Travis McGee: The First 90s Guy

 

 

“I happen to think [women] are people. Not cute objects. I think that people hurting people is the original sin. To score for the sake of scoring diminishes a man.” Thus spake Travis McGee in Nightmare in Pink, the second outing of John D. MacDonald’s knight in tomato-can armor, which appeared in 1964.

Thirty-two years later, a mystery fan posted on the Internet: “I gradually grew weary of McGee’s sexist attitude.”

Huh?

In his first appearance in The Deep Blue Good-bye, the Florida salvage expert stoutly declared: “Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave.”

But in 1996, another reader noted on the Internet: “I can readily understand how this attitude toward women would rankle many female readers.”

What?

When The Dreadful Lemon Sky appeared in 1974, McGee had this to say: “There are too many of them in the world lately, the hopeful ladies who married grown-up boy children and soon lost all hope….They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to ‘take care.’ God knows they are expert in taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.”

Are we reading the same books?

As early as 1965, novelist and English professor Charles Willeford described the women in McGee’s life as “weak [and] helpless,” and in 1977 New York Times critic John Leonard snorted about his “wounded women and macho rubbish.” The question came up again for discussion last year on Dorothy-L, the Internet’s mystery literature discussion, where McGee was accused of hypocrisy for his views on sex and of being a sexist with a “take care of the poor little woman” attitude. One reader suggest that McGee’s women were nothing more than “devices” and another admitted to feelings of shame for still enjoying the novels.

As it happened, I’d just reread the entire series in preparation for an appearance at the 6th John D. MacDonald Conference and very much begged to differ. In fact, I believe that Travis McGee may be the first 90s guy – sensitive to a woman’s needs, respectful of her abilities and unthreatened by her independence. Interestingly, The Armchair Detective actually addressed this topic in a 1983 article entitled “Travis McGee The Feminist’s Friend,” in which Carol Cleveland did a detailed book-by-book analysis and concluded, “In Travis McGee, [MacDonald] gives us a hero who is capable of friendship with women as well as men, and who, since the introduction of the series, has been a proponent of the basic tenet of feminism: ‘I happen to think they are people. Not cute objects.’”

A few years  earlier, a Purdue University professor surveyed the 17 novels then in print, counted 130 women with functional roles in those stories and concluded that, based on those portraits, “McGee is a credit to his feminine genes.” A New Mexico State University graduate student writing in 1992 noted that from the first of the McGee novels, MacDonald’s themes included “emphasis on women, the obsession with their value as individuals and the proper relation of men to women,” and asserted, “Travis prefers (and MacDonald praises) strong, independent women.” And just last year, a Stetson University literature professor credited the women in the McGee series with providing inspiration for many of the women heroes created by women writers who now inhabit contemporary mystery fiction.

Travis McGee’s very active sex life is undoubtedly the source of many of the misreadings of his character and from first to last has rankled some readers. As one 90s mystery fan noted, “In just about every book, Trav runs across some poor, sexually dysfunctional woman. And wouldn’t you know it? He’s just what they’ve (sic) all been waiting for.” With few exceptions, the sexual dysfunction of McGee’s women results from run-ins with brutal men, sociopathic predators who include sadists like Junior Allen and Boone Waxwell and serial killers like Howie Brindle and Cody Pittler. The sexism implicit in the 90s reader’s invocation of “poor” women is explicit in novelist Willeford’s pre-feminist insensitivity toward rape: “As divorcees and widows with some previous conjugal experience, one finds it incredible that they have been ‘destroyed,’ emotionally, spiritually, and physically, but a little precoital sex-play with some ‘unfeeling brute.’”

Many contemporary mystery readers and writers believe McGee’s willingness to help the survivors of such brutality is at the heart of his attraction as a series hero and demonstrates humanity, not sexism. “To give aid in recovering from such a traumatic experience is the hallmark of sensitive and caring people,” says Calvin Branche, managing editor of the JDM Bibliophile, the quarterly magazine devoted to the works of John D. MacDonald. “The fact that Travis helps many women through their troubled time is hardly the mark of a sexist. And any romantic entanglement that ensues is hardly unknown in real life, so why would it be any different in fiction?”

Although the frequency of McGee’s sexual encounters was one of the larger-than-life qualities that appealed to many men’s fantasies, the relationships were marked by candor and equality. Frequent Bibliophile contributor and John D. MacDonald expert Don Sandstrom says: “MacDonald was not a sexist. Anything but. He saw men and women on an even playing field. Both McGee and MacDonald had a really healthy attitude toward sex. He saw it as a coming together, not ‘Me, Tarzan, you Jane.’ When you look inside the relationships, it wasn’t about sex at all.”

McGee’s habit of referring to the women he helps as “wounded birds” is seen by some critics as condescension toward women, but his true crime is playing against type, says Walter Satterthwait, author of the Joshua Croft series, including Accustomed to the Dark, and historical mysteries, including Escapade. “Toward all the wounded who approach him, avian and human, male and female, McGee is invariably nurturing. He’s a nurse. He’s a momma. He worries about them. He coddles them. He feeds them,” Satterthwait points out. “Not that McGee condescends to women, but he co-opts their traditional role and violates the arbiter’s cramped and bitter theories by acting in a way that a big, two-fisted shambling male should never act.”

