I had that fractional part of consciousness left which gave me a remote and unimportant view of reality. The world was a television set at the other end of a dark auditorium, with blurred sound and a fringe area picture.” I was a bit miffed because I saw a casting notice which asked for cars of all types. No mention of ‘1960’s period’ cars. When MacDonald created the character, he was to be called Dallas McGee, after the city, but after the Kennedy assassination he decided that name had too many negative connotations. He was searching for a first name for McGee when a friend suggested that he look at the names of the many Air Force bases in California. MacDonald's attention was caught by Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, and so he named his character Travis. [4] This was my first journey into the world of Travis McGee. Boy, howdy, what a fun and fine trip! John D MacDonald’s writing is right up there with the best. Not only is this a great story, but MacDonald’s use of the English language is something akin to Chet Baker’s work with a trumpet. Pure magic.

The Deep Blue Good-By was author MacDonald's first Travis McGee novel and was published in 1964 beginning twenty years of Travis McGee stories that would finally total twenty-one novels. The Florida based main character could be described as a kind of private detective who rescues lost valuables for a fee. He resides on a house boat he calls The Busted Flush and drives a vintage Rolls Royce named Miss Agnes. He is quite opinionated, which I am sure mirrors the opinions of Mr. McDonald, and considers himself to be a veritable lady's man. I am not sure I agree with McGee's lifestyle, but I suppose, as they said about the lifetime resident at San Quentin, he has a good heart. Director James Mangold— The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line and Girl Interrupted (he also wrote the last two) - was onboard. Deadline reported the filmmaker was looking for an A-List talent; Fox hoping that The Deep Blue Good-by, the first of MacDonald's 21-book series would be the beginning of a beautiful franchise. The onset of the sixties is a Freudian era… Women are instrumental in everything… They are hot stuff… They are victims… Kevin Jagernauth (25 April 2011). "Paul Greengrass Eyes 'Travis McGee' For Next Film". The Playlist. Archived from the original on 29 April 2011.

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Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life.” (Is this really Travis or, I believe more likely, MacDonald talking about himself?) For now we’ll have to content ourselves with the McGees we do have on film, and the books, always the books. In the past McGee has been played by Rod Taylor, in the 1970 film version of Darker than Amber , while Sam Elliot wore the flip flops in a 1983 TV movie titled simply Travis McGee , although it was based on The Empty Copper Sky . John D. MacDonald introduced the world to his libertarian and reclusive anti-hero Travis McGee in this excellent 1964 publication. This is the first John D. MacDonald book I've read and probably won't be the last. MacDonald really knows how to build the suspense. Junior Allen is a first degree douche bag and a good villain. You can't help but read faster and faster, eager to see him get what's coming to him. The writing is really good and the characters of Travis and Junior are well done. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways."

Already an established and successful writer, MacDonald was persuaded to create a franchise character, a recurring romantic hero to sell books. What he did was craft a personification for the world-weary angst of post-WWII riding shotgun on the tide of 60s alienation and disillusion.A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability. But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out, in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.”

In his first adventure Trav helps Cathy, from Candle Key, in the Keys of course. Cathy, he helps Cathy. It's meant to be, it's in the stars, Trav.Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making-out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in supermarkets.” (MacDonald doesn’t devote as much of his cynicism to young women in his later novels.) McGee first appeared in the 1964 novel The Deep Blue Good-by and was last seen in The Lonely Silver Rain in 1985. In 1980, the McGee novel The Green Ripper won the National Book Award. Translated to a heterosexual relationship -- a woman wooed away from her marriage by a magnetic cad and now obsessed with him -- it really doesn't offer modern audiences anything noteworthy or new to think about. Possibly it did in 1952 when it was first produced, but not now. The only real insight we get into human nature is from a kind and thoughtful single speech by Miller, the doctor. The rest we've seen for decades on daytime talk shows and on reality shows, not to mention dozens or hundreds of films. I should caution against picturing Travis as a knight in shining armor. He is quite rusty and amoral, both in his methods of obtaining information which don't rule out torture and intimidation, and in his own predatory interest in women. This family was a circus act, balanced on a small platform atop a swaying pole, as the crowd goes ahhh, anticipating disaster. A vain foolish man and a careless young wife and a tortured girl, swaying to the long drum roll. When it fell, the unmarked House Beautiful would sell readily, the Lincoln would e acquired by a Mexican dentist.” (Future novels don’t make this attempt very often)

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

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Travis McGee is a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He’s also a knight-errant who’s wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is simple: He’ll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half. Beyond research, there is a beautiful love story. I would say that, almost, it is the main plot and that the rest develops from the love so tender and so complicated that arises between them. MacDonald starts off "in progress", as if Travis has been doing this for some time, and he sets Travis up as lazy, but also a man with a heart and a strong sense of justice. Cathy's story is sad enough, but it's Lois' that will really break your heart. MacDonald makes excellent use of her character and her condition to provide the nasty details about Junior Allen. Lois Atkinson is at the end of her rope until Trav steps in and becomes even more determined to stop Junior Allen. But McGee sees his real job as being a sort of hardboiled ‘knight-errant’, usually aiding a nubile post-WWII damsel-in-distress. The pattern for the series is set in The Deep Blue Good-by when Cathy asks Travis McGee for help recovering a dubiously-earned fortune that her dead father left hidden. McGee takes the case, and it leads to a smarmy but persuasive lowlife named Junior Allen. And in his effort to learn more about Allen, McGee meets his latest victim, Lois Atkinson. Junior Allen had wormed his way into controlling Lois’ life and money, and she was reduced to a nearly catatonic state by the time McGee came along. In addition to being a brute and a treasure-hunting rival for Travis, Lois reveals that Allen is also a serial rapist. Travis proceeds with his plan to recover Cathy’s fortune and ensure that Junior Allen meets justice.