John D. MacDonald (1916–1986)

The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald is the first in a series of 21 that feature Travis McGee. Set in southern Florida, McGee isn’t a licensed Private investigator, instead he calls himself a “finder” in that he searches and finds and charges a percentage of what he recovers in the process. In this outing he is looking for a particularly brutal and disgusting man who goes along raping and fleecing his victims.

I have decided that I won’t dedicate myself to reading every book in show more this series as I found Travis McGee to be a self-important, beach bum who wasted pages of the book on letting the readers in on his “philosophy of life” and in particular his philosophy on women. He truly seemed to believe that his opinion was totally accurate and that is was right to judge women by their bodies. I liked the main part of the story which had McGee tracking down a thief and rapist named Junior Allen, I just wish the author had stuck with the story instead of going off in a very creepy direction.

I am a fan of John D. MacDonald’s hard-boiled stand alone crime capers but Travis McGee is not someone that I care to read too much about. I won’t say “never again” to McGee, but will continue with the stand-alones and take McGee in very small doses. show less

“All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.”


Once John D. MacDonald wrote A Deadly Shade of Gold, the Travis McGee series began to take on a resonance that separated it from others of its ilk. Over the course of twenty-one books, Travis McGee became one of the most enduring and beloved characters in mystery show more fiction. Praise for this tremendous saga comes from nearly every great mystery writer in MacDonald’s chosen genre, and many great writers outside his genre. These include many female mystery writers, who give their praise without reservation, and with nary a whisper about misogyny; because it simply does not exist.

Praise from these female writers, and a public still devouring this series decades after it first hit bookshelves proves, in my opinion, just how misrepresented this series and its protagonist, Travis McGee, has become in some quarters. If you know a little about life, you’ll often feel like you know some of the people in MacDonald’s influential series — both the males, and especially the females — as well as the protagonist himself. And that is certainly the case with this very dark entry in the series, part of a three-book section in the series (A Deadly Shade of Gold, Bright Orange For the Shroud, Darker Than Amber) of such high quality, that only later in the series, when the resonance was even deeper, did we get three that surpassed them (Free Fall in Crimson, Cinnamon Skin and, as it turned out, the final entry, The Lonely Silver Rain). In between there were good to great ones, always enjoyable, but never a three-book stretch like the former, or the latter.

Darker Than Amber begins with a great opening line, and lives up to it. Amber is a tawdry and unpleasant look at women pretty on the outside, but so rotten at their core, they are capable of disconnecting themselves from the crimes they commit. Meyer emerges in Amber as the important character he will be for the remainder of this legendary series. It is in fact Meyer who talks about the complete disconnect from empathy these outwardly attractive women share:

“That pair disposed of fourteen objects, not fourteen brothers. Their unease comes not from pity, not from any concern for the dead objects, but merely from their awareness that society frowns upon such actions.”

And earlier, we get this exchange between Vangie and Meyer:

“You are the nicest, Meyer. So nice you'd have to blow the whole bit, and it would mess up my girlfriends and keep the law looking for me forever. If I get my hands on that money, I want to stay dead, thank you.” — Vangie

“Knowing that your...friends are still murdering for profit?” - Meyer

“People are dying all over the place for all kinds of reasons, Meyer, and if I'm out of this one, it couldn't bother me less.” — Vangie

But that’s getting ahead of things. Before McGee gets tangled up in the affairs of Vangie/Tami Western, he reminisces about Vidge, a broken bird who had come to stay with McGee for a bit. She had married the wrong man — as women are so often prone to do — and, as McGee notes, he nearly destroyed her soul:

“Finally he had gone to work on her sexual capacities. Were the sexes reversed, you could call it emasculation. People like Charlie work toward total and perpetual domination. They feed on the mate. And Vidge didn't even realize that running away from him had been a form of self-preservation, a way of trying to hang fast to the last crumbs of identity and pride.”

