I guess it has been nine years since I read a John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novel (three, actually, in A Tan and Sandy Silence and Two Other Great Mysteries which also includes The Long Lavender Look and Bright Orange for the Shroud) and five years since I’ve read McDonald at all (On the Run in in 2019). As I might have mentioned then, I’m pacing them out.
In this book, a wealthy businessman asks McGee and Meyer to go to Mexico to find out the circumstances in which his daughter was living before she died in an auto accident, perhaps while drunk or high. She had fallen into a bad crowd and had travelled to Mexico with them, and McGee and Meyer find layers of intrigue as they try to find her associates. The father of the other girl in the group has also come to Mexico to find his daughter and is also trying to find himself and get tuned into the youth culture. A wealthy woman emerged from seclusion, although the two girls were staying with her, to identify the body and has gone back into seclusion somewhere around the world. And the group itself descended into drug-fueled madness and free sex, culminating in a plan to use the dead girl’s savings to smuggle heroin into the United States. McGee and Meyer unpeel the layered plots over time with a lot of speculation taking pages along with the normal existential musings you get in MacDonald.
The plot and goings on might have been edgy and shocking in 1969, but you could set a similar story in a high school and play it out on a network television show (not even a cable or streaming show, although presumably if you did you’d get more skin and depicted violence). It has a few anachronisms, like presenting Mexico as a fairly safe destination for travelers and easy border crossings without a passport, but it’s still relatively timely to someone who lived in an era before cell phones and personal tracking devices became a thing. Access to these devices and their pings would have made a much simpler story indeed.
As you know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough and remember previous MacDonald reviews, I like the man’s writing. He writes pulp with a depth of theme and depth of writing that was beginning to fall out of practice in the 1960s. I mean, Robert E. Howard’s work had depth to the writing (but not as much overt philosophizing thematics). Don Pendleton had a little philosophy, but his writing was not as thick and rich. Now, of course, you get length that has replaced depth. I wonder why the writing changed. The nature of the business? The difference between education in the eras? Something, for sure.
So I will continue to dabble in reading the MacDonald, although I have to think I have read most of the popular work, and it would take some doing on my part to figure out definitively what books I have read since I have started tracking my reading and books that I own (I have no way to be sure what I would have borrowed from the library when I was younger) and to seek out the ones I have not. And I have a bunch of projects ahead of me in the queue. So that’s a thing for another day. Meanwhile, I will probably continue to pick the books up when I see them and re-read them as I come across them in the stacks here at Nogglestead.
