History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10

• Plot: Travis McGee agrees to recover a woman’s stolen inheritance, and discovers that the man who took it has been destroying women along the Florida coast.
• Clues: Straightforward; this is a hunt more than a puzzle.
• Reveal: The villain is known early. The climax is violent, and the aftermath is where the book lands its punch.

Travis McGee lives on a houseboat called the Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game, at a marina in Fort Lauderdale. He describes himself as a salvage consultant: he recovers what people have lost, legally or otherwise, and keeps half. He works only when his money runs low, taking his retirement in instalments.

Cathy Kerr, a dancer in a small club, asks for help. Her late father smuggled something valuable back from his wartime service, and a smooth predator named Junior Allen charmed his way into her life, found it and vanished. McGee follows Allen’s trail and finds other women he has left damaged along the way.

MacDonald launched McGee with three paperback originals in 1964, each with a colour in the title. The series became hugely popular because McGee was something new: a tough guy with a conscience, cynical about American consumerism and property development, fond of long digressions about the state of the country.

Those digressions are the book’s pleasure and its drag. MacDonald writes vividly about Florida’s heat, water and tackiness, and McGee’s voice is wry and literate. But the sermons can go on.

The handling of women is the dated part. McGee’s belief that he can heal wounded women through sex is presented as kindness, and it now reads awkwardly, even as the book is genuinely angry at the violence Allen inflicts.

The 7 reflects a strong, influential opening to a series that got better and deeper, with a hero whose flaws are part of his appeal.