McGee is patient, waiting for her to stop blaming herself for everything, and finally explode. Yes, as other readers have noted — and made far too much of — there does comes a point when he sleeps with her. McGee gives back to Vidge her self-confidence, allowing a trampled flower to spring back to life, toward the sunshine. The situation and the solution resonate with the ring of truth. There is nothing predatory here by McGee at all. MacDonald the writer simply understood the psychological underpinnings of the situation he’d created, and had his character do likewise; and I might add, at a personal cost to himself, reflected by this comment late in the narrative:

“Vidge had soured me a little, and Vangie had dropped off the bridge and accelerated the process, and then I had really put the lid on it by trapping that dumb empty punchboard into a life sentence.”

McGee's rescuing of Vangie from the water after someone has tried to kill her has no fairy-tale ending whatsoever, because Vangie, as McGee eventually discovers, is a hooker into something very nasty; so nasty that she obviously expected to come to a bad end one day:

“All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.”

There is money involved, a lot of it, and a string of homicides to go with it. All Vangie wants is the money, and to disappear. McGee, despite his experience, develops a grudging sort of admiration for Vangie; not so much because there is more to the Hawaiian beauty than other girls like her, but because once, there might have been:

“In the silence I tried to sort her out. Her twelve years on the track had coarsened her beyond any hope of salvage. Though I know it is the utmost folly to sentimentalize or romanticize a whore, I could respect a certain toughness of spirit Vangie possessed. She had not howled as she fell to her death. She had not flinched or murmured as we cut the hooks out of her leg.”

Vangie tries to protect not only McGee and Meyer, but herself when they offer to help:

“Oh, h*ll, Travis, it isn’t so much finking out as keeping you guys from knowing how lousy I really am.”

Because McGee nearly lost his own life beneath the water simply because Vangie had grabbed his wrist, and because he eventually gets her horrific backstory — Vangie is 26 and has been a pro for 12 years — he feels an obligation when things end badly for her — very badly. There is a wonderful piece of writing as MacDonald describes a youthful dance by Vangie aboard the Busted Flush. It culminates in this melancholy observation by McGee:

“When the flesh is taut, the dance becomes strangely ceremonial. It is a rite that celebrates the future, and it was eerie to see how accurately it could be imitated by a woman who had left any chance of love so far in the past.”

What we get when McGee and Meyer decide they can’t let any more men fall prey to this deadly sea carnival, is a tawdry and violent and insightful look at the heartless and wicked. Trying to con his way into the lives of the men and women running the deadliest of games, McGee nearly loses his life right off the bat in a violent duel with one of the men involved. He buries him and tries to deal with the emotional repercussions even as he and Meyer continue pressing toward their objective. In essence, this is a dark tale of predatory men and predatory women with no conscience, at least not as the rest of us understand such. MacDonald does an especially wonderful job of capturing with honesty the essence of the women:

“It was interesting to me in a clinical way that in the distance from the table to the street door she managed to sway a tautly fabricated hip against me three separate and insistent times, though she'd had no trouble with sway or balance on the way in. With instant practicality, she'd changed masters. Now it was merely a case of firmly cementing the new relationship in the only way she knew how.”

But conning their way in is only part of the problem. McGee, though you rarely hear about it — perhaps because it doesn’t fit a narrative some want to paint — was often turning down opportunities with the opposite sex, and here does so more than once. But even then, MacDonald uses McGee’s reactions to make insightful observations every man of a certain age understands all too well:

“The thing that astounded and disheartened me was to find a very real yen to take a hack at this spooky little punchboard. There had been a lot more to Vangie in both looks and substance, but she hadn't tingled a single nerve. I wanted to grab at this one. Maybe everybody at some time or another feels the strong attraction of something rotten-sweet enough to guarantee complete degradation.”

But McGee shakes it off and goes forward. Along the way, we get to meet Merrimay Lane, a character so wonderful she almost — but not quite — offsets the bad taste left by the other women encountered in this one. From what is supposed to be a safe distance, McGee and Meyer have her impersonate Vangie, just to rattle a brutal guy named Terry. And it does, leading to a very violent end. There is some other stuff in between, including observations on the races and their interactions, and this wonderful gem about a woman’s wrist:

“The wrist of a woman and the small tidy forearm always seemed to have some tender and touching quality, a vulnerable articulation unchanged from the time she was ten or twelve, perhaps the only part of her that her flowering leaves unchanged.”

