Friday, August 26, 2011

Travis McGee is some sort of salvage expert who lives in a houseboat (the Busted Flush) that he won in a poker game, so I immediately thought of Jack Spratt and his troubles getting into the Detective's Guild because he didn't have enough entertaining quirks. McGee is also prone to philosophizing over everything from domestic violence to proper physical regimens:

One very sound rule for the care of the body is always to keep in mind what it was designed to do. The body was shaped by the need to run long distances on resilient turf, to run very fast for short distances, to climb trees, and to carry loads back to the cave, so any persistent exercise you do which is not a logical part of that ancient series of uses is, in general, bad for the body. A succession of deep knee bends is destructive, in time. As are too many pushups. As is selective muscle development through weight-lifting. As is jogging on hard surfaces. A couple of years of such jogging and you are very likely never to walk in comfort again. Man is a walking animal, perfectly designed for it. The only more efficient energy use is the bicycle.

This book is not about a salvage operation; McGee's friend Meyer's boat is blown up, with Meyer's niece aboard (his only remaining family). Meyer was in Canada at the time; as a world-renowned economist (who also lives on a boat, until it blows up) he is frequently invited to lecture all over the place. It seems that while McGee handles the physicality and rawer, animal intelligence of the investigations, Meyer provides all the book-learnin' and soft speaking--to great effect. The two of them set out to find out why the niece died, why Meyer's boat was reduced to flaming shrapnel, and to find Meyer a new boat on which to reside. They end up solving a decades-old series of murders that nobody realized had been committed, and traveling as far as the Yucatan to track down the culprit. Good stuff.

On a side note, I did some internet poking to remind myself of Meyer's name, and discovered that all twenty-one Travis McGee novels have a color in their title. I have to wonder whether that was an afterthought, because I read two of them this month, and in both cases, the phrase which names the book doesn't appear until the penultimate or last chapter. I spent most of The Dreadful Lemon Sky wondering why the sky was lemony, and what the hell made it so dreadful (besides being a very unusual color for sky)

ghg