John D. MacDonald

• Born: July 24, 1916
• Birthplace: Sharon, Pennsylvania
• Died: December 28, 1986
• Place of death: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Type of Plot: Hard-boiled

Principal Series: Travis McGee, 1964-1985

Contribution

John D. MacDonald takes the hard-boiled detective and fashions him into the modern version of a knight-errant. MacDonald’s Travis McGee usually gets involved in helping young women who have been bilked of their money by charming male swindlers. In McGee’s code of honor, the worst crime is taking advantage of the innocent and the naïve. He couples his fiercely moral views with strong convictions about the nature of modern society, which he deplores for its rapacious violation of the environment and its greedy exploitation of human beings. Knowing he cannot change the structure of society fundamentally, McGee opts for living on its fringes and for doing battle with the hucksters and cheats who thrive on fooling women—and sometimes gullible men—by deceit and trickery. Although he is a fierce individualist, McGee is remarkable for having such a well-developed social consciousness. He is a man who realizes that his way of life is in itself a statement, a challenge to the status quo.

Biography

John Dann MacDonald was born on July 24, 1916, the only son of Andrew MacDonald and Marguerite MacDonald, in Sharon, Pennsylvania. When he was ten years old, his family moved to Utica, New York, where he attended the Utica Free Academy. Two years later he contracted mastoiditis and scarlet fever and almost died. His sickness changed his life, making him an avid reader and a deeply reflective person.

MacDonald’s father wanted his son to be a businessman, and MacDonald obliged his father by attending business schools in Philadelphia and Syracuse, where he was graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1936. After his marriage in 1938, graduation from the Harvard Graduate Business Administration School in 1939, and a series of unsatisfactory jobs, he enlisted in the navy in 1940. It was a relief to him to have a sure means of supporting his family (his son was born in 1939) and not to worry about his place in the competitive business world. Soon he began to write—although his first short story was not published until 1946. His work for the navy and for the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency) gave him valuable background and experience for his fiction.

After World War II, MacDonald began to make a modest living from selling stories to magazines. He published his first full-length novel in 1950 and went on to produce books about a wide range of subjects, including science fiction. In 1952, he began living in Florida, the setting for all the Travis McGee novels. Although he is best known for the Travis McGee series, it makes up less than half of his total output as a writer. Condominium (1977), for example, was a best seller and earned significant praise for the fineness of its moral and aesthetic vision. In 1972, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1986.

Analysis

As John D. MacDonald freely admitted on many occasions, Travis McGee was his mouthpiece for the expression of opinions on a wide range of issues. MacDonald was a mature writer when he created McGee in 1964, so he knew how to create the detective as a full-fledged character interacting in complex ways with other characters. Although MacDonald showed that he could cleverly manipulate detective story plots, he always emphasized the significance of themes and characterization. He was not overly concerned with the whodunit form or with the mysteries the detective solves, but instead stressed the detective’s moral nature and intelligence. How McGee goes about his job is at least as important as his discovery and apprehension of the murderers he pursues.

Because McGee is always the first-person narrator of the novels, his consciousness is of paramount interest. He works for himself and the people who hire him. He owns and lives on a boat, The Busted Flush, named in memory of a winning hand in a poker game. McGee had been losing hand after hand and then finally won one by bluffing a flush. His luck turned, and he won enough to take possession of the boat. The name of the boat points to the basic situation in which McGee usually finds himself. Fate usually deals him what looks like a losing hand, but somehow he manages to pull out or “salvage” something of value.

McGee is no unmarked hero. Indeed, the McGee series is remarkable for the many wounds and broken bones the detective suffers. He has been shot in the head and has endured all manner of injuries to his face, his ribs, and his legs. He is a rugged six feet, four inches tall and weighs more than two hundred pounds (although his opponents often mistake him for being a good twenty pounds lighter). McGee always manages to escape with his life because of his mental and physical agility. He can duck and dance away from blows, and he can fall out of a hot-air balloon from a height of about four stories, landing so that only his knee needs surgery. Yet he recognizes that no matter how good he is, sooner or later he will be nailed. One of the finer pleasures of the McGee series is reading his analyses of fights, his calculations as to when to take blows on his forearms and elbows and when to penetrate his opponent’s defense.

Bright Orange for the Shroud

McGee never comes away from any of his cases with a clean victory. Sometimes one of his clients dies. Many times innocent people who get in the way of McGee’s investigations die. For example, McGee understands that to catch up with Boone Waxwell in Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965), he has to use a woman whom Waxwell is stalking as bait. McGee’s timing is off, however, and Waxwell snatches the woman and rapes her before McGee’s plan of entrapment gets under way. Characteristically, the vicious Waxwell eventually manages to impale himself in a way that is just retribution for the many women he has violated. A rough, crude sort of justice—a kind of symmetry—does operate in the McGee novels, but it is at the expense of the guilty and the innocent alike.

Waxwell is also a particularly good example of MacDonald’s deftness at creating complex characters. Waxwell talks like an easygoing country boy. He does not seem particularly bright. Yet McGee finds that this is a facade, that Waxwell hides his cunning, murderous nature with a mild-mannered, good-natured style. Knowing this, and even after being warned, McGee still underestimates Waxwell.

Free Fall in Crimson

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Travis McGee series is his patient piecing together of plots and human characters. In Free Fall in Crimson (1981), a terminally ill millionaire is beaten to death. He had, at most, another six months to live. Why was he murdered? Is there any connection between his daughter’s fatal bicycle accident, his death, and the fact that she was due to inherit his fortune? To trace the chain of events and to understand who had the most to profit from the millionaire’s death, McGee calls on his friend Meyer, an economist among other things, who has a gift for seeing the “big picture” in ways that are beyond Travis, who is better as a painstaking collector of details. Because virtually every McGee case revolves around money, he needs a knowledgeable consultant who can explain or speculate on the many ways money can be extorted and conned from people or how it can find its way into various enterprises that conceal the source of revenue.