This is a terrific entry in the series, though without a doubt it’s one of the more seedy story-lines due to the parade of hideous men and women with whom McGee crosses paths. Lee Child has admitted that Jack Reacher is a stripped down version of Travis McGee, but to me the things he left out are what makes McGee stand head and shoulders above nearly all others in the genre. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series resonates, and more often than not it’s deadly accurate when it comes to human interactions and motivations. Darker Than Amber, which makes reference to Vangie’s eyes, is itself very dark, but also involving. I’ll end this one with a quote from Meyer about McGee, because it sums up not only this entry, but the series itself:

“One of the last of the romantics, trying to make himself believe he’s the cynical beach bum who has it made. You permit yourself the luxury of making moral judgements, Travis, in a world that tells us man’s will is the product of background and environment. You think you’re opportunistic and flexible as all h*ll, but they’d have to kill you before they could bend you. That kind of rigidity is both strength and weakness.” show less

“I envy the generation of readers just discovering Travis McGee and count myself among the many readers savoring his adventures again.” — Sue Grafton (1940-2017)


Perhaps more than any other book within the Travis McGee series, Dress Her in Indigo holds up a mirror to elements in society that were not nearly so pleasant as those wearing rose-colored, politically correct glasses want us to believe. This is most definitely not a Seattle coffee-shop-approved version of the hippie movement. show more It is a brutally candid and unflinchingly honest look at the darker side of those young people who dropped out during the 1960s. It’s a side not often spoken of, much less illuminated today, thanks to a whitewashing of history, but it is a side of the hippie movement that many will recognize as truth. Published in real-time, in 1969, it is all the braver in showing that it wasn’t all peace and flower-power, but drugs and depravity were part of the mix as well.

This is one of the Travis McGee Mexico entries, taking MacDonald's protagonist out of Florida while maintaining much the same vibe. As Carl Hiaasen noted long ago, MacDonald captured the great beauty and promise of Florida, along with its languid sleaze. He does the same with Mexico, especially rural Mexico, and Dress Her in Indigo is exactly that: a novel about sleaze. In a mingling of the lost and vulnerable, the type of personality seemingly born — perhaps even searching — for someone to prey upon them, and those among them doing the preying, an unpleasant and deeply sad portrait is painted. That portrait is not limited to the hippie culture, however, as MacDonald takes direct aim at the sleazier, predatory element of the homosexual community — male and female — in a manner which rings as brutally honest as McDonald’s take on the hippie dropouts heading to Mexico. With the latter there is sympathy, however, especially because Meyer remembers the girl whose final moments they are trying to uncover in Mexico for her father. Meyer has trouble reconciling just how far Beatrice (Bix) had fallen:

“Let’s give up on the whole thing, Trav. What the h*ll good are we doing? We can’t tell Harl any of this. She was on a gay adventure, full of plans and excitement and fun. Until the tragic accident. Let’s rehearse it. I don’t want to know any more about it. I knew that girl. She was a quiet, calm, decent kid. So she tripped and fell into this da*ned septic tank, and we don’t have to follow her any further into it, do we?”

There is little sympathy from McGee for the predators within the homosexual community, those looking to take advantage by any means, in order to “turn” someone. Nor should there be. One woman even acts as a “broker” of sorts for Bruce Bundy, procuring and then delivering someone she believes may be susceptible to Bundy’s machinations. Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison, however, is herself a predator of sorts, on the heterosexual front, using her sexual expertise as an outlet for her own neurosis. She uses McGee for a while, until he finally manages to wiggle from her grasp and find a healthier, more rewarding intimacy with the lovely Elena. It takes McGee a while to figure out Lady Harrison, but when he does, it’s dead-center-perfect:

“I realized I had come upon a prime example of that uniquely English phenomenon, the true eccentric. Some of them build cathedrals out of bits of matchstick. Some of them count the number of stalks of hay in the average haystack. Some write a hundred letters a week to the London Times. Some catalogue all the birds in the fifty meadows. They are all quite mad, but do not know that they are mad, since they find a socially acceptable outlet for their monomania. This woman had been driven mad in a war, and had retained one little edge of sanity and built the rest of the structure of her life upon it.”

