As usual, I'm a little behind. I read these in June, but
didn't get around to doing the write-ups until now.
Reading these three books one after the other, I was
pleasantly surprised to find that they were not nearly as
formulaic as I feared they might be. Sure, there's always the
damsel in distress, and Travis plays the knight errant, but
there was enough variation to keep me from knowing exactly
how it would all play out. I was also surprised to find
Travis moving outside Florida a great deal of the time. He
doesn't age in real time, but he does age somehow. By 1985 he
is questioning whether he has made the right choices in
life.
I would say that the books are not noir, but they are pretty
hardboiled. There are a lot of violent deaths and some
torture, but McGee himself never kills anyone (although he
get pretty close). He does gets into a fair number of
fistfights.
In One Fearful Yellow Eye, much of the action takes place in
Chicago, where Glory Doyle, "one of the broken birds," had
moved after marrying a rich old man. (There are actually two
broken birds, Travis's term, in this book.) On her husband's
death, she discovers that he had liquidated his assets and
disposed of all the cash in the last year and half before
dying. She wants to know where the money went and why, and
she wouldn't mind getting it back, either. It seem obvious
someone was blackmailing him, but the details are a little
complicated. There is strange mix of characters involved,
including some Nazi war criminals with a sadistic bent.
Ultimately, however, I found the original grounds for
blackmail less than convincing. The big secret--that Glory's
husband had fathered a child out of wedlock--was known to
everyone who mattered, including Glory, and is revealed right
away to the reader. The young woman was underage at the time,
but their relationship was consensual and her mother married
her off. The statute of limitations must have run out by the
time the story starts, and anyway he was in the last stages
of a fatal illness. He was not likely to have been
prosecuted. So why pay out $600,000? It didn't really make
sense. (According to the copyright page, "A shorter version
of this book has appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine.")
The Turquoise Lament finds Travis responding to a letter from
an old friend, Pidge, who is married and living in Hawaii.
Travis goes for a visit. She tells him she thinks her husband
is trying to kill her; the husband says she's crazy. Which is
it? Travis falls hard for Pidge, whom he had last seen when
she was a teenager. It seems like the real thing this time.
There is also a matter of sunken treasure and major-league
legal fraud. Travis figures it all out and flies to Pago Pago
for the final rescue.
I must have read The Lonely Silver Rain before, because I
remembered how he transferred all his LPs and reel-to-reel
tapes to cassettes and upgraded his stereo system, although I
retained nothing about the plot. In this story, Travis tracks
down a friend's missing yacht and discovers some bodies on
it. Then people start trying to kill him. Travis has to
figure out who's after him and why, so he can get them off
his case. To do so, he has to find out who is really to blame
for killing the people whose bodies he merely discovered.
Organized crime is involved. In a parallel plot, the
middle-aged Travis is finally starting to question the
choices he has made, wondering whether he should have settled
down when he had the chance, wondering if he isn't getting
too old to be a boat bum. Meanwhile, someone mysteriously
keeps leaving cats made out of pipe cleaners on his boat and
in his truck. Interestingly, there's no love interest this
time, but it wouldn't be JDM without (quite) a bit of
sex.
***SPOILER**
At the end, it turns out the cats are being left by his
teenaged daughter! Her mother was one of Travis's most
serious girlfriends. She left without saying she was
pregnant, and she died just after giving birth. The girl
thinks he treated her mother badly and doesn't care for
anyone but himself. With the help of a letter carefully saved
in his safety deposit box, he proves that it was a case of
true love, that her mother left him, not the other way round,
and that he had no idea of the daughter's existence. They are
reconciled, and after a summer on the houseboat with him, she
goes off to college. A happy ending. Most unexpected, given
all the other McGee books, in which he studiously avoids
commitment, all the while delicately disengaging himself from
serious relationships and enjoying or not enjoying any number
of not-so-serious relationships. Now he has a commitment,
someone to live for. I don't know if this is the last McGee
novel (they're listed alphabetically in most of the books),
but it would be a good place to leave him.
Karin
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