The following article was published in Florida Accent, the Sunday supplement to the Tampa Tribune, on February 28, 1965, written by reporter Jack McClintock and titled “No Credit Cards for Travis McGee.” It was the same month that the fifth McGee novel -- A Deadly Shade of Gold -- was published (not April, as McClintock reports) and JDM obviously agreed to do the interview to push the book. There’s not much new here for the dedicated MacDonald fan, but there is an interesting bit of conversation about Ian Fleming, which amplifies JDM’s opinion of him expressed elsewhere. There’s also a photo -- taken at the old Point Crisp house -- that I’ve never seen before.
When John D. MacDonald decided to do a series after writing some 50 novels and hundreds of short fiction pieces - he knew he needed a hero he could "live with."
So he wrote two more novels, trying out two heroes, and scrapped them both. On the third try he came up with Travis McGee: boat bum, skeptic, retriever, for a price, of ill-gotten gains.
"McGee is essentially an iconoclast who feels displaced in this highly-structured society," MacDonald says of his livable protagonist, "and he's aware there probably won't be room for him in 20 years.
"At first his name was Dallas McGee, but the semantics of that name went sour."
MacDonald says that for a long time he resisted pressures to write a series. But the book market was changing and the pattern of pressures changed and MacDonald changed his mind and has published four novels built around Travis McGee. A fifth is due in April.
"I have letters in my files stating explicitly why I would never write a series,” he declares wryly. "And here I am with Travis."
McGee titles are colorful: The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying, The Quick Red Fox.
"That was a cold and arbitrary decision," MacDonald confesses cheerfully. "Bookrack displays are a visual thing, and people will remember the colors and know which ones they've read."
The writer has prematurely silver hair and talks with humor and vitality. His previous novels are read all over the world — a fan club in France numbered Albert Camus and Francois Sagan among its members.
"And a lady at the University of Nice is doing her Ph.D. on MacDonald," says MacDonald.
He got into writing almost by default. After graduating from the Harvard School of Business with an M.A. degree in 1939, MacDonald, as people are expected to do, went to work.
"Then I was fired from my first four jobs," he admits without a trace of regret. "It was a case of 'bigmouth.' It wasn't that I wasn't diligent, I just kept saying the wrong things to the wrong people.
"I'm essentially inner-directed. I dislike phoniness and people who cannot evaluate themselves," he says. And he told them so.
The army beckoned in 1940 "just as I was beginning to think there was no place for me," he chuckles. "So I asked what it paid and it sounded pretty good so I went."
He wrote short stories home from overseas instead of letters, and when his wife sold one he decided to write for a living. He makes a good living at it, and cannot be fired for baiting phonies.
MacDonald has opinions and doesn't care who knows it. They're in his conversation and in his books. And sometimes in his letters.
When a critic claimed Travis McGee was an "undisguised imitation" of Ian Fleming's James Bond, MacDonald wrote him:
"Fleming was kind enough to state his admiration of my work on several occasions, and I must risk appearing tasteless and say that perhaps the most serious flaw in the Bond books is that Fleming really could not write very well."
He caught some errors in the critic's article and wrote: "I must forgive you for making the charge of imitation, as it was made without having read the books.
"May I be so forward as to commend them to you?” MacDonald added slyly.
One who has read the McGee books sees some of MacDonald in them - his ironic wit, his vitality – and, no doubt, his opinions. Travis McGee, however, is mostly just Travis McGee.
The hero says earnestly of himself, "I am wary of a lot of things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny.
"I'm also wary of all earnestness," he adds with deadly aim at his own.
McGee lives on a plush houseboat called the Busted Flush -- which refers to the way McGee came to own her and not to her lavatory facilities which include a seven-foot-long sunken bathtub in excellent working order.
He does base acts for nearly-noble motives, nearly-noble acts for greed's sake -- and talks of himself with clear-eyed and conscious irony. He's fallible, sometimes weak, sometimes strong, often ridiculous. He can be vaguely puritanical, or outstandingly vicious. He's complex, contradictory, human.
At his best, he's an ironic inspector of his own interior who laughs loudest when he's taking himself most seriously.