On this sad quest by McGee and Meyer to give Harlan Bowie an idea of the last months of his young daughter Bix’s life in Mexico before the accident, we get a real sense of the magic of Mexico. In a place where the bungalows have girl names like Alisha, even the older teddy-bear-like economist, Meyer, is affected by the flowers and the sky and the summery air; not to mention other natural beauties such a Ron Townsend’s very sexy, leather-clad and leggy companion, Miranda Dale:

“Didn't all those legs make you feel insecure?” — McGee

"And so did the age of the child. But this is the sort of place where I could try to overcome minor obstacles." — Meyer

MacDonald has McGee and Meyer flying into Oaxaca on a rivet-missing and shaky old Douglas:

“We were off to start at the end of her life and work back.”

Soon McGee and Meyer are drowning in the sad cesspool of Bix’s life with Minda McLean, Carl Sessions, Jerome Nesta, and finally, Walter Rockland and Eva Vitrier. On the sidelines waits Bruce Bundy, a slimy gay predator with enough dough to pull it off, and Minda Mclean’s father, who has retired and dropped out himself. He has turned into a hippie, thinking he’ll be able to bridge the gap easier when he finds Minda. While McLean’s spiel sounds good on paper, his liberal explanation for the hippie culture and why the kids were drawn to it plausible in some academic setting, it rings sad and hollow in contrast to the starker truth McGee is discovering. Just how hollow we don’t discover until several people are dead. The sleaze begins bothering McGee so bad he comments to Meyer:

“Dandy little village they've got here. These sweet kindly folk tear me up, they really do. I'm even beginning to wonder about Emilio Fuentes. He'll probably turn out to be a retired female wrestler going around in drag.”

MacDonald, always a terrific writer, intersperses wonderfully descriptive moments of the landscape and people of Mexico as he takes the reader deeper and deeper into the sad story of Bix’s life in Mexico:

“There was evident poverty, beggars with twisted limbs, sick children, stray mongrels, but there was a sense of great life and vitality, of enduring laughter.”

And we get a terrific character portrait of Emilio Fuentes, a thirty-something businessman who knows how to live. It is through him that we get a look at male/female interactions in Mexico, which despite wishes of the PC crowd to the contrary, surely rings as true today as it did in 1969 when this book was published. One such scene which some have made note of is a moment between Emilio and one of his secretaries, a tall solemn girl. She brings him the mail and this happens:

“He read the letters swiftly, scrawled his big signature on each and handed them to the girl, then slapped her smartly across the seat of her skirt as she turned. She yelped and jumped, and he said something in swift, slurred Spanish. She spoke in tones of protest. He spoke again. She smiled and flushed and walked swiftly out.”

Emilio turns to McGee and has this explanation:

“That one,” he explained, “that Rosita, she had the unhoppy love affair and now she has the long face. I told her I wanted to see if there was any feeling left in the back side. She told me I should have more respect. Then I said something, it doesn’t translate. But it made her face hot and it made her smile, no?”

