Order THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY here
"The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They're disaster prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their head. And you can't reverse the process."
There is something about private detectives that people find thoroughly sexy. The idea of having someone who earns a living defending vulnerable people without enforcing a judiciary system few people believe in today is romantic enough to keep a timeless charm. If you climb the mountain of all the detective fiction written, what will you find at the top though? I've went on that hike for you, reader and at the very top is a gentleman named John D. MacDonald, a man referred to by Stephen King himself as "the great entertainer of our age", and The Deep Blue Good-By, the first novel featuring his recurring private detective Travis McGee, is nothing short of splendid.
Travis McGee is not a licensed private investigator. He doesn't work in an office and isn't prey to his lowest instincts. He's a free spirit living on his boat and enjoying his time on Earth between two jobs. What is his job? Simple, retrieving unlawfully taken property from people and keeping half of it every time. When a colleague of Travis' sweetheart Chookie McCall tells him about her father's fortune she lost to a magnetic and mysterious ex-convict named Junior Allen, his life takes an abstract turn as he goes hunting for a ghost that ravages every woman he meets.
It will be tough to explain how much I loved that novel. See, I'm a stickler for novels about domestic abuse, because most of them are complete shit. They aren't even interested in the issue. They are modern takes on princess-in-the-castle stories that the women (and sometimes children's) deliverance really just is the prize in a beef between two violent males with different sets of values. The Deep Blue Good-By is very much a novel about domestic abuse and a somewhat dated one, but it is so well-crafted and attuned to what domestic abuse really is, it makes it a reference (if not THE reference) in the genre.
And in the darkness I began to remember the brown and humbled eyes of Cathy Kerr, under that guileless sandy thatch of hair. Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame.
In The Deep Blue Good-By, Travis McGee is tracking down a man through the women he destroyed. So, the genius of John D. MacDonald here is that he shaped a character through the trail of damning evidence he left through his life. Of course, that makes Junior Allen an evil bastard, but that also makes him extremely seducing as the women explain how he wedged his way into their lives, providing insight on the actual dynamics of domestic abuse. I don't think Junior Allen even appears in the novel before the last fifty pages, but his charisma and his cruelty seep through every sentence of the book, which are really the two variables of his reign of terror.
The novel wouldn't have worked so well if John D. MacDonald wasn't such a crafty stylist and a keen armchair psychologist. What makes Travis McGee such a special character is that he is strong and self-reliant, but not boastful. He gets emotionally entangled in his cases, but they are business first and foremost. He also understands human beings exceptionally well and can pinpoint what makes a person unique in a paragraph or less. The Deep Blue Good-By not only provides a great lead character, but it also gives the reader with an exclusive look inside his head and who doesn't want to get as close as possible to extraordinary people, right?
Shit, there is so much mid-century detective fiction that you can probably spend your entire lifetime trying to track it all without ever getting to John D. MacDonald. He's not even the only MacDonald who was writing detective fiction back then. That would be a mistake. He is THE detective fiction author to check out. I would've never came around to do it myself without reading the apology of his work in Lawrence Block's The Crime Of Our Lives. So thank you Mr. Block for delivering one of my new heroes to my doorstep. Everybody else, go read John D. MacDonald right now. Stop what you're doing. Walk out of work. Do what you gotta do to get acquainted with the great entertainer of our age.
BADASS
