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From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Dreadful Lemon Sky is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.Around four in the morning, Travis McGee is jarred awake by a breathless ghost from his past: an old flame who needs a place to stash a package full of cash. What’s in it for McGee? Ten grand and no questions asked. Two weeks later, she’s dead.
“The Travis McGee novels are among the finest works of fiction ever show more penned by an American author.”—Jonathan Kellerman
Carolyn Milligan was only aboard McGee’s boat for one night. She came to drop off a hundred grand for safekeeping. What Carrie really needed was someone to keep her safe. She said she’d be back in a month. Instead Carrie is killed in a dubious roadside accident. Now McGee is left with a fortune—and a nagging conscience.
So McGee takes a trip to the seedy little town of Bayside, Florida, to look into Carrie’s life before she showed up on his boat. What McGee finds only pushes him further into the corrupt world of drugs and blood that Carrie was trying to escape. McGee is used to high stakes, but when the bodies start piling up, even he may be in over his head.
Features a new Introduction by Lee Child. show less
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This is an unremittingly dark and cynical look at life in modern (at least in MacDonald's time) Florida, where money is king, legal boundaries are just suggestions, and people have little hesitation to act out their darkest wishes. And I'm not talking about McGee himself. He is behaving better than average in this book, although his presence is still quite deadly. Two women he refuses to sleep with wind up dead pretty quickly. Other people die in odd, sometimes gruesome ways, or sometimes just for the hell of it. There's still five pages left - why not kill off someone else? Here, McGee and Meyer travel up the Florida Atlantic Coast in the Busted Flush to investigate the death of another of McGee's one night stands, a woman who only a show more couple of days previously came to the Busted Flush at 4 AM to drop off a large amount of money for safekeeping. Why the urgency? She wouldn't say. But she did want to sleep with McGee again. However, wary of some sort of trap, he refused. Or maybe it was because although she was only 30 and it had been six years since he had seen her, she now looked like she was 40. There is really no getting into McGee's mind. Luckily, Meyer is along for the ride and he proves invaluable in helping to sort out a very tangled web. It is a satisfying read along the way, because there is an ample amount of mystery to go along with McGee's and MacDonald's preaching. After finishing it, however, the plot seems a bit cartoonish. Of course, McGee does find a woman to sleep with during the course of the book, giving us a chance to read more than one of MacDonald's incredibly badly written sex scenes. He was a much better writer when describing boats or how development was ravaging Florida. Seeing blurbs on the cover calling him "the best novelist in America" is enough to make me laugh--or wonder about the state of 1970s American fiction. show less
The toughest thing about revisiting John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series is getting past its casual misogyny. Most of the female characters have either "Victim”" or “Bimbo” tattooed on their foreheads; many carry both messages. Even when McGee admits to admiration of a woman’s character, it doesn’t stand in the way of a bit of recreational or therapeutic sex. And all too often, she ends up dead in the next chapter.
That happens to a couple of the female characters in “The Dreadful Lemon Sky”, beginning with Carrie Milligan, an old friend (of whom McGee seems to have an inexhaustible supply) who approaches him asking him to hold a considerable wad of cash for 30 days. McGee accepts, despite knowing there’s no show more legitimate reason for a construction company secretary to be walking around with $94,000 in assorted greenbacks. When Milligan ends up dead on a Florida highway, McGee delays carrying out her directive to deliver the cash to her sister while he and the ever-present Meyer dig more deeply into what quickly begins to look like murder.
McGee remains a strong character to build a series around. He’s competent, smart, good-looking, persistent, and has his own very particular moral code which is essentially Good Guy Realist. Meyer is around to do the heavy lifting when a philosophical question needs to be brought into play, and MacDonald gets to use McGee as a mouthpiece for his own dismay at the untethered and (in his view) malignant growth of Florida’s wetlands and beach communities. A Travis McGee novel guarantees that the Bad Guys, on the whole, get their comeuppance and that Our Hero will survive, somewhat more battered and perhaps just a bit more cynical, to fight the good fight and live the good life another day.