Even though it may not be something we as a male reader might approve of or do, or how as a female reader we might react to such an action, it rings absolutely true, both then and today. In fiction, you have to be able to weave real-life moments within a story to give it validity. It is really a wonderful scene, because it accomplishes many things. First, it gives us a picture of a culture. Yes, some will say it’s 1969, but that’s a copout. Were we a fly on the wall today in parts of Mexico we would discover that such moments still happen, and with the same reactions from both parties. Secondly, it creates an indelible impression of Emilio Fuentes for the reader which is carried forward in the narrative. It helps the reader understand and like him — at least I did. Emilio, a friend of Ron Townsend who aids McGee as he backtracks Bix’s trail, takes McGee and Meyer to a rooftop beach party where they meet Elena and Margarita, who play important roles within the story, giving the reader moments of normalcy to offset the sleaze. Thirdly, it allows the reader to glimpse a culture at its basic level, the sexes interacting in “reality” as opposed to how the angry, militant feminists would like it to be, with every girl, every woman, adhering strictly to a party line not of their own making, removing their individuality. Because women are not all the same. Some use common sense, and are capable of taking care of themselves. They are not snowflakes, or man-hating angry feminists. They are capable of discerning intentions and differentiating between truly dreadful behavior which should be condemned, and relatively harmless — though inappropriate — actions. Because Rosita stood up for herself and put Emilio in his place, yet smiled because she did realize it wasn’t lecherous in that particular instance, it makes the reader like her, as well. You might say she’s Catherine Deneuve approved, which is a great thing.

I’m nearly always obligated to comment on minutiae like this when reviewing a Travis McGee book, because it invariably becomes a talking point with readers. Since much of the scene is quoted above, however, readers can see what "Actually" happens in the scene for themselves. Time to move on.

There are a couple of other good young people McGee encounters in Mike Barrington and Della Davis. They are closer to the image we have today of the hippie culture, showing that it wasn’t all the same for everyone. Yet they cannot remain untouched by the darker and tawdrier side of the coin for too long. Despite a violent confrontation McGee has with someone near the end of the book which leaves him injured, and Meyer wounded, it really is the sleaze we remember from this one, that ugly yet honest portrait of the drugs and the sexual predators, the sadness and anger. In the end, there’s a twist we didn’t see coming, but the reader’s elation is short-lived. This far down the septic tank, it’s impossible to get clean.

Perhaps it’s because we’ve lingered for too long a period with the murderers and homosexual predators and those looking to make a score from the misery of one another, Dress Her in Indigo seems longer than it is. Misery and sadness and depravity mingle with beauty and pleasure and MacDonald captures both, but it is the former which wins out in the end, and the reader can’t wait for McGee and Meyer to get back to Florida.

I’m tempted to give this one four stars, solid ones, because it’s a terrific story which resonates, yet doesn’t quite reach the upper echelon of Travis McGee entries. This is especially so because the next in the series, The Long Lavender Look is one of the absolute best. Yet, I’m going to give it five stars, and here is the reason:

Everything in this narrative rings true, yet in today’s PC climate, it is certain to get harangued or misrepresented. A great story is a great story, however, and one which tells the truth deserves some applause. For those who disagree with MacDonald’s painting of segments of society, which still ring true, that’s okay. I think they are ignoring the reality, and that’s okay too. But you must be able to write it, and to say it. And to that point, I’ll end the review by deferring to a very famous mystery writer, who just happens to be a woman:

“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.” — P.D. James show less

"A tall, frail, sallow-looking fellow in a wrinkled tan suit too large for him stared up at me with an anxious little smile that came and went—a mendicant smile, like dogs wear in the countries where they kick dogs."


The man McGee is talking about is Arthur Wilkinson, or rather the shell that’s left after becoming entangled with Wilma Ferners in Bright Orange for the Shroud. Though it is Boone “Boo” Waxwell who understandably gets mentioned most whenever this entry in the legendary show more Travis McGee series is spoken of or written about, Wilma is nearly his predatory equal. MacDonald the writer knew that for every Waxwell in the world, there also exists a female counterpart; in this case the sexy but amoral Wilma Ferners. MacDonald paints each in their charming, venomous tones to perfection. The real literary achievement here, upon any serious reflection, is how MacDonald was able to make the small and beautiful, outwardly sweet yet inwardly predatory and sadistic Wilma so memorable. While McGee has more than one face to face encounter with Waxwell, we basically only get to “see” Wilma in flashbacks; but they are painted so vividly that when McGee concludes halfway through the narrative that she’s no longer among the living, the reader simply doesn't care. Not after what she almost did to the Alabama Tiger, and to Arthur Wilkinson. Arthur has been taken for every penny, mercilessly cleaned out. This includes his manhood, and his dignity. Wilma and Boone were simply part of a slick con.

