UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964)

              The Deep Blue Goodbye began a very successful series about Travis McGee, not exactly a detective, but a man who retrieves valuable things from those who have wrongly taken them away from their rightful owners. McGee lives as if retired until he needs money; then he takes on a retrieving job. McGee lives aboard a houseboat called The Busted Flush, named from the hand that began a winning streak in a poker game that eventually won him the boat.

            He doesn’t like a lot of things about modern American life. “I am wary,” he says, of “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… I am also wary of earnestness.”

            Some of this is just silly, of course, but McGee has a theory very prescient for 1964 about technology crowding out ordinary people from jobs that are meaningful and that have incomes one can live on. Less timely are his views about women—about “ladies” who seem to represent a kind of ideal for him but who aren’t quite up to surviving the hard knocks of life, versus the much hardier stock who thrive in the poorer classes. But whatever his views about them, his instinct is to protect them, nurse them when they’re hurt, and sleep with them if they offer.

            Junior Allen, the villain in this book, has a lot of the features of the villain in MacDonald’s The Executioners (1957—filmed twice with the title Cape Fear): a very cunning and seemingly unstoppable monster—an incarnation of evil. This book moves inexorably toward a confrontation between McGee and Allen, which happens out at sea.