This omnibus is great for McGee fans, I had a similar hardback for decades. It afforded fans an opportunity to see how MacDonald gradually turned this series into one of the most resonating in fiction. It’s greatly evident by the difference between The Quick Red Fox and the two much better entries which followed it. MacDonald waffled a bit early on in the series as to the tone. The second book, Nightmare in Pink, is not nearly as good or cohesive as The Deep Blue Goodbye. He edged back toward his original Goodbye template — somewhat — with A Purple Place for Dying, then backslid again with The Quick Red Fox. Quick Red Fox has an almost traditional detective feel at certain points, which was not the vibe of Goodbye.

In short: Quick Red Fox is okay, worth reading for completists, but I’m almost of a mind to recommend skipping it, Nightmare, and even Purple Place for Dying if you’re collecting entries in this legendary series singly. But in an omnibus, since it’s here, it is worth reading. It won’t blow you away, because it’s only good/average. But a female character within that story — sex-pot Lysa Dean — reappears in one of the later books, the free-wheeling Free Fall in Crimson. So for continuity it’s a good one if you are a completist. Its followup, however, is a must.


A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD —

“She loved her tropic sea and it had killed her dead, in the hot blazing days of August.”

If ever there existed a book within a series which makes you realize as a reader that the series is something really special, this is it. You realize as you read A Deadly Shade of Gold that the Travis McGee series is more than the sum of its parts, and better than almost any other series in the genre ever written. This is the entry where you can visibly see on paper, and almost tangibly feel in your bones the series transforming from something very good, into something for the ages, worthy of being placed in a time capsule for generations hundreds of years from now to discover.

All John D. MacDonald had promised in the very good Deep Blue Good-bye was delivered on in this fifth book in the famous Travis McGee series. The lengthiest entry of the entire series is involving, insightful, violent, and yet resonating. It preceded Bright Orange For the Shroud and Darker Than Amber, making it the finest three-book stretch of the series until decades later, when we got Free Fall in Crimson, Cinnamon Skin, and the final Travis McGee, The Lonely Silver Rain.

I’m going to use a lot of quotes this time around, but I’m not really spoiling anything for anyone, because frankly, you can pretty much find something quote-worthy every two or three pages. Deadly Shadoe of Gold is so complex, so full of characters and motivations, I don’t feel the need to attach a spoiler. This is MacDonald taking the series to new heights, and it’s a stunningly good read. The body count is incredibly high here, yet the narrative is so rich and resonating, so filled with insight, it masks just how much life is lost in this one. McGee does actually take a body count as he lays wounded near the end of the book, and it reaches ten. And the dying isn’t even over yet.

A Deadly Shade of Gold is one of the Mexico stories, which seemed an extension of Florida, and McGee. Nothing was lost by taking McGee out of his Ft. Lauderdale environment in the Mexico entries. He’s in New York for a spell, and Los Angeles, but you can feel rural Mexico in this one:

“At sea level the heat was moist, full of a smell of garbage and flowers, and a faint salty flavor of the sea.”

“Unpaved streets of mud and dust, some clumsy churches, a public square with a small sagging bandstand, naked children, somnolent dogs, snatches of loud music from small cantinas, scores of small weathered stalls, squatting street vendors, ancient rickety trucks, a massive, pervasive almost overpowering stench composed of a rare mixture of mud flats, dead fish, greasy cooking and outdoor plumbing.”

Author Carl Hiaasen, in praising the series — as do a slew of writers which, were I to list them all, male and female, would read like a who’s who of great writers — talks about MacDonald’s ability to capture Florida perfectly, in all it’s racy sense of promise, breath-grabbing beauty, and languid sleaze. MacDonald does the same with Mexico. That may in fact be why the books where part of the narrative is set in Mexico, seem so natural. Mexico seems in fact, in this series, to be an extension of Florida, with much of the same atmosphere, including MacDonald’s disdain for its spoilage by greed and corruption.

There is also a lot about Cuba in this book, which like Mexico, has a strong connection with McGee’s Florida. McGee’s friend Raoul tries to explain just how it was in Cuba under Batista, and how it didn’t get better with Castro:

“You are not such a great fool as to try to fight such power, neither do you get too close to a power which has a silent and secret side, sudden disappearances, quiet confiscations. What you do, you give him and the ones close to him no opening. How do businessmen survive under Salazar, Franco, any of them? I am not being an apologist for my class. Perhaps we should have done something sooner, before the communistas came in with their perversions of freedom.”