“The Dreadful Lemon Sky” delivers on all those points. It’s just too bad that MacDonald’s characterization of female characters has aged so poorly. show less
That happens to a couple of the female characters in “The Dreadful Lemon Sky”, beginning with Carrie Milligan, an old friend (of whom McGee seems to have an inexhaustible supply) who approaches him asking him to hold a considerable wad of cash for 30 days. McGee accepts, despite knowing there’s no show more legitimate reason for a construction company secretary to be walking around with $94,000 in assorted greenbacks. When Milligan ends up dead on a Florida highway, McGee delays carrying out her directive to deliver the cash to her sister while he and the ever-present Meyer dig more deeply into what quickly begins to look like murder.
McGee remains a strong character to build a series around. He’s competent, smart, good-looking, persistent, and has his own very particular moral code which is essentially Good Guy Realist. Meyer is around to do the heavy lifting when a philosophical question needs to be brought into play, and MacDonald gets to use McGee as a mouthpiece for his own dismay at the untethered and (in his view) malignant growth of Florida’s wetlands and beach communities. A Travis McGee novel guarantees that the Bad Guys, on the whole, get their comeuppance and that Our Hero will survive, somewhat more battered and perhaps just a bit more cynical, to fight the good fight and live the good life another day.
“The Dreadful Lemon Sky” delivers on all those points. It’s just too bad that MacDonald’s characterization of female characters has aged so poorly. show less
“He captured the mood and the spirit of the times more accurately, more hauntingly, than any ‘literature’ writer — yet managed always to tell a thunderingly good, intensely suspenseful tale.” — Dean Koontz
“A writer way ahead of his time, his Travis McGee books are as entertaining, insightful, and suspenseful today as the moment I first read them. He is the all-time master of the American mystery novel.” — John Saul
John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee series became, as Robert B. Parker pointed out, one of the great sagas in American mystery fiction, and about whom Mary Higgins Clark wrote, “Talk about the Best” penned The Dreadful Lemon Sky near the middle of the 1970s. It remains one of the better entries in a show more series littered with memorable reads. A rather protracted confrontation near the end of the book keeps it from being in the very top tier of the series for me, but it’s just a tick below them — meaning it’s almost assuredly better than just about everything else out there. This one is actually a much more complex mystery than most in the series, which is why some rank it even higher in the canon.
It begins at four o’clock in the morning, when McGee’s warning system alerts him that someone has stepped onto The Busted Flush. It turns out to be Carrie Milligan, a young woman from McGee’s past. McGee had stepped in and prevented her from being raped at a boat party on the Alabama Tiger several years before. That same evening they had their one and only intimate coupling. Carrie was very shaken by the ordeal, what might have happened, but McGee does not attempt to take advantage of her. While McGee is portrayed as somewhat surprised by what eventually did happen that night so long ago, it is clear that MacDonald understood the psychology of the moment, the instant intimacy and trust such a saving act might have on the one rescued. It is only when MacDonald the writer has his creation recall those events in his thoughts, that McGee, who had made no lecherous moves after rescuing the girl, nor had he planned any, gets a glimmer of understanding:
“It was a very gentle time, and very sweet in a strange way. In body language she was saying, This is the way it should be. And I was saying, Replace that memory with This one.”
Unfortunately for McGee, the romantic episode was isolated, and he became someone Carrie looked up to and trusted to advise her. McGee even loaned her the use of his boat for her honeymoon — someone long gone now, and a mistake on Carrie’s part. His residual affection for her, however, makes McGee’s later actions in the novel understandable. It also reveals how forward-thinking MacDonald could be, rather than the sexist lout his tarnished hero is so often made out to be:
“They lead the singles life. Lots of laughs and lots of barren mornings. Skilled sex, mod conversation, They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to ‘take care.’ God knows they are expert in taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.” — McGee, thinking about Carrie and her romantic disappointments
But now Carrie is here, in the wee hours of morning, and she’s got ninety-four grand-and-change she wants McGee to hold for her until she returns — no questions asked. Well, of course McGee does, and of course Carrie doesn’t return because she can’t. McGee is going to give the money to her sister, Susan, but before that happens he and Meyer must discover if Carrie’s death in Bayside was actually an accident. It will lead to one of the most complex mysteries in the series, involving unrequited love, drug smuggling, and a lawyer and potential politician who likes to lift up every skirt he comes across. Freddie Van Harn in fact, is everything McGee is unfairly portrayed as by some, only on steroids.
