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mindsplinters's review against another edition
2.0
Push it to 2.5ish really because I liked quite a few aspects of it and it tied its messy self up quite nicely and satisfactorily. It was vivid and lush and dramatic and complicated and I can see how it appealed to so many people (including one of my favorite authors). The layers of McGee and his thought processes are certainly intriguing. However, he sometimes got a bit precious in his self image so I feel he's at his best when he is kept busy. It's good for his soul. The book is also a strange balance of conscience and liberalism and morality (McGee shows a remarkably advanced outlook on conservation and what people do the planet for a book published in 1965 - and a character who is a cross between beach bum and freelance mercenary) and debauchery and cheapness and sexism (McGee goes about respecting women, admiring their strength, etc... and then casually sleeps with any number of them and sometimes thinking horrible derogatory things about them). Certain bits, shall we say, don't age well. On the other hand, some things are downright prophetic. "This is the heart of contemporary propaganda, amigo, to strengthen ignorant terrible men who believe themselves to be perfect patriots."
markfeltskog's review against another edition
This is the fifth book in the Travis McGee series. It lacked, for me at least, the elegant brevity of the first four, and therefore failed to hold my interest to the extent those books did. I'm planning to casually read my way through the entire series, and I hope subsequent books were subjected to a more judicious editing.
johnnygamble's review against another edition
3.0
Dunno. Not gonna remember it months from now. Not crazy about the pseudo-philosophy in between violence and detection.
yaj's review against another edition
3.0
A thriller in which a lot of bad things happen to bad people. Darker than the previous Travis McGee adventures but I still find the writing pretty compelling.
darwin8u's review against another edition
4.0
The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.
- John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold
John D MacDonald presents a combination of James Dickey's prose with Ian Fleming's narrative flourish. With John D. MacDonald, however, you are also likely to find weird paragraphs sprinkled into the novel that deal with economics, politics, love, lust, the John Birch Society, and the ethics of hunting.
Reading MacDonald is like having a surprisingly lucid conversation with a drunk economics professor who you recently discovered just killed a man with his golf club. You can't pull away from the conversation and aren't quite sure if the story is going to continue, or if he is going to explore a tangent more appropriate for an economics class or his therapist. His brain is amazing and his stories definitely titillate on several levels at once.
- John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold
John D MacDonald presents a combination of James Dickey's prose with Ian Fleming's narrative flourish. With John D. MacDonald, however, you are also likely to find weird paragraphs sprinkled into the novel that deal with economics, politics, love, lust, the John Birch Society, and the ethics of hunting.
Reading MacDonald is like having a surprisingly lucid conversation with a drunk economics professor who you recently discovered just killed a man with his golf club. You can't pull away from the conversation and aren't quite sure if the story is going to continue, or if he is going to explore a tangent more appropriate for an economics class or his therapist. His brain is amazing and his stories definitely titillate on several levels at once.
brettt's review against another edition
2.0
Mystery writer John D. MacDonald had a long career behind him when he finally agreed with a publisher in the early 1960s to write a series character. He wrote the first batch of novels together before they were released, calling his Florida-based adventurer "Dallas McGee" before thinking the assassination of President Kennedy in that city might bring negative association to the character. Renamed "Travis McGee," the cover blurb-described "big, loose chaser of rainbows" bowed in 1964 in The Deep Blue Good-by. Even though it appeared the very next year, A Deadly Shade of Gold was actually the fifth McGee novel and written to be about twice as long as the others.
An old friend of McGee's has reappeared at his Florida boat slip, talking about making a final score and perhaps reuniting with his lost love. He asks McGee to broker the reunion, but before that can happen the buddy is murdered and whatever he was using to make the score is the only clue McGee has to the death. He commits himself to finding the killer and unraveling his friend's "big score," planning on making the guilty pay as many ways as possible.
Although almost exclusively a pulp writer in several genres, MacDonald infused his stories with philosophical speculation on a wide range of topics, as well as being an early voice in environmental awareness. Gold is not different, touching on questions about whether a collector has more right to a people's ancient artifacts than do those for whom they represent ancestral history. The intelligence and introspection of McGee, combined with the insightful kinds of questions MacDonald asks about human nature, put the Travis McGee series on a par with most literary fiction that's designed to examine the same issues.
Gold does suffer from the weaknesses of the rest of the series. Ostensibly a hard-boiled detective/adventurer/crime thriller "updated" for the 1960s, it doses the genre's bent for misogyny with some early Hefnerism (in another novel, McGee "saves" a female character from being "frigid" and hating sex by inviting her to his boat and sleeping with her regularly) and maintains the tradition of disposable female characters (women wanting a long life had best steer clear of that big, loose chaser of rainbows) and McGee himself gets a little tiresome the seventeenth or eighteenth time he talks about what a sack of rat bastards these mortals be.