McGee and Meyer

McGee and Meyer often work as a team. MacDonald found it necessary to invent Meyer because of the limitations of the first-person point of view. With McGee as narrator, everything is seen or reported from his perspective. Dialogue sometimes allows other points of view to intrude, but only a true collaborator could widen and extend McGee’s consciousness. Like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson or Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, McGee and Meyer complement each other and compensate for what the other lacks. Meyer is certainly no man of action—as is proved in Free Fall in Crimson, where he buckles under pressure and almost causes McGee’s death.

MacDonald also introduced Meyer to give his detective series a tension and variety that is often lacking in formula fiction. As MacDonald notes, Meyer helped solve a technical problem:

I have to keep the plot the same without allowing it to look as if it is the same. Little Orphan Annie gets into a horrible situation and Travis—Daddy Warbucks—comes and saves her. Every time. So . . . you become a little bit wary of a plot structure which is going to leave too many doors closed as you’re writing it. I brought in Meyer about the fourth book because there were getting to be too many interior monologues.

If McGee is a Daddy Warbucks helping vulnerable young girls who have been swindled and molested, he is also a romantic who falls in love with some of the women he saves. McGee’s cases take an emotional toll on him. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, McGee has a tough-guy exterior that hides a streak of sentimentality. He knows better than to indulge himself, yet he never completes a case unscarred by mental trauma. Compared to most fictional detectives, McGee is a feminist—in the sense that he is deeply aware of women’s feelings. He often rejects women who invite him to engage in recreational sex. He is not above using manipulative women sexually to solve a case, but such women are his equals. He does not condescend to them. He also likes to describe love play. Sex scenes in the MacDonald series are as evocative as the fight sequences.

In Travis McGee, MacDonald created a character with a temper—if not a background—like his own. MacDonald hated working for business firms. He did not find himself as a man or as a writer until he decided to abandon the competition of the business world. Similarly, Travis McGee turns his back on the corporate enterprise. He has contempt—as did MacDonald—for the industries that are ruining Florida’s environment. The McGee novels are full of laments for the spoilage of the state’s lovely land and sea refuges. Neither MacDonald nor McGee sees a way to change the world, but both the author and his character elaborate on a consciousness of exquisite, discriminating taste.

Travis McGee is a rough-hewn version—perhaps it would be better to say an inversion—of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. Wolfe never left home; McGee is rarely at home. He travels the state of Florida—and sometime beyond it to Iowa, Illinois, and other states—to solve his cases. His home is a boat, and he is always in motion. Whereas Wolfe is sedentary and fat, McGee watches his diet. For all of their differences, however, each detective is admired for the way he savors and measures experience. McGee, the poor man’s Nero Wolfe, the proletarian amateur, is the upholder of public and private standards.

In medieval literature, the knight went forth to save a damsel in distress or to vindicate a lady’s honor. In The Deep Blue Good-by (1964), the first McGee novel, in A Purple Place for Dying (1964), and in The Green Ripper (1979), McGee explicitly refers to himself as a kind of worn-out, yet indefatigable knight, ready to tilt his lance at dragons. He realizes that the odds are against him, but he cannot live with himself if he does not set forth. The imperative is moral. A seasoned veteran who knows how to spell himself, who waits for his second wind, McGee is the resilient hero and the modern antihero, making no great claims for his prowess yet surviving precisely because he knows his limitations. In a Florida fast being overtaken by developers, confidence men, and greedy corporations, McGee remains a voice of conscience, acting on his own principles and pointing out the damage caused by a world that ignores ethical and ecological concerns.

Principal Series Character:

• Travis McGee is a self-described “salvage expert,” specializing in recovering stolen goods for clients who are helpless, hapless, and innocent victims of confidence men. He is a tough, independent man with a romantic streak and a moral code.

Bibliography

Campbell, Frank D., Jr. John D. MacDonald and the Colorful World of Travis McGee. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977. Study of the world of MacDonald’s fiction, the rules defining it, and its effect on the narrative.

Gorman, Ed. “John D. MacDonald.” In The Big Book of Noir, edited by Lee Server, Ed Gorman, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998. Details MacDonald’s contributions to film noir and compares him with many other writers and directors.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at MacDonald’s contribution to the pulps and the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins.

Hirshberg, Ed. John D. MacDonald. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Book-length study of MacDonald’s life and work.

Hirshberg, Ed. “John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee: Heroes for Our Time.” In Crime Fiction and Film in the Sunshine State: Florida Noir, edited by Steve Glassman and Maurice J. O’Sullivan. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. Discussion of heroism in MacDonald’s work and in his life. Part of an anthology focused on the use of noir motifs in Floridian fiction.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. A scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Includes extensive treatment of MacDonald, discussing nine of his novels. Bibliographic references and index.

Merrill, Hugh. The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Extremely well-researched biography that uses correspondence and other personal papers to paint a picture of the author and his creative process.

Moore, Lewis D. Meditations on America: John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee Series and Other Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Uses a cultural studies methodology to detail the nature and meaning of MacDonald’s contributions to American culture.

Shine, Walter, and Jean Shine. A Bibliography of the Published Works of John D. MacDonald with Selected Biographical Materials and Critical Essays. Gainesville: Patrons of the Libraries, University of Florida, 1980. Useful checklist of works by and about MacDonald. A good starting point for further research.