Travis McGee is one of those characters you hear about from time to time,
usually with superlatives attached; and the same can be said about his
creator, John D. MacDonald. And so, when the Travis McGee books came
back in print some years ago I acquired and read the first six or eight
of them, and then stopped. Part of the reason was that they were
grittier than I liked, and part was that I’d simply lost interest. I
kept them, though, and after reading Ed McBain’s
Nocturne I decided to give him another try.

For those who aren’t familiar, Travis McGee is a beach bum. He lives on
a houseboat in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. And sometimes people who have
had some object or other taken from them come to him and ask him to get
it back. If he succeeds, he gets 50% of whatever he retrieves–and then
he lives the good life on his houseboat until the money runs out and he
needs to take a new client. McGee is frequently described as a knight
errant–a fundamentally decent guy who can’t help aiding the weak and
oppressed.

In this particular book a young woman comes to him. Her father had been
in the Air Transport Command as a freighthandler, and apparently had
managed to make quite a bit of money on the side smuggling. On returning
to the States he’d killed an officer and been sentenced to life in prison.
A cellmate of his, on release, comes to see the young woman, and
insinuates his way into every part of her life, until he finds out where
the money was stashed, and then he disappears. The woman wants the money
back.

I’m afraid I didn’t like it much, this time through. I even found it,
and Travis McGee himself, to be a bit tedious. I’ve spent a couple of
days pondering that, on and off, and I think I’ve figured out way.

What people seem to like about Travis McGee, other than his knightly
character, is that he philosophizes. As the book goes on he tosses off
little gems of wisdom about this or that or the people he meets. And
that, it turns out, is a big part of what I dislike, because a lot of it
is pretty damned depressing. There’s no joy and no humor to speak of in
this book.

And then there’s McGee’s vaunted moral code. He’s a real nice guy; one
of his rules is that he won’t engage in casual sex with people he really
cares about. Instead, he only engages in casual sex with brainless
idiots who aren’t looking for anything else. And while you expect the
hero in a book like this to treat the bad guys violently, he treats other
folks badly as well if it gets him the information he wants.

And then, finally, there’s a whole pornography of violence thing going on
that I find repulsive. It’s one thing to kill somebody in a novel; it’s
another thing to describe the process and the results in detail. I was
repulsed by them in Nocturne as well, but I didn’t have the
sense that the book was about the violence; rather, it was about
finding the perpetrators.

I might re-read one or more of the remaining Travis McGee’s in my
collection, just to see if my generalizations hold true…but if they do,
I think that Good Ol’ Travis is going to get purged.