McGee and MacDonald... a Colorful Team
By Susan R. Welch
Travis McGee is a fictional detective. He is a mildmannered Florida houseboater who does his "salvage" work only when he needs the money, is a social commentator, is clever rather than violent, is kind to friends and animals, and respects women. He isn't the Wolf Man in sheep's clothing and he isn't a sexual basket case.
Lacking as he does the charm of untrammeled sadomasochism, John D. MacDonald's hero could hardly be expected to capture the public imagination, but the 14 mysteries in the Travis McGee series have sold five million copies in paperback originals and are more popular than ever.
Including the McGee series, which he started in 1964, MacDonald has written 64 books, 46 million copies of which have been sold by Fawcett alone. He was in Minneapolis last week to promote The Scarlet Ruse, the latest McGee thriller, and his fans are so rabid that it was difficult to quickly obtain a copy of the book.
Getting a Travis McGee past the security guard at the Tribune front desk was a major strategical problem. He wanted to steal it.
Minneapolis booksellers, delighted to hear of MacDonald's arrival, were even more delighted by the recent "arrival" of McGee and The Scarlet Ruse.
"What does the name John D. MacDonald mean to me?' exclaimed Dave Moore of Shinders. "Money! The man's a phenomenon. Our entire stock of The Scarlet Ruse sold out in three weeks. It'll be the best seller of the year."
"Bookstores wouldn't exist If it weren't for authors like him," said Kay Sexton of B. Dalton, Bookseller.
The 56-year-old MacDonald is tall, well-built and well tailored. His face is flushed pink from the Sarasota sun -- like McGee, he lives in Florida -- and he generates congeniality, courtesy, charm, and a desire to be charmed himself.
MacDonald, a Harvard Business School graduate, says there's no parallel in lifestyle between himself and Travis McGee: "He's more gregarious than I am. I work from 9 to 6, and feed my duck and my goose. I'm also building a motorcycle. I need to be near my dish. Rattle my dish and I'll be there."
"The philosophies in my books are like trial balloons. Travis is more positive than I am -- I'm more anxiety-prone, more apt to doubt my own judgments. But one belief Travis and I do share is that the original sin is being a predator -- using and abusing other people, hurting them gratuitously."
Although he believes that fiction gets closer than anything else to the truth about existence, his aim in his writings is to provide entertainment
"As Sam Goldwyn used to say, if you want to send a message, call Western Union. If some people are able to use my books as band aids for their own personal loneliness or private grief, that's great. I just don't want to start taking myself too seriously. If I did that, I might end up eating the poison apple."
Ross MacDonald, another noted mystery writer, who was hailed as an unrecognized genius by Eudora Welty in The New York Times last year, was given a poison apple, in John D. MacDonald's opinion.
"It's really one of those faddy things. He was given a great shining gift of critical acclaim by the literary establishment. This is okay if you're relatively indifferent to such things, but he swallowed the bait completely. He's got someone following him around now, writing down everything he does this is the great writer at work, and so on.
"No author should ever publicly review books. There's too much of an opportunity for petty jealousies, extravagant praise. Criticism should be left to professional critics."
Every Travis McGee title features a different color, a device MacDonald uses to prevent faithful readers from buying the same book twice. He has fun making up the titles and will sometimes go back after finishing a book and insert a sequence that will make the title plausible.
Will he ever kill off Travis McGee?
"Every time I get angry with Fawcett (his publisher) I threaten to write Black Border for McGee in which McGee dies." MacDonald chuckled.
"But, seriously, doing a series is like being in a potato-sack race. You're stuck with one character's viewpoint and the scope of characterization is narrowed. Eventually I'll get to the point where I have no place to take Travis where he hasn't already been.
"Or else I'll run out of colors -- be down to puce or daffodil."
As paperback king, MacDonald can be mischievous when "cheap" readers buy his books in used editions:
"I've been known to wander into bookstores where they sell used paperbacks and carefully, very carefully, tear out the last two pages of a MacDonald novel and slip them into my pocket. Then I'll put the book back on the shelf.
"I also have a friend who writes 'Oh, my God, where did I get this terrible disease' on page 100 of one of my books. Then he sells it as a used paperback. Can you imagine the expression on the face of a reader when he comes to that page?"
What does it feel like to be one of the country's bestselling novelists?
"My life is satisfying," MacDonald said. "But you know, lots of times I feel unreal. It's a schizophrenic thing. There's a California couple that puts out a magazine just about me. Sometimes I pick it up myself and it's almost as if I'm trying to find out what John D. MacDonald is really like.
"Then I say to myself, you're okay. You're doing what you want to do. But how can I really be certain in a world where nobody can prove that anything is worth doing?"
Susan R. Welch is a member of the Research Department staff at the Minneapolis Tribune.