John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, an Essay of Book Covers
John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, an Essay in Book Cover Art
John D.
MacDonald (JDM) was one of the best-selling writers working in crime and
mystery fiction in post-World War 2 America. He wrote short stories for the
pulps and when those markets began failing, he wrote novels for the
revolutionary paperback publisher Fawcett Gold Medal. His first, The Brass
Cupcake, appeared in 1950 and in the following decade he had a succession
of powerful standalone novels including, The Damned (Gold Medal, 1952),
Dead Low Tide (Gold Medal, 1953), Cry Hard, Cry Fast (Popular
Library, 1955), and The Drowner (Gold Medal, 1963).
In 1964
JDM’s most iconic character – and his only series character – the boat bum and
salvage expert Travis McGee appeared in The Deep Blue Good-by, published
as a paperback original by Gold Medal. McGee appeared in 21 novels between 1964
and 1984. Each of the McGee adventures featured a color – pink, amber, indigo, lavender
– in the title and each book sold in the millions. Below is a chronological listing, by publishing date, of every book with the cover art of four different editions. The publisher
of the first edition and publication date are next to the titles and the first
paragraph for each is below the title.
1. The Deep
Blue Good-by [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1964]
“Home is where the privacy is. Draw all the
opaque curtains, button the hatches, and with the whispering drone of the air
conditioning masking all the sounds of the outside world, you are no longer
cheek to jowl with the random activities aboard the neighbor craft. You could
be in a rocket beyond Venus, or under the icecap.”
2. Nightmare
in Pink [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1964]
“She worked on the twentieth floor, for one
of those self-important little companies which design packages for things. I
arrived at five, as arranged, and sent my name in, and she came out into the
little reception area, wearing a smock to prove that she did her stint at the
old drawing board.”
3. A Purple
Place for Dying [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1964]
“She took the corner too fast, and it was
definitely not much of a road. She drifted it through the corner on the gravel,
with one hell of a drop at our left, and then there was a big rock slide where
the road should have been. She stomped hard and the drift turned into a rough
sideways skid, and I hunched low expecting the white Alpine to trip and roll.
But we skidded all the way to the rock and stopped with inches to spare and a
great big three feet between the rear end and the drop-off. The skid had killed
the engine.
4. The
Quick Red Fox [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1964]
“A big noisy wind out of the northeast, full
of a February chill, herded the tourists off the afternoon beach, driving them
to cover, complaining bitterly. It picked up gray slabs of the Atlantic and
smacked them down on the public beach across the windshields of the traffic,
came into the cramped acres of docks and boat basin, snapped the burgees and
hoooo in the spider-webs of rigging and tuna towers. Fort Lauderdale was a dead
loss for the tourists that Saturday afternoon. They would have been more
comfortable back in Scranton.”
5. A Deadly
Shade of Gold [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965]
“A smear of fresh blood has a metallic
smell. It smells like freshly sheared copper. It is a clean and impersonal
smell, quite astonishing the first time you smell it. It changes quickly, to a
fetid, fudgier smell, as the cells die and thicken.”
6. Bright
Orange for the Shroud [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965]
“Another season was ending. The mid-May sun
had a tropic sting against my bare shoulders. Sweat ran into my eyes. I had
discovered an ugly little pocket of dry rot in the windshield corner of the
panel of the topside controls on my houseboat, and after trying not to think
about it for a week, I had dug out the tools, picked up some pieces of prime
mahogany, and excised the area of infection with a saber saw.”
7. Darker
than Amber [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1966]
“We were about to give up and call it a
night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.”
8. One
Fearful Yellow Eye [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1966]
“Around and around we went, like circling
through wads of lint in a dirty pocket. We’d been in that high blue up yonder
where it was a bright cold clear December afternoon, and then we had to go down
into that guck, as it was the intention of the airline and the airplane driver
to put down at O’Hare.”
9. Pale
Gray for Guilt [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1968]
“The next to last time I saw Tush Bannon
alive was the very same day I had that new little boat running the way I wanted
it to run, after about six weeks of fitzing around with it.”
