- Title: The Deep Blue Good-by
- wiki: link
“I found I had taken an irrational dislike to Junior Allen, that smiling man.”
Throwback Tuesday takes us back nearly 60 years to John D. MacDonald‘s first Travis McGee novel which would eventually span 21 novels taking place over the next two decades. Private investigator adjacent, McGee is, in his own words, a salvage consultant working out of his houseboat on the Florida coast. When in need of money, and for the right client, McGee will offer his services for half the value of whatever he can recover and is often the only recourse for those who have no legal remedy.
McGee’s cases often come to him through word of mouth. In The Deep Blue Good-by Travis looks into the possibility of stolen inheritance for the friend of a friend who was treated roughly by a Junior Allen, a suitor who learned of her father’s ill-gotten gains in prison. The structure of the book is such that MacDonald waits more than two-thirds of the tale before bringing McGee into contact with Allen, instead focusing on McGee’s search into what his client’s father may have smuggled overseas during the war and dealing with the women psychologically and emotionally tormented who he left in his wake.
The staples of the series are all present in the first book including its tragic end as even with all he has learned of the man McGee still underestimates Allen leading to two brutal encounters on Allen’s yacht, the final of which only one of them will survive. While McGee has some success in recovering items of value for his client, the wounds he suffers over the course of the encounter, and the evil he witnesses in the women Allen raped, tortured, and drove to the edge of sanity (including one he grows to care for over the course of the novel) will haunt him far after the case is solved.