Travis McGee

Was this a new man`s first meeting with Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, or The Great Gatsby? No, what I had come upon was Nightmare in Pink, a forty cent Fawcett Gold Medal paperback whose pink cover sported a presumably naked woman hidden behind a discretely angled leg and a study of the hero, a rough-and-ready sort of guy described by the blurb as a "Soldier of fortune, thinking man`s Robin Hood, a man who works just this position of the law to do a living stealing from thieves.

This was Travis McGee, and the new was the second of a serial by John D. MacDonald (each distinguished by a different color in the title) that stretched to twenty-one novels, beginning with 1964`s The Deep Blue Good-by and ending with 1985`s The Lonely Silver Rain. McGee does not sit behind a desk, fiddle with a computer, or fret about his retirement plan the way you and I do. He docks his 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush, at a Fort Lauderdale marina, where he leads a beachbum lifestyle and takes his retreat in chunks. Once the money runs out, however, he has to go looking for jobs: "salvage" operations, as he calls them. These operations involve people who get missed something of value, had it stolen from them, or been conned out of it, and go to McGee as a final resort. He offers to recover what`s been lost, and his fee is half of its value, expenses taken off the top. For an action hero, smart and savvy, good with his fists and endlessly attractive to women, McGee is also a meditative type, cynical about society`s rules and conventions. "... I do not use too easily on emotional motivations. I am suspicious of them. And I am suspicious of a lot of former things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny." [The Deep Blue Good-by, 1964].