10. The Girl
in the Plain Brown Wrapper [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1968]
“After I heard that Helena Pearson had died
on Thursday, the third day of October, I had no trouble reconstructing the immediate
past.”
11. Dress
Her in Indigo [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1969]
“On that early afternoon in late August,
Meyer and I walked through the canvas tunnel at Miami International and boarded
a big bird belonging to Aeronaves de Mexico for the straight shot to Mexico
City. We were going first class because it was all a private and personal and
saddening mission at the behest of a very sick and fairly rich man.”
12. The Long
Lavender Look [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970]
“Late April. Ten o’clock at night. Hustling
south on Florida 112 through the eastern section of Cypress County, about
twenty miles from the intersection of 112 and the Tamiami Trail.”
13. A Tan
and Sandy Silence [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1971]
“The socket wrench slipped, and I skinned
yet another knuckle. Meyer stood blocking out a sizable piece of the deep blue
sky. He stared down into the bilge and said, ‘Very inventive and very fluent.
Nice mental images, Travis. Imagine one frail little bilge pump performing such
an extraordinary act upon itself! But you began to repeat yourself toward the
end.’”
14. The
Scarlet Ruse [Fawcett Gold Medal, 1972]
“After seven years of bickering and fussing,
the Fort Lauderdale city fathers, on a hot Tuesday in late August, killed off a
life style and turned me into a vagrant.”
15. The
Turquoise Lament [Lippincott 1973]
“The place Pidge had borrowed was a studio
apartment on the eleventh floor of the Kaiulani Towers on Hobron Lane, about a
hundred yards to the left off Ala Moana Boulevard on the way toward downtown
Honolulu.
16. The
Dreadful Lemon Sky [Lippincott 1974]
“I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my
houseboat, alone in the half acre of bed, alone in a sweaty dream chase, fear,
and monstrous predators. A shot rang off steel bars. Another. I came bursting
up out of sleep to hear the secretive sound of the little bell which rings at
my bedside when anyone steps aboard the Busted Flush. It was almost four
in the morning.”
17. The
Empty Copper Sea [Lippincott 1978]
“Suddenly everything starts to snap, rip,
and fall out, to leak and squeal and give final gasps. Then you bend to it, or
you go live ashore like a sane person.”
18. The
Green Ripper [Lippincott 1979]
“Meyer came aboard the Busted Flush
on a dark, wet, windy Friday afternoon in early December. I had not seen him in
nearly two months. He looked worn and tired, and he had faded to an indoor
pallor. He shucked his rain jacket and sat heavily in the biggest chair and
said he wouldn’t mind at all if I offered him maybe a little bourbon, one rock,
a dollop of water.”
19. Free
Fall in Crimson [Harper, 1981]
“We talked past midnight, sat in the deck
chairs on the sun deck of the Busted Flush with the starry April sky
overhead, talked quietly, and listened to the night. Creak and sigh of hulls,
slap of small waves against pilings, muted motor noises of the fans and
generators and pumps aboard the work boats and the play toys.”
20. Cinnamon
Skin
[Harper, 1982]
“Every man can be broken when things happen
to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient
fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body
will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like and unbearably shrill sound.”
21. The
Lonely Silver Rain [Knopf, 1984]
“Once upon a time I was very lucky and
located a sixty-five-foot hijacked motor sailor in a matter of days, after the
authorities had been looking for months. When I heard through the grapevine
that Billy Ingraham wanted to see me, it was easy to guess he hoped I could
work the same miracle with his stolen Sundowner, a custom cruiser he’d had
built in a Jacksonville yard. It had been missing for three months.”
My favorite Travis McGee title is The Green Ripper. What’s yours? |
My favorite is also "The Green Ripper".
ReplyDeleteFor me, The Green Ripper is the most personal (for Travis McGee and for the reader, too) of the books, which is why I like it so much.
DeleteSuch a great piece, Ben. Love how you can see the different covers evolve as the years pass. The 1960s first editions all have that weird bust of Travis...
ReplyDeleteThanks, I had fun putting the post together. I think the bust of Travis is pretty funny, too. It has a stodgy look about it, or maybe it's simply the type of old-fashioned image that has lost some of its power over the years.
Delete