Later, when Raoul puts McGee into contact with Dominguez, McGee inquires whether Dominguez knows some of the wealthy Cubans who made it out, and gets this response:

"I used to know them well. Just as Raoul used to know them well. Upper class Havana was a small community, McGee. But now there is...a considerable financial difference between us. Raoul and I came out later. It is the Castro equation, my friend. The later you left, the cleaner you were plucked. So we no longer travel in the same circles."

To know Florida, as MacDonald did, was to know both Mexico and Cuba, and there is a deep, rich resonance to all that happens in this narrative centered on those two countries. Mexico and Cuba loom large over McGee’s quest for justice for his friend Sam Taggart’s murder. McGee is doing it mostly for Nora, but also for some gold artifacts which led to Sam’s ugly death in a lonely hotel room:

“When a man with a hundred dollar car gets killed in a four dollar cabin, the pros are not going to get particularly agitated.”

But love dies hard, and the chance of reconciliation between Sam and Nora has McGee heading to New York, with Nora in tow, because this isn’t just his quest to unravel what happened, but hers as well:

“I cannot describe the look on her face then, a hunting look, a merciless look, a look of dreadful anticipation. It reminded me that the worst thing the Indians could do to their enemy prisoners was turn them over to the women.”

But there is danger, and deception, which bothers Nora. And there is a very dangerous man from the old Cuban regime living high on the hog in Mexico. McGee and Nora get close, and in a marvelously tense and exciting portion of the narrative, McGee sneaks into the compound at night, is attacked by a dog, and moves stealthily in the darkness to discover what’s been happening. There he meets the beautiful little Almah, with whom Sam was in love. McGee’s plan is to fool her into spilling the beans, and toward that end, he needs to frighten her:

"I wanted her to feel death so close she could smell the shroud and the dank earth."

But even when he’s accomplished what he needed to, there is a sickening feeling that the cost was too great:

"Her glance moved swiftly away again, reminding me of the way a spiritless dog cringes when inviting a caress."

"As I started up I told myself that something would have broken her sooner or later. She would have come up against something that couldn't be cajoled or seduced. The ones with no give, the ones with the clear little porcelain hearts shatter. And in shattering, some splinters are lost, so that when, with great care, they are mended, the little fracture lines show. But when you break a pretty thing, even if it is a cheap pretty thing, something does go out of the world. Something died in that clearing. And she would never fit together as well again."

All the while McGee moves closer to discovering what happened, he moves closer to Nora as well. He soon realizes that through actions aboard a boat, goaded into killing under false pretenses, Sam, at least the Sam both he and Nora knew, died long before he returned to Florida with the stolen artifact. And then, something beyond McGee’s control, and beyond the acceptable risk they were taking occurs, changing everything for McGee. As good as the story has been up to that point — and it’s stellar — it then gets better. Yes, it appears to meander a bit as McGee tries to drown his sorrows, but once Raoul puts McGee in touch with Dominguez, the story gets grittier, weirder, and more violent, with McGee desperately attempting to keep at bay his depression about all that’s happened, and all that’s been lost:

“There can be a sort of emotional exhaustion compounding of finding no good answers to anything. Too much had faded away, and the only target left was a grotesque pornographer with a voice like a trapped bee, and he seemed peripheral to the whole thing.”

But he may not be as peripheral as McGee first thought, and there is some unexpected violence to this one, which echoes all the way back to Cuba. The ending is not violent at all, but kind and resonating, as McGee plays guardian angel so at least one good thing can come out of Sam Taggart’s death.

Rich, colorful, incredibly involving and satisfying, A Deadly Shade of Gold is the kind of read that is marvelous on its own, and foreshadows the even deeper and more mature resonance of the last few books in the series. Meyer is only at the beginning of the narrative in this one, but will soon become an integral part of the series, taking on a larger role as McGee’s confidant, and sometimes conscience. At over 400 pages, there is a lot here for a McGee novel, but the ride, and the ending, make it all worth the reader’s time. A marvelous achievement within the series, and a book which set the bar higher for not only this series, but this genre.


BRIGHT ORANGE FOR THE SHROUD —

"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 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 has murdered her but the reader doesn’t care; because in essence she had it coming for her actions, just as Waxwell does.

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 McGee gets 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 a man she 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." — And then: "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 of the series. Deadly Shade of Gold and Bright Orange for the Shroud spotlight a great writer bringing a series into its own, as it becomes one of the finest sagas in the genre ever written. Highly recommended. ( )

SEL loved Travis McGee. ( )