Taking the Flush down to Bayside, McGee works out several stories which become fluid as he pokes around, trying to remain plausible as he looks into Carrie’s murder, which everyone has accepted was an accident. First McGee runs across Cindy Birdsong at the marina. Her husband Cal is a brute of a man whom McGee instantly notes by his movements, even while drunk, is someone more than a little formidable. Drunk, Cal slaps his wife, and McGee, who has never met these people, and has no idea what he’s stepping into, or how it will affect whatever tack he takes while looking into Carrie’s death, hesitates to become involved. McGee’s atypical hesitancy to play hero on this occasion proves warranted when he’s barely holding his own against Cal, and is saved by the cops. They’ve been following Cal’s trail of drunken violence all night, which includes a pizza guy’s broken arm, and three truckers in the hospital, beaten senseless by Cal. McGee doesn’t press charges because Cindy Birdsong asks him not to, even thanks him later.
McGee uses his wiles to discover that Jack Omaha and his partner Harry were having affairs with the help — the help being Carrie and Joanna. Omaha apparently cleaned out the building supply business before disappearing and that may or may not be where Carrie got all that cash. So McGee pokes around some more. It doesn’t go much better with Chris Omaha. Freddie is dipping into those waters already — and just about all the water in town, willing or not — and he doesn’t want her talking to McGee. Chris has already revealed herself to McGee as uncaring, and later in the book is described by Joanna as dumb, loud, greedy, and rotten to both Jack Omaha and the kids. When Freddie smacks her in front of McGee, who has conned his way into her home, McGee at first thinks Freddie has shot her. He’s relieved to discover Freddie only slapped her. Though McGee doesn’t like it much, and tries to taunt Freddie into making a move, McGee has to consider how his actions will affect his own cover story. Because it doesn’t come to that, it is still far from McGee — or MacDonald as a writer — condoning these actions. It’s a story, and there is far more going on here than meets the eye, as is borne out later.
When Carrie’s sister Susan enters the picture, she is confused and numb. In kindness, McGee offers to see what the deal is with the staggering funeral home bill. Once he realizes the director is attempting to take advantage of Susan’s grief, he returns to Susan who is sitting outside, and tells her exactly what the guy said. In essence, it empowers Susan and she is the one who goes back inside and sets things right. McGee was being a decent guy, not demeaning her, for heaven’s sake. She is in grief, still stunned at the sudden loss of her sister in the story. Even after she puts the funeral director in his place, she acknowledges how she managed it:
“I was pretending I was Carrie and it was me who was dead. She’d never let him take advantage. I was just so confused when he gave me the bill before.”
Joanna become friends with Meyer and McGee as they delve into Carrie’s death, but not before Joanna makes a play for McGee, and makes the mistake of asking him if there’s more than one reason to become intimate with someone. His response:
“The biggest and most important reason in the world is to be together with someone in a way that makes life a little less bleak and solitary and lonesome. To exchange the I for the We. In the biggest sense of the word, it’s cold outside. And kindness and affection and gentleness build a nice warm fire inside. That’s okay. But if you want to set some new international screwing record, or if you want to show off the busiest fastest hips in town, forget it.”
It’s almost startling how often McGee declines overtures from the opposite sex in this series, and yet you so rarely read about those instances in reviews. Hmmm. Here Joanna becomes friends only, at least for a time. But a lot happens in this one, and there is eventually a pretty high body count. The story is very complex, delving into the ins-and-outs of the traffic, and the morality surrounding the quick buck to be had by doing so. Then there is the question of who took the money, not to mention an investigator who realizes right off the bat, that McGee and Meyer have ulterior motives for being in Bayside which doesn’t coincide with any story they’ve told — to anyone. The Busted Flush takes some heavy damage in this one, as does McGee. A violent and slightly too protracted conclusion is followed by an even more violent but much more succinctly written anti-climax.
