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| I told myself I was getting too fanciful and went to bed. |
Anyone* who has followed
this irregular blog would know I have enjoyed reading and almost-reviewing all
of the Travis McGee novels. There have been 20 before this one, and so far as I
can be bothered to fact-check, this is the last one before MacDonald’s untimely
death at the age of 70 after complications post-coronary surgery sent him into
a coma from which he never emerged.
And this one is pretty
standard fare.
An old friend (standard)
gets in touch because, now he’s made a bit of money (standard) he needs someone
trusty and discrete (standard) to find his stolen yacht (standard). Trav gets
to keep a percentage of the value of the boat as a finder’s fee (standard). He
finds several dead teenagers thereupon (not unusual) one of which is the
daughter of a Peruvian diplomat (ooh, interesting) and is plunged into the
world of Latin-American drug smuggling (yawn). Into the mix comes someone
leaving pipe-cleaner cats around his boat (weird) and Trav is daily under
threat of annihilation (…) by a trained assassin (ibid). Oh, and the guy who
hired him? Dead-oh. Such larks!
Guns, gals, and pals with
boats/planes abound in this, the next exciting instalment of the adventures of
unreconstructed Don Quixote, Travis McGee!
 |
| Now hidden in the marina office |
Yeah, as usual it’s all good clean fun until someone gets chopped up on a yacht, but at least this time, Trav’s good deeds do not go unpunished. His ‘therapy sessions’ with all those ‘chickadees’ appear to have blessed/cursed him with progeny – his sexploits revisited on him in a form other than a shame-filled nausea, a trick knee or scar tissue – and the only child about which we know comes to pay him a visit! And she’s pissed off, or something. Fittingly, but maybe not sufficiently cancel-culture-reparation-y, Trav finds himself thrust into a whole new world of toxic masculine guilt and as a result sinks all of his finder’s fee into a trust fund for the troubled Jean (man, 80s names properly suck), minus a bit for a pal with a plane.
And there we have it, the sum total of John Dann MacDonald’s written output in three paragraphs. Of course, I’m leaving out The Executioners, Condominium, and any number of other note-worthy thrillers, but stick a fork in Trav, he’s done.
Still, the original Maccy-D (he pre-dates the founding of the popular
food-substitute and bullshit purveyors by a good 23-odd years) must hold a very
special place in the American literary firmament as Slip F-18 Bahia Mar,
although it doesn’t exist per se, has its own literary landmark plaque in Fort
Lauderdale. I don’t know if that is a tribute to a great writer or some joyless
shystering** by a money-grubbing opportunist – both equally plausible – but
it’s another photo I can borrow with only minor lipservice*** paid to the
photographer and make my blog look shiny.
*If indeed anyone is a real person
** Read this and fuck off
thereafter if you think I use this term meaning anything other than that which
is baldly obvious: https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/900005387204/
***Photographer: Jonathan Schilling; reproduced without changes, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence
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