A deadly shade of gold Book

As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm reading detective fiction and ripping off everything of value. My story takes place in L.A. of the early '90s, but I'm traveling to all eras and hiring all manner of sleuth to serve as tour guide. Published in 1965, A Deadly Shade of Gold is the fifth Travis McGee mystery by John D. MacDonald. Most of the book takes place far from Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale as McGee is pulled in to investigating the murder of an old friend named Sam Taggart which takes him to Manhttan, to a backwater Mexican resort town on the Sea of Cortez and then Los Angeles.

-- I'm not thrilled by the way women are portrayed. MacDonald deserves credit for making the major characters as complex and exciting as he can and in the L.A. segment introduces one--a Venezuelan heiress named Connie Melgar--who in some ways would be McGee's equal if instead of solving mysteries he was