In the spring of 1948 British mystery author John Creasey made his first ever trip to the United States, arriving in New York on the Queen Elizabeth on April 13th. He was embarking on a multi-state speaking tour that included many chapters of the Rotary Club, of which he himself was a member. His travels took him as far as Arizona and, in early May, visited Utica, New York, where he met and spent an afternoon with rookie writer John D MacDonald.
We MacDonald fans stand in awe of the sheer quantity of JDM's output: 66 novels, 6 anthologies, 5 works of non-fiction, and nearly 400 original short stories published during his lifetime. He was a piker compared to Creasey, who, by the time he died in 1973, had written over 600 novels under 28 different pseudonyms, including crime, westerns, romance, and science fiction. He created many different series characters, the most popular of which was George Gideon of Scotland Yard, who appeared in 21 separate novels and who made it to both the big screen (John Ford’s 1958 film Gideon’s Day) and the small (the British television series Gideon’s Way).
When Creasey toured America he had written “only” 230 books, according to JDM, who took him to a minor league baseball game in Utica. He wrote about it in his weekly Clinton Courier column.
Visitor:
Last week-end we became most pleasantly involved with a visiting British gentleman making his first trip to the States. He is John Creasey, a writer of mystery novels that are published in England.
From the viewpoint of sheer productivity, he has left us with a feeling of awe and concern. He has published two hundred and thirty books, and has sold four million copies in Great Britain.
Mr. Creasey is a quiet and pleasant fellow, thirty-nine years old. And he is one of those rare people who have not lost the ability to be enthusiastic.
His constant companion is a small black notebook which is whipped out frequently and into which goes even bits and pieces of casual conversation.
In Utica he saw his first baseball game -- Blue Sox versus Binghamton -- and, as an ardent cricket fan, he said that he could see how it could become most exciting. We got all tangled up explaining the intricacies of the "hit and run” and the rule which says that the third foul is not called a strike.
We were explaining that a home run occurred when a fair ball was hit outside the playing area, and thereupon the batter hit a double into the left field stands, and the local ground rules made a liar out of us.
He seemed very dubious about the statement that the pitched ball actually does curve in the air, breaks sharply in front of the plate. And he failed to see the necessity of leather gloves to protect the hands. He said that the cricket ball is of the same construction, is thrown and hit equally hard, and the players merely get used to catching it barehanded. Hmmm!
* * *
Change of Heart:
During the past years the New York Central Railroad has seemed to consider the passengers as a highly objectionable sort of freight that must be taught humility as it is shunted from place to place. Deluxe service has been available on extra-fare trains.
But last week we treked down to New York, paid coach fare and got on something called the Upstate Special which is made up at Syracuse.
To our somewhat enormous astonishment we ended up in a luxurious observation car, sitting in a deep chair, listening to soft music, holding a tall cool glass and watching the Hudson Valley unroll.
The astonishing train, where you are not clipped for luxury service, leaves Utica every day at 9:25 a.m. and takes five hours and twenty minutes to get to New York. Since it is made up at Syracuse, there are seats available, and there will always be room.
Ed Stanley tried to talk us out of taking the train, saying that it is a local and that it makes six stops between Utica and Albany. Ed is right. It does. But on that train, it’s even pleasant to stop. It makes the trip last longer. Five hours and twenty minutes seemed hardly long enough. For the first time we began to feel that the NYC is beginning to cooperate with us in our perpetual ambition of getting something for nothing.
* * *
Hotel Service:
On this trip we obtained, for the first time, a "televised" room in a New York hotel. And, for the first time, we are anxious to have a coaxial cable to come into Utica so that television, in clear and distant image, can be available here.
As a practicing skeptic, we were not convinced by the ardent claims or the television boys. We had to be shown.
In baseball parks they don't sell the sort of seat that you get when you watch a game on the screen. To get the same view, you would have to sit on the shoulders of the umpire. Watching a boxing match, you begin to worry about whether a wild left hook will knock you off your chair. In the wrestling matches, they throw large gentlemen into your lap.
Maybe one day a television crew will focus the cameras on a scene of combat. And everybody sitting in their parlors watching the screen will get a slightly different slant on warfare. A slant that may help this battered old world find some better answers.