There is a romance of sorts here between McGee and someone, and their coupling will eventually take on a rich and mature hue. McGee is damaged externally, the woman damaged internally. It will in fact be McGee who wants to continue the affair. The woman, however, needs more time, because she has discovered things about herself of which she’d formerly been unaware. There is a realness to her reasons filled with MacDonald’s unspoken psychological understanding:
“Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.” — McGee
On a lighter note, we get McGee’s take on why he doesn’t do pot, and why music should be ‘over there’ instead of all around you, and we get to hear Meyer’s hilarious reasons for not jogging. So it isn’t all darkness, but there is a more serious shading to this one which resonates with the reader. It’s probably a 4.5 for me, but I’ll round up. A fabulous mystery this time out for McGee, with a story so dense and complex, so humanistically shaded, that it almost masks how much violence there is in Dreadful Lemon Sky. Highly recommended! show less
“A writer way ahead of his time, his Travis McGee books are as entertaining, insightful, and suspenseful today as the moment I first read them. He is the all-time master of the American mystery novel.” — John Saul
John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee series became, as Robert B. Parker pointed out, one of the great sagas in American mystery fiction, and about whom Mary Higgins Clark wrote, “Talk about the Best” penned The Dreadful Lemon Sky near the middle of the 1970s. It remains one of the better entries in a show more series littered with memorable reads. A rather protracted confrontation near the end of the book keeps it from being in the very top tier of the series for me, but it’s just a tick below them — meaning it’s almost assuredly better than just about everything else out there. This one is actually a much more complex mystery than most in the series, which is why some rank it even higher in the canon.
It begins at four o’clock in the morning, when McGee’s warning system alerts him that someone has stepped onto The Busted Flush. It turns out to be Carrie Milligan, a young woman from McGee’s past. McGee had stepped in and prevented her from being raped at a boat party on the Alabama Tiger several years before. That same evening they had their one and only intimate coupling. Carrie was very shaken by the ordeal, what might have happened, but McGee does not attempt to take advantage of her. While McGee is portrayed as somewhat surprised by what eventually did happen that night so long ago, it is clear that MacDonald understood the psychology of the moment, the instant intimacy and trust such a saving act might have on the one rescued. It is only when MacDonald the writer has his creation recall those events in his thoughts, that McGee, who had made no lecherous moves after rescuing the girl, nor had he planned any, gets a glimmer of understanding:
“It was a very gentle time, and very sweet in a strange way. In body language she was saying, This is the way it should be. And I was saying, Replace that memory with This one.”
Unfortunately for McGee, the romantic episode was isolated, and he became someone Carrie looked up to and trusted to advise her. McGee even loaned her the use of his boat for her honeymoon — someone long gone now, and a mistake on Carrie’s part. His residual affection for her, however, makes McGee’s later actions in the novel understandable. It also reveals how forward-thinking MacDonald could be, rather than the sexist lout his tarnished hero is so often made out to be:
“They lead the singles life. Lots of laughs and lots of barren mornings. Skilled sex, mod conversation, They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to ‘take care.’ God knows they are expert in taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.” — McGee, thinking about Carrie and her romantic disappointments
But now Carrie is here, in the wee hours of morning, and she’s got ninety-four grand-and-change she wants McGee to hold for her until she returns — no questions asked. Well, of course McGee does, and of course Carrie doesn’t return because she can’t. McGee is going to give the money to her sister, Susan, but before that happens he and Meyer must discover if Carrie’s death in Bayside was actually an accident. It will lead to one of the most complex mysteries in the series, involving unrequited love, drug smuggling, and a lawyer and potential politician who likes to lift up every skirt he comes across. Freddie Van Harn in fact, is everything McGee is unfairly portrayed as by some, only on steroids.