McGee enlists the aid of Chookie in this one, who will be familiar to any true fan of this great series. MacDonald paints her as a real flesh and blood woman with faults, but also a heart. She is, in fact, one of the great recurring characters in this series, memorable in the overall mythology of Travis McGee as the tarnished white knight grew older, and the entries became more resonating. The particulars of Bright Orange are unimportant, just another instance of McGee running a con, to get back money that was taken in a con. But this one is unique in that it has one of the most dangerous and memorable villains in crime fiction, and because it is also salvage work — McGee is attempting to salvage Arthur himself, including his manhood. Chook works toward that end and becomes involved with Arthur, but when you’ve been stripped of everything, it is a long and rough road back.

Waxwell is physically dangerous, with a quick and instinctive predilection for danger and violence. But he can also exude a fascination that while it repulses, also attracts:

"Bogart, Mitchum, Gable, Flynn—the same flavor was there, a seedy, indolent brutality, a wisdom of the flesh. Women, sensing exactly what he was, and knowing how casually they would be used, would yet accept him, saying yes on a basis so primitive they could neither identify nor resist it."

Waxwell is predatory in every manner possible, and has a yen for Vivian, the neglected wife of an ineffectual and alcoholic lawyer involved in the original scam. MacDonald poignantly paints her so that the reader feels a sense of doom closing in on a fine woman:

"A man going sour puts an attractive wife in a strange bind. Still tied to him by what remains of her security, and by all the weight of the sentimentalities and warmths remembered, she is aware of her own vulnerability and, more importantly, aware of how other men might be appraising that vulnerability, hoping to use it."

"Houses where love is dead or dying acquire a transient look. Somewhere there are people who, though they don't know it yet, are going to move in."

In painting Vivian with such nuance, MacDonald is setting up one of the most horrific scenes in crime fiction, which I’ll get back to in a bit. Boone uses everyone, including a plump fifteen-year old deep in the remote area of Florida he calls home. She keeps coming back for more, unable to break the hold Waxwell has on her despite being smart enough to know he’s ruining her. It is a desperation you feel from almost everyone throughout the narrative of Bright Orange for the Shroud — Arthur, Vivian Crane and the alcoholic husband she still loves, even Chook; her involvement with Arthur on the Busted Flush brings to the surface problems she’s been unwilling to face.

There is Stebber and others that McGee must make his way through in an effort to get the money back — if he can find it, and if he can stay alive while doing so. Chook makes an observation about McGee’s similarity to Waxwell which angers McGee at first, because the very thought of that potential, were McGee to have taken a different path in life, is vile:

"Maybe he is you, gone bad. Maybe that's what he smelled. Maybe that's why you can handle him."

When trying to smoke Wilma out doesn’t work, McGee realizes Waxwell had murdered her:

"I had a sudden and vivid image of that small, delicate, pampered face, watery under the black slow run of water, of fine silver hair strung into the current flow, of shadowy pits, half seen, where sherry eyes had been."

The reader doesn’t care, because in essence she had it coming. So does Waxwell:

"After exposure to Boone Waxwell, the look of Chook and Arthur on the early afternoon beach had the flavor of great innocence."

McGee’s plan to enlist Vivian’s help in distracting Boone away from Marcos so that he can search for Arthur’s money is pre-empted when Waxwell strikes first, unexpectedly. A miscalculation by McGee gets him shot in the head, leaving him dazed and paralyzed on one side as he is forced to lay helplessly by a window and listen to the sounds of Waxwell, smug and toying as he rapes Vivian Watts Crane. The scene is one of the most brutal in the series. Yet it needs to be pointed out that the brutality is all in the mind of the reader. McGee can only hear the sounds, the voices, for most of it. He can hear Vivian’s desperation — lonely and neglected, hating her physical and involuntary response to an act of violence, and a man she truly despises. It is a brilliant piece of writing, using the device of McGee’s helplessness, his ability to only hear what’s happening, while avoiding completely any gore or painfully graphic details. It makes the scene all the more powerful and harrowing, because through McGee’s helplessness, we feel Vivian Crane’s.

