Word: mcgee
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...McGee mixture is an agreeable blend of boat lore, suspense, machismo, sex and lighthearted sadism. The Scarlet Ruse turns on the theft of $500,000 worth of rare postage stamps. In The Turquoise Lament, McGee learns that a thieving Florida lawyer blocks the forward progress of justice-and of the plot. He invades the miscreant's country estate, eases him from the middle of a disgraceful orgy, binds him and drops him live into a freshly dug backwoods grave-a marvel of vengeful fantasy. Lawyers are the schoolyard bullies of modern society, against whom no ordinary child dares battle...
Such gratification is worth a lot to anyone fumbling among paperback sleazies in bus-station bookracks. Yet, until now, it has not cost much. MacDonald was an old penny-a-liner, with 50 or 60 paperback thunderations behind him, before he began the Travis McGee series more than a decade...
...experiment of issuing MacDonald in hardback (The Turquoise Lament) is not progress. Few artifacts are as needless as hardback crime stories. Still, those who lose a day from their lives whenever a new McGee mystery appears will no doubt continue to do so. (The McGee series has sold more than 14 million paperback volumes, and MacDonald's income has been estimated at $100,000 a year.) To understand why, consider the portrait on the covers of the new novels. Each cover shows a view of the formidable McGee, leathery, curly-haired and, say, a rugged...
Much of Travis McGee's appeal is due to his point of view, which is one of slightly disaffected middle age. He may be 6 ft. 4 in., a weapons expert and a former N.F.L. tight end (as who is not, in fantasy?). But he gripes constantly, with some style, about the sex habits of kids, the rapaciousness of land developers, and the gaudy promises of the consumer society. He remembers a time when Florida's coastal waters were almost clean. He has known a few good women, true-blue but now long gone...
What better barge on which to ride out male climacteric than McGee's houseboat Busted Flush (won in a poker game), with its pasha's bed, four-nozzle shower, 1,100-mile range and capacious tanks full of nostalgia and contempt? This time MacDonald gives McGee and his brainy friend Meyer (a retired financier who lives aboard the good ship John Maynard Keynes) some fine autumnal soliloquies...