The Turquoise Lament: A Travis McGee Novel

As he gets older, Travis McGee seems to become more and more maudlin--or perhaps it is his creator's fault. In this, the 15th entry in the series, McGee is called to help out the daughter (Pidge, later renamed Lou Ellen) of a deceased (naturally) former business partner who thinks that either she is going crazy--or her husband is trying to kill her. So Travis flies to Honolulu to investigate, or to put it more accurately, to practice his amateur psychology on the girl, who is in her early twenties, and her husband, an affable 270-pound former football player whom she married on the rebound not long after her father's tragic death in a motorcycle accident. Her mother died from cancer when she was much younger. It's that kind of book. Death is everywhere. Even in passing, MacDonald manages to tell about as many horrific deaths as he can. Characters we meet briefly turn out to have met tragic ends--and not just the character, but "him, his wife, and two of their four children." It is way way too much and one begins to wonder if the book even has a plot or if it is just going to be about McGee's obsession with the girl, because, yes, he is the one she really wants and even ran away when she was 17 and stowed away on his boat. But as McGee tells her later, statutory rape was not his thing. In any case, nothing is stopping him now. But of course we know that by the end of the book either something awful will happen to her as well or she and McGee will be somehow parted, despite McGee confessing to Meyer that this is a woman he could actually spend the rest of his life with. If it sounds like a soap opera, it is. Eventually, we find that there is more than a little skullduggery going on, relating to a "treasure book" the girl's father put together with information about where valuable ship wrecks might be found. After his death, it goes missing.Meanwhile, Pidge and her husband are traveling alone on their boat from Hawaii to Pago Pago in American Samoa. As McGee and Meyer unravel the mystery of the missing treasure book, Travis begins to fear for her life (as we readers familiar with the fate of anyone who sleeps with Travis have been doing all along.) As a result, this is a very annoying book, since Travis can't do much to protect her while she is in the middle of the Pacific and basically out of communication. Remember, this book was published in 1973. He does take out some of his frustrations on a crooked lawyer in the book's best scene, which highlights McGee's remorseless, creative, cruelty. The lawyer deserves it, however, so at least this is one book where McGee himself isn't the biggest SOB. I haven't spoiled anything so far, and I won't talk much about the rest of the plot, but I will say that the ending is really a pitiful job of writing. Surely MacDonald could have come up with something a bit more clever than what he did. The reader is asked to have sympathy for poor Travis McGee, a man who in the course of the book spends as much time having sex with various women as he does solving the mystery. Obviously, this is not one of the better books in the series, though it certainly is high in grim fascination and creative ways to kill people.

A slow start but plenty of mystery and suspense once it got going. In this one we find Travis going to the aid of a previous acquaintance who feels like shes losing her mind and hearing voices whilst also chasing down a valuable item missing from her fathers estate.Pretty good overall but quite a lot of time spent on the backstory of certain events.

Many of the plot elements Are standard: girl in danger, Travis investigating a bad guy, etc. enough uniqueness to keep the suspense mounted. Trav’s style of investigation continues to set him apart.

Very suspenseful! And what a nice surprise that for once McGee is in time to save the girl rather than having to revenge her!

John D. MacDonald’s tales of freelance “salvage expert” Travis McGee are, at heart, formulaic tough-guy adventure stories. The series ultimately transcends the formula in which it’s rooted—Travis grows, changes, ages, and becomes a fully rounded character—but even in its later, more complex installments the formula remains. Fans of the series can list the elements from memory: the Busted Flush, steaks and cocktails, an old friend in trouble, a beautiful woman, the main characters’ “insider” knowledge of how the world works, and Travis’ ability to outsmart the bad guys who think they’re clever and outfight the ones on think they’re tough.The Turquoise Lament is a relatively late installment in the series, written when the character (and the formula) were already well-established and familiar. You can, as you read it, feel MacDonald deliberately setting out to experiment: to stretch himself by telling a McGee story that subverts every familiar element of the formula. MacDonald is careful to keep the story moving, the exotic locations rolling by, and the mystery plot bubbling, and as a result The Turquoise Lament reads just as smoothly as a typical McGee story. When you get to the end, and look back, though, you realize that you’ve just read something that’s very definitely—and very deliberately—not a typical McGee story.Whether the idea of such an experiment appeals, and whether MacDonald’s particular execution of it satisfies, is going to be a matter of personal taste. For myself, I’m glad he did it and I’m glad I read it, but—in both contexts—once was enough. If you’re an established fan of the series, The Turquoise Lament is well worth your time. If you’re just Travis McGee, however, this is definitively not the place to start.

In this,#15th McGee novel, Travis travels to Hawaii to help Pidge, a girl he once bounced on his knee. Well, now he doesn't bounce her on his KNEE, but close to it.