Today I read John D. MacDonald's THE GREEN RIPPER (1979), the
eighteenth Travis McGee book. I have three more to go before
I've read them all in order.
This one is a) demonstrably inaccurate and b) quite
unsettling. The story picks up a few months after THE EMPTY
COPPER SEA ended, with McGee and Gretel Howard in a serious
relationship. All of a sudden, she dies. Meyer deduces it was
part of something much larger, and soon they're talking to
mysterious federal agents. McGee is depressed and angry at
Gretel's death--in one of his really black moods--and sets
out after the people that caused her death. When the time
comes, he narrates:
| One down and nine to go. This time, my dead love, I am not
doing my
| knightly routine. I have shelved that as innappropriate for
the
| occasion. The old tin-can knight had too many compunctions,
scruples,
| whatevers. For this caper, I am the iceman. I have come
here and
| brought the ice. It is a delivery service. One time
only.
What's a) demonstrably inaccurate is Meyer. At the start, he
predicts the collapse of the global economy in five to twelve
years. He's just flown back from a conference in Europe and,
on page three, begins to explain why the entire world will
soon stop functioning and we will enter a new dark age. This
is an unusual opening for a tough-guy thriller.
The stuff that's b) quite unsettling is the terrorist
organization that McGee infiltrates. How he does it doesn't
come off right--it's hard to imagine McGee as a method actor
portraying a deep-sea fisherman, winkling information out of
weirdo commando cultists, and they wouldn't accept him so
fast--but the details of how the terrorists organize
themselves, and how they will carry out their attacks, are
given in some detail and are sometimes chilling. This would
be a good one to review before that Bouchercon panel on
post-9/11 crime writing.
I'd rate this as middling McGee. Much of it is highly
unlikely, sometimes preposterous, but it moves fast, and
these days the book will seem much different to readers than
in the eighties and nineties. That gives it added interest,
in a grim way.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/
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