It's also a little too long and disconnected, with almost two separate novels housed under one cover. But anyone wanting to see how the hard-boiled quick-talking flatfoots and dames of the 1950s became the Spensers, Pragers, Robicheauxs, Milhones and Warshawskis of the modern world should explore the McGee series, and A Deadly Shade of Gold is a pretty good sample to use.
Original available here.
An old friend of McGee's has reappeared at his Florida boat slip, talking about making a final score and perhaps reuniting with his lost love. He asks McGee to broker the reunion, but before that can happen the buddy is murdered and whatever he was using to make the score is the only clue McGee has to the death. He commits himself to finding the killer and unraveling his friend's "big score," planning on making the guilty pay as many ways as possible.
Although almost exclusively a pulp writer in several genres, MacDonald infused his stories with philosophical speculation on a wide range of topics, as well as being an early voice in environmental awareness. Gold is not different, touching on questions about whether a collector has more right to a people's ancient artifacts than do those for whom they represent ancestral history. The intelligence and introspection of McGee, combined with the insightful kinds of questions MacDonald asks about human nature, put the Travis McGee series on a par with most literary fiction that's designed to examine the same issues.
Gold does suffer from the weaknesses of the rest of the series. Ostensibly a hard-boiled detective/adventurer/crime thriller "updated" for the 1960s, it doses the genre's bent for misogyny with some early Hefnerism (in another novel, McGee "saves" a female character from being "frigid" and hating sex by inviting her to his boat and sleeping with her regularly) and maintains the tradition of disposable female characters (women wanting a long life had best steer clear of that big, loose chaser of rainbows) and McGee himself gets a little tiresome the seventeenth or eighteenth time he talks about what a sack of rat bastards these mortals be.
It's also a little too long and disconnected, with almost two separate novels housed under one cover. But anyone wanting to see how the hard-boiled quick-talking flatfoots and dames of the 1950s became the Spensers, Pragers, Robicheauxs, Milhones and Warshawskis of the modern world should explore the McGee series, and A Deadly Shade of Gold is a pretty good sample to use.
Original available here.
alanfederman's review against another edition
4.0
This was definitely one of the darker one of the series so far. The story centers around some gold statues, Cuban politics, John Birchers, and assorted other characters who live on the fringes. Somehow Travis manages to navigate these waters, but the real highlight of this book, and all his books, is the wry observations of life and society.
audreyintheheadphones's review against another edition
4.0
Ninety-nine percent of the things that ninety-nine percent of the people do are entirely predictable, when you have a few lead facts. Drunks, maniacs and pregnant women are the customary exceptions.
Synopsis: Unlicensed Florida investigator and houseboat-resident Travis McGee sets out to avenge the death of an old friend, winds up in Mexico and then L.A. and uncovers at least three plots too many, two of which involve Cuba and one of which involves a dead dog.
Travis McGee is watching his best friend assemble a platter of pretty young women aboard McGee's houseboat, The Busted Flush, when he gets one of Those Kind of phone calls: his old friend Sam, who disappeared three years ago, is calling from a payphone in Georgia, on the run and in need of McGee's help. McGee offers it, of course, and when Sam arrives in town, it's quickly clear what the problem is: the solid gold, pre-Columbian statue Sam stole from his last employer. Who, it turns out, was a Cuban ex-nabob in hiding.
Then again, Sam was never reknowned for his decisionmaking skills. He disappeared the night after his then-fiancee Nora caught him in bed with her shop assistant. But this particular lapse in judgment results in Sam being chopped to pieces all over his motel room, just in time for Nora and McGee to find him.
They swear revenge! They trace Sam's movements back to Mexico! They pose as lovers at a resort! They quickly get sucked into intrigue! And of course, McGee comforts the grieving Nora by throwing her feet over her head and having at it. Which totally makes her feel better, until McGee gets drunk and makes the local cantina hooker happy too.
Now, I have to say, I really liked 3/4 of this book, including all the Mexico bits, the comforting and the avenging. However, after Sam is avenged, there's 150 pages of nonsense where McGee decides he'll steal the rest of the statues Sam was in the process of stealing, treks out to L.A., bones two other women (he's a man who knows his strengths) and dedicates himself to taking down a bizarre Hollywood blackmailer and pervert who isn't even introduced until 300 pages into the book.
I stayed up til 3a.m. reading the first 300 pages (all man, all Mexico) and then struggled the next morning to finish the Hollywood-blackmailer plot. I do not understand why it was tacked on to the end there, except it does provide McGee with a nice offering to lay at the feet of the one woman he meets in the story who doesn't sleep with him. So I guess that's something.
And why am I so calm about the dog thing? Here's why:
The dog gets one line of screen time. He's a silent, deadly Doberman rushing at McGee's face, and McGee knows it's him or the dog. Exit the dog. BUT. McGee then spends the rest of the book mourning the dog. Nora mourns the dog. The psychopathic assassin who McGee's chasing mourns the dog. That's one well-mourned dog for one line of screen time. It's done in a very Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw way, and not at all gratuitously, comically or lingeringly.
So I'll keep working my way through the series.
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