It was 1977 in Vienna, Austria, when I discovered two joys of reading that have stayed with me till this day.
One was an author who was just starting out and the other was one who had been around for a long time and was actually in the last part of his career.
The one I discovered first was Stephen King, who at that point had published two novels. The one I read first was “Salem’s Lot,” a different type of horror novel than anything I had ever read. It was a tale of vampires in modern-day, everyday Maine. The combination scared me more than anything I had ever read before.
From that point on, I was what King called Constant Reader. He has been writing worldwide bestsellers ever since. I haven’t read all of them, but I don’t think I’ve missed more than two or three. “Salem’s Lot” was nowhere near the best, but none of the others had as much of an effect on me.
The other came that summer when a friend introduced me to Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald’s classic series character and hero of 21 novels. By 1977, 16 of them had been published. MacDonald would live nine more years and there would be five more McGee novels.
I’m not sure there was ever a modern American writer respected by an many other writers in his genre. The most recent reissues of the McGee novels has introductions by Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher character might be the second-most uniquely interesting series hero ever.
McGee is first by almost any standard. He’s not a police officer, a private detective or a coroner. He calls himself a salvage consultant, living on a houseboat in the Bahia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
He doesn’t have an actual job. He believes retirement is wasted on the old and it’s better to retire when you can still enjoy it. So he makes some money and then retires till the money runs out. Then he rinses and repeats.
What does he salvage? That’s the beauty of it. Someone comes to see McGee after having something valuable stolen from them when there is no possibility of getting it back. He agrees to recover it for them in exchange for a 50-50 split. After all, half is better than nothing.
His houseboat is the Busted Flush, which he won in a high-stakes poker game by running a bluff. He’s part Don Quixote and part Popeye the Sailor. In one respect, he’s almost a hippie in that he despises the plasticity of modern life in the ’60s and ’70s. He rejects time clocks, insurance policies, modern cars and the Playboy Philosophy.
The closest thing he ever had to a real job was a couple of years playing professional football before tearing up a knee.
He comes up against all sorts of enemies, from bad dudes to Nazi war criminals to Mafiosos to religious cults. Most of the novels can be read out of sequence, although the final ones carry a narrative through the books. All 21 of them have colors in the title, and the rumor was that the title saved for the last one would include the color black.
As it turned out, the last one was called “The Lonely Silver Rain,” and it was the most morose of them all. It was McGee feeling his age and wondering if his life had been mislived. But it ends on a wonderful note, with McGee learning he has an 18-year-old daughter he has never met by a woman he loved who left him unexpectedly in “Pale Gray for Guilt.”
That novel came out in 1984 and MacDonald died at age 70 before he could write another.
There was actually a Stephen King connection. He offered to write s novel to wrap up the series, but MacDonald’s heirs said that wasn’t necessary. In fact, his heirs were somewhat different in that they didn’t hire a writer to continue the series as Mike Lupica is now continuing all three of Robert B. Parker’s series and Dirk Cussler is continuing his father Clive’s Dirk Pitt series.
There was one bizarre development in the McGee pantheon. In 2001, a writer named Lori Stone published a book that essentially had McGee’s daughter Jean coming to Fort Lauderdale to solve the murder of McGee and his friend Meyer.
Bizarre in that the names Travis McGee, Meyer and the Busted Flush never appear in the story. The writing is adequate, although nothing like MacDonald. The story ends with the impression that it will be the first of a series and the back of the book has a sample chapter from what will be the next one.
Twenty-three years later, the next one has never been published.
I find it hard to believe that Stone didn’t know she was infringing on someone else’s copyright, but I know it’s still possible to order the first book from Amazon.
Don’t bother. A McGee book without McGee is just, well, sort of meh.
But if you haven’t read the 21 MacDonald wrote, you’re in for a treat.