And beyond McGee’s willingness to help is his unusual sensitivity, which made him extraordinarily successful as a healer. “To me, McGee has a kind of knightly quality. He’s a righter of wrongs. A filler of needs,” observes G.M. Ford, creator of the Leo Waterman mysteries, including The Bum’s Rush. “McGee not only listened to the women in his books, but heard both what was, and was not, being said. He then responds to both they physical and emotional needs of these wounded birds which the wind has blown his way. By my standard, none of McGee’s bedding of women would constitute casual or purely recreational sex.”

That knightly quality is at the heart of McGee’s appeal and his creator’s intention. “MacDonald really believed that sexual love can heal; and in particular, that a man like McGee could heal a damaged woman. I think the clearest example is A Purple Place for Dying, where he devotes a couple of chapters to the healing process after the real plot is resolved,” says Neil Albert, creator of the Dave Garrett mysteries, including Tangled June. “In the 90s it’s fashionable to call that approach condescending – but to reject it on those grounds is to reject the entire Western tradition of the chivalrous romance. MacDonald is entitled to be considered within the context of that tradition. It’s common—indeed, facile—to speak of the PI as a knight errant, but with McGee, the analogy fits pretty damned well.”

Not that the Florida knight spends his time rescuing helpless damsels in distress. “Any charge that MacDonald created weak or helpless women should be vigorously denied. I find his major women characters to be assertive, tough and resourceful people,” says Albert.

Those tough women many be the reason the McGee series remains a favorite among many women writers and readers. Dana Stabenow, creator of the Kate Shugak mysteries, including Breakup, recalls her early reaction to McGee’s female compatriots: “I remember the woman [Cookie McCall] in Bright Orange for the Shroud who kept shooting at Boone and missing. It annoyed me at first, but then I realized, ‘Why should she know how to shoot?’ The point is that she got hold of the gun and was banging away. She wasn’t flopping around uselessly and, my personal bête noire, screaming.”

And, Stabenow asserts, Chookie McCall is emphatically NOT an exception. “Most of McGee’s women are like that – i.e., not victims. Puss, Gretel, Puss’s daughter, even the monster in The Scarlet Ruse. None of them go limp at the hands of fate.”

The recent emergence in mystery fiction of courageous women who confront and challenge fate is now old news, but the notion that the fiction of John D. MacDonald might have laid the groundwork for that trend is brand new. One proponent of that idea is Ellen Smith of Stetson University who delivered a paper entitled “Dana, Britt, Gretel and Gail: McGee’s Women and a Warm Climate for Sleuthing” at last years JDM conference in Sarasota. In Smith’s analysis, the strong women characters in the McGee series have provided models of resourceful and active women characters for the many women writers who have appeared in contemporary American mystery fiction since Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone debuted in 1977. Specifically, Smith draws connections between the McGee women and the heroes of several Florida women who pen mysteries, notably Britt Montero, the creation of Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan.

But Smith is not the only proponent of the idea that John D. MacDonald’s fictional women provided inspiration for women mystery writers. Count me as another. I dedicated the third of my Lauren Maxwell mysteries, Lamb to the Slaughter, to MacDonald, acknowledging him as “a master who work showed me the way.” Without question, the rich variety of women depicted in the McGee series has informed not only my fiction but my life. In the 1970s, when I and many other young women were testing the limits of how far women could go and wondering exactly what we could become, MacDonald’s McGee novels offered us a world of fascinating possibilities and parables. Consider Chookie McCall, the professional dancer and early friend of McGee who manages to extricate herself from a destructive relationship and finds a grown-up man to share her life. Or Dana Holtzer, the extremely competent personal assistant who has the strength to shoulder the tragic burden that life has handed her and to say goodbye to McGee. And what about Cindy Birdsong, who manages a busy marina, Connie Alvarez, who manages a mammoth orchard, and Anne Renzetti, who manages a four-star Gulf hotel? Even among his minor characters, MacDonald brings McGee into contact with compelling women like Noreen Walker, a civil rights activist masquerading as a maid, and Julie Lawless, a scorned wife who gets on with her life with a minimum of bitterness, and Skeeter Keith, a free-spirited cartoonist poised to hit the big time. And, of course, there are the two great loves of McGee’s life – Puss Killian, the mysterious stranger who plays a pivotal role in avenging Tush Bannon’s death in Pale Grey for Guilt, and Gretel Howard, the woman whose appearance in The Empty Copper Sea provides a lifeline to the future for a hero in danger of drowning in a sea of bitter cynicism and casual violence.

Of those women, only Chookie McCall has been created when MacDonald wrote in Nightmare in Pink, “A complete woman, more than any man could ever be, is involved with the realities, the elemental dynamics of life, the blood and pain and mess of it, cleaning and healing. In this is all the enduring lustiness of their purposes and their needs.” With those words in the second McGee novel, MacDonald anticipated the many strong, resourceful and courageous women who would come into Travis McGee’s life, damsels who would confront distress and grapple with fate, many victimized but few victims, fitting friends and lovers for a very unusual man.

Of John D. MacDonald, Sandstrom notes, “He was ahead of his time.”

And so was his enduring hero, Travis McGee, the first 90s guy.

___

Written in 1997 for The Armchair Detective, which folded before publication

Copyright 1997 © by Beth Quinn Barnard of text and photos.  All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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