Taking the Flush down to Bayside, McGee works out several stories which become fluid as he pokes around, trying to remain plausible as he looks into Carrie’s murder, which everyone has accepted was an accident. First McGee runs across Cindy Birdsong at the marina. Her husband Cal is a brute of a man whom McGee instantly notes by his movements, even while drunk, is someone more than a little formidable. Drunk, Cal slaps his wife, and McGee, who has never met these people, and has no idea what he’s stepping into, or how it will affect whatever tack he takes while looking into Carrie’s death, hesitates to become involved. McGee’s atypical hesitancy to play hero on this occasion proves warranted when he’s barely holding his own against Cal, and is saved by the cops. They’ve been following Cal’s trail of drunken violence all night, which includes a pizza guy’s broken arm, and three truckers in the hospital, beaten senseless by Cal. McGee doesn’t press charges because Cindy Birdsong asks him not to, even thanks him later.
McGee uses his wiles to discover that Jack Omaha and his partner Harry were having affairs with the help — the help being Carrie and Joanna. Omaha apparently cleaned out the building supply business before disappearing and that may or may not be where Carrie got all that cash. So McGee pokes around some more. It doesn’t go much better with Chris Omaha. Freddie is dipping into those waters already — and just about all the water in town, willing or not — and he doesn’t want her talking to McGee. Chris has already revealed herself to McGee as uncaring, and later in the book is described by Joanna as dumb, loud, greedy, and rotten to both Jack Omaha and the kids. When Freddie smacks her in front of McGee, who has conned his way into her home, McGee at first thinks Freddie has shot her. He’s relieved to discover Freddie only slapped her. Though McGee doesn’t like it much, and tries to taunt Freddie into making a move, McGee has to consider how his actions will affect his own cover story. Because it doesn’t come to that, it is still far from McGee — or MacDonald as a writer — condoning these actions. It’s a story, and there is far more going on here than meets the eye, as is borne out later.
When Carrie’s sister Susan enters the picture, she is confused and numb. In kindness, McGee offers to see what the deal is with the staggering funeral home bill. Once he realizes the director is attempting to take advantage of Susan’s grief, he returns to Susan who is sitting outside, and tells her exactly what the guy said. In essence, it empowers Susan and she is the one who goes back inside and sets things right. McGee was being a decent guy, not demeaning her, for heaven’s sake. She is in grief, still stunned at the sudden loss of her sister in the story. Even after she puts the funeral director in his place, she acknowledges how she managed it:
“I was pretending I was Carrie and it was me who was dead. She’d never let him take advantage. I was just so confused when he gave me the bill before.”
Joanna become friends with Meyer and McGee as they delve into Carrie’s death, but not before Joanna makes a play for McGee, and makes the mistake of asking him if there’s more than one reason to become intimate with someone. His response:
“The biggest and most important reason in the world is to be together with someone in a way that makes life a little less bleak and solitary and lonesome. To exchange the I for the We. In the biggest sense of the word, it’s cold outside. And kindness and affection and gentleness build a nice warm fire inside. That’s okay. But if you want to set some new international screwing record, or if you want to show off the busiest fastest hips in town, forget it.”
It’s almost startling how often McGee declines overtures from the opposite sex in this series, and yet you so rarely read about those instances in reviews. Hmmm. Here Joanna becomes friends only, at least for a time. But a lot happens in this one, and there is eventually a pretty high body count. The story is very complex, delving into the ins-and-outs of the traffic, and the morality surrounding the quick buck to be had by doing so. Then there is the question of who took the money, not to mention an investigator who realizes right off the bat, that McGee and Meyer have ulterior motives for being in Bayside which doesn’t coincide with any story they’ve told — to anyone. The Busted Flush takes some heavy damage in this one, as does McGee. A violent and slightly too protracted conclusion is followed by an even more violent but much more succinctly written anti-climax.
