I'm currently on a non-Travis McGee JDM kick, which will
probably be an exercise in sado-masochism for me as I don't
generally like JDM's non-Travis McGees. Some people seem to
have the impression (apparently JDM felt this way himself,
from what little I can gather) that his non-McGees are his
most impressive work; I think that's completely wrong.
As is often the case with writers, the genre restrictions
that the McGee series imposed actually helped JDM out
tremendously. JDM had a lot of oddball notions about sex, for
instance, especially in the late fifties and through the
sixties. (They come off as sort of a Puritanically Playboy
thing, if that makes any sense.) When they come out of
McGee's mouth, they're interesting, because they're embodied
in a character that has a specific life history, setting,
point of view, etc. These notions make him seem more real,
more individual. Detached from the reality of McGee, though,
they just seem pretty goofy, especially when you meet up with
them again and again in the most improbable places.
It's more than just JDM's philosophy being more palatable in
the context of McGee, though. JDM obviously had ambitions
towards writing "more serious" works, but in practice what
that meant was a number of sub-John O'Hara type things, soapy
beyond all hope. I'm writing this on the sly at work, and as
such don't have my books around me, but I'd certainly toss
THE DAMNED, CONTRARY PLEASURE, CANCEL ALL OUR VOWS, CLEMMIE
and THE BEACH GIRLS in that hopper, off the top of my head. A
somewhat better variant was the much later ONE MORE SUNDAY,
which unusually for it's time took a somewhat sympathetic
look at evangelical Christianity. (Probably the kind of thing
he'd been aiming at.) JDM could, in fact, be very insightful
about America, but he seems to have needed the "rules" of the
McGee series as a base to launch his best thoughts.
Another interesting thing is that JDM had real problems
writing non-McGee crime novels. THE DROWNER, ON THE RUN,
MURDER IN THE WIND - all of these seem to me to be relatively
clunky affairs. One problem here I think is that JDM was
excellent at crafting villains/sociopaths/evil characters,
but seemed curiously reluctant to give these guys their
voice. ONE MONDAY WE KILLED THEM ALL would've benefited
immensely from being told from the POV of the antagonist (the
protagonist is another JDM Earnest Dullard.). It's been a
long time since I read THE LAST ONE LEFT, but I remember it,
too, could've used more bad guy and less good guy.
(Another strange one is THE END OF THE NIGHT, which I've kept
not because it's especially good - it's not
- but because it's so strange, Middle America meeting up with
the drug scene. Reading it is like watching your dad disco at
the local club, not something you really want to see but you
can't look away.)
The best non-McGee crime novel JDM ever did was probably SOFT
TOUCH, a really first class book that turns the usual JDM
protagonist inside out. Certainly I haven't bumped into
another non-McGee that equals it. TOUCH reveals a certain
level of experimentation, a kind of distance, which would've
been great to follow up on. (It does help if you've read
other JDM's, though. Oddball comparison: SOFT TOUCH is to
JDM's work the way THE BURNING COURT is to John Dickson
Carr's. They're both great books, but they're especially
effective if you know the writer's general formulas.)
Outside of that, JDM's successful non-McGees are very much of
a type. They tend toward business settings, often with
business scams or interoffice politics being a major theme.
They tend not to have traditional crime plots. One character
is often a self-made business man from the backcountry, not
conventionally educated but shrewd. They also tend to work in
their moral crises in stark terms. A KEY TO THE SUITE manages
to blend business machinations with JDM's oddball sense of
sexual sin in what I thought was an unusually effective way
(everyday Man in the Grey Flannel Suit type meets up with a
hooker at a convention), partly because of the downbeat
ending. I also remember more or less liking A MAN OF
AFFAIRS.
Right now I'm reading WHERE IS JANICE GANTRY?, which looks to
be somewhat more sophisticated than a lot of non-McGees from
this period (it was written in 1961) though it has it's
clunky moments, too. It's certainly a lot less clunky than
DEADLY WELCOME, which I just finished and which has too many
scenes of people standing around telling each other parts of
the story. Also on the stacks to read or reread are APRIL
EVIL, THE GIRL THE GOLD WATCH AND EVERYTHING, A BULLET FOR
CINDERELLA, and A FLASH OF GREEN, which I read a long time
ago and don't remember much.
doug
Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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