"From the mortgaged house came the finishing cry of the tennis player, a tearing hypersonic howl like a gun-shot coyote. Her eyes were a very dark blue, and with sun-coin on the tawny forearm, she had closed her eyes and shuddered at the thought of any Waxwell touch."

With Arthur just beginning to feel like a man again, but still incredibly fearful — rightfully so — of Waxwell, it takes an attack of conscience by Wilkinson to finally come back and help McGee. Rather than go to the police, McGee has Arthur take him to a hospital, where he makes up a story about the bullet wound. Not fit to be released, still partially paralyzed and with bone fragments in his skull, McGee goes back for Vivian. It is a sticking point for many readers. Yes, it does make things work out later, so it was a plot choice, and yes, it did expose Vivian to further abuse by Waxwell. But, with a bullet shattering part of his skull, McGee is in no condition to be making rational decisions. And even were we to assume he was, there is something hugely important being overlooked, and it is this:

Earlier in the narrative, Vivian has a conversation with McGee which reveals just how close to the edge she really is. In that conversation, she shudders at the thought of Waxwell ever getting hold of her, because he makes “her skin crawl” and as she tells McGee: “He makes me feel naked and sick.” — “It’s like nightmares where you’re a kid. I think that if Boone Waxwell ever…got me, I might walk around afterwards and look just the same, but my heart would be dead as a stone forever.” By the time we’ve reached this point in the narrative, we have such a nuanced portrait of Vivian, a fine woman sliding toward oblivion because of a husband gone sour, we have reason to believe her, and so does McGee. With what McGee overheard, Vivian is already gone. Proof of that is what McGee finds when he does return — what she has done after Waxwell leaves, in regard to her passed out husband, and herself:

"It's what they so often do in the night. Maybe some forlorn fading desire to keep the darkness back. But if they could turn on all the lights in the world, it wouldn't help them."

It is terribly sad, yet somehow inevitable, as Chandler noted the conclusion should be to a great crime mystery. It affords McGee an opportunity to set up Waxwell, however, while at the same time the reader gets to hear the terrible regret and compassion for Vivian that McGee has in his head, as he tidies up the scene:

"They'll pretty you up for burying. But not in orange. That's a color to be alive in. To smile in. They won't bury you in it."

But even when this one seems over, it isn’t, because on the water, Boone Waxwell pays one last call. The end is brutal and fitting, in one of the most memorable books in the series. This one definitely isn’t for the snowflakes, and it isn’t even for McGee, as it sours him a bit in the immediate present. That is borne out when he is propositioned by the beautiful Debra at the end, who is simply another version of Wilma:

"Sweet," I said, "you are a penny from heaven. And you probably know lots and lots of tricks. But every one would remind me that you are a pro, from Wilma's old stable of club fighters. Call me a sentimentalist. The bloom is too far off the rose sweetie. I'd probably keep leaving money on the bureau. You better peddle it. Thanks but no thanks."

And seconds later we get this:

"The lips curled back and her face went so tight, I saw what a pretty and delicate little skull she'd make, picked clean, as Wilma now was, in the dark bottom of Chevalier Bay."

This is one of the best and most resonating entries in the series, despite the violence and the harrowing rape scene, and despite it being at the earlier end of the Travis McGee canon. It is, in fact, the last in the series I’ll be reviewing for a while. I highly recommend Pale Gray for Guilt and The Long Lavender Look, two other stellar entries. I’ll probably review them eventually, but not soon. Bright Orange for the Shroud is highly recommended. Brutal, sad, but resonating. A great writer at what seemed like his peak, until near the end of the series, when he raised the bar even higher. show less