There is a romance of sorts here between McGee and someone, and their coupling will eventually take on a rich and mature hue. McGee is damaged externally, the woman damaged internally. It will in fact be McGee who wants to continue the affair. The woman, however, needs more time, because she has discovered things about herself of which she’d formerly been unaware. There is a realness to her reasons filled with MacDonald’s unspoken psychological understanding:
“Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.” — McGee
On a lighter note, we get McGee’s take on why he doesn’t do pot, and why music should be ‘over there’ instead of all around you, and we get to hear Meyer’s hilarious reasons for not jogging. So it isn’t all darkness, but there is a more serious shading to this one which resonates with the reader. It’s probably a 4.5 for me, but I’ll round up. A fabulous mystery this time out for McGee, with a story so dense and complex, so humanistically shaded, that it almost masks how much violence there is in Dreadful Lemon Sky. Highly recommended! show less
Travis McGee novels are most successful when there is a mystery to solve or a chain of events to uncover. Here there are both. McGee is awoken in the middle of the night by Carrie Milligan, an acquaintance of six years back, arriving with a shoe box under her arm stuffed with a little over $100,000. Assured that the money is rightfully hers and not stolen, McGee is asked to keep it safe for a month. Two weeks later Carrie dies as a victim of an unwitnessed hit-and-run. A couple of questions need answers: who killed her (if she was killed) and where did the money come from? It leads McGee and his best friend, Meyer, to the City and County of Bayside. But first. . . .
The Dreadful Lemon Sky was McGee’s 16th outing and by 1974 women no longer swooned because they were in his presence. They still became involved with him because he is the hero--it is a staple of the genre, after all--but now there were conflicting motives and underlying vulnerabilities; there were reasons beyond the expectations of the form. But Lemon has one scene that is unforgivable in any era. McGee stands by as a blithering housewife is slapped to the floor. His response? “I tried to look smaller and slower than I am”; an attempt to bait the villain into striking first. There were structural reasons to establish animosity between these two characters while withholding a physical confrontation, but clearly it doesn’t work.
The rest of the novel works to perfection. An intriguing setup allows McGee and Meyer to dive right into the characters and their lives and relationships. Though Carrie was a little older than her friends, most of them are the remnants of the hippie generation. His houseboat, which McGee brought with him to the seaside town, gives him an initial in with them. An incidental encounter upon his arrival helps with other residents. For the rest he uses what little he’d learned from Carrie. Not an uninteresting thing follows. The Dreadful Lemon Sky delivers on mystery, character, drama, action and romance.
The only real negative is so small that it can only slightly lower a five-star rating. There’s a fight to the death that may go on for too long. There are story reasons for this, too, but it may wear on some. Not for long, though. There are still revelations to come and a final altercation, which is where the novel takes its name.
It’s not to be missed. show less
[Sexism Warning: Created in the Swingin’ Sixties this series wasshow more
peppered with the chauvinism of the era, which the McGee novels never completely lost as it continued through the next decade and a half. Part of what made total eradication impossible, even in the face of changing times and sensibilities, was the first person narrative of a womanizer and self-professed beach bum. These tendencies did soften as McGee aged but even as a middle teen--as I was when I first read these books--I realized a lot of the character’s histrionics over his carnal motives were simply a mask for wanting and liking sex. Such was MacDonald’s skill that you could assign and argue real-world motives to fictional creations, but in the end the degree to which each reader as individuals can ignore such outdated attitudes will determine whether these books will frustrate and anger or deliver superior entertainment. There is nothing outdated about MacDonald’s storytelling.]
The Dreadful Lemon Sky was McGee’s 16th outing and by 1974 women no longer swooned because they were in his presence. They still became involved with him because he is the hero--it is a staple of the genre, after all--but now there were conflicting motives and underlying vulnerabilities; there were reasons beyond the expectations of the form. But Lemon has one scene that is unforgivable in any era. McGee stands by as a blithering housewife is slapped to the floor. His response? “I tried to look smaller and slower than I am”; an attempt to bait the villain into striking first. There were structural reasons to establish animosity between these two characters while withholding a physical confrontation, but clearly it doesn’t work.
The rest of the novel works to perfection. An intriguing setup allows McGee and Meyer to dive right into the characters and their lives and relationships. Though Carrie was a little older than her friends, most of them are the remnants of the hippie generation. His houseboat, which McGee brought with him to the seaside town, gives him an initial in with them. An incidental encounter upon his arrival helps with other residents. For the rest he uses what little he’d learned from Carrie. Not an uninteresting thing follows. The Dreadful Lemon Sky delivers on mystery, character, drama, action and romance.
The only real negative is so small that it can only slightly lower a five-star rating. There’s a fight to the death that may go on for too long. There are story reasons for this, too, but it may wear on some. Not for long, though. There are still revelations to come and a final altercation, which is where the novel takes its name.
It’s not to be missed. show less
I was curious to see how well MacDonald held up, and remember this book from when it first appeared in 75. It turns out it holds up very well, and from what I can tell his portrait of Florida is both accurate and had good predictions in it. Though McGee and Meyer are very conservative, when reading one book they don't seem as creaky as they did back when I used to read every one as it came out. There are also passages in here that are nicely evocative, such as one where McGee is trying to fall asleep in his boat in an inlet, and he describes all the sounds and the feel of the water under the boat. An entertaining book.
This book was loaned to me by a friend. I had never read a John D. MacDonald book before. Not as hard-boiled as I like, but a fun read. Travis McGee's sidekick, Meyer, is a treat. Travis McGee is given a batch of money to hold for an ex-lover. She soon ends up dead. He knows the money he holds must be connected to her murder. He tries to find out where the money came from, and at the same time tries to find her killer by seeking out the people she knew.
A clever and plausible resolution, I thought. The setup is the typical McGee - a female friend comes along asking for help out of a jam - and when the friend turns up dead McGee takes a hand to figure out what happened. He goes through the steps of doing so as methodically as if it were a police procedural, but ends up revealing a heavily convoluted motive, with elements of local politics and drug-running thrown in for good measure. Yet somehow, the whole thing hangs together.
The denouement features a plot twist that is a bit telegraphed, and ends in a rather Terminator-esque scene, but you'd be disappointed in McDonald if he didn't get your blood pumping a little at the end. Good stuff.
The denouement features a plot twist that is a bit telegraphed, and ends in a rather Terminator-esque scene, but you'd be disappointed in McDonald if he didn't get your blood pumping a little at the end. Good stuff.
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John D. MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania on July 24, 1916. He received a B.S. from Syracuse University in 1938 and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. During World War II, he served in the Army. His first novel, Brass Cupcake, was published in 1950. He wrote about 70 books during his lifetime show more including the Travis McGee series, Condominium, No Deadly Drug, Nothing Can Go Wrong, and A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John Dann MacDonald. A Flash of Green was adapted into a movie by the same name and The Excuse was adapted into a movie entitled Cape Fear. He received numerous awards including the Ben Franklin Award for the best American short story in 1955, the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere for A Key to the Suite in 1964, the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award in 1972, the American Book Award for The Green Ripper in 1980. He died from complications of an earlier heart bypass surgery on December 28, 1986 at the age of 70. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original title
- The Dreadful Lemon Sky
- Original publication date
- 1974
- People/Characters
- Cal Birdsong; Cindy Birdsong; Jason Breen; Walter J. Demos; Susan Dobrovsky; Joanna Freeler (show all 17); Harry Hascomb; Betty Joller; Meyer the economist; Travis McGee; Carolyn Dobrovsky Milligan "Carrie"; Chris Omaha; Jack Omaha; Jake Schermer (Judge); Jane Schermer; Harry Max Scorf (special investigator); Frederick Van Harn
- Important places
- Bayside, Florida, USA; Florida, USA; Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA; Broward County, Florida, USA
- Epigraph
- Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.
—SANTAYANA - Dedication
- For each true friend of Travis McGee
- First words
- I was in deep sleep, alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of bed, alone in a sweaty dream of chase, fear, and monstrous predators.
- Quotations
- I did not think I could placidly endure another gleaming salesman tell me that I had to have quadrophony sound, coming at me from all directions. I have never felt any urge to stand in the middle of a group of musicians. They... (show all) belong over there, damn it, and I belong over here, listening to what they are doing over there. Music that enfolds you, coming from some undetectable set of sources, is gimmicky, unreal and eminently forgettable.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I will have to get Meyer to explain this concept to me.
Classifications
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- Reviews
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- ISBNs
- 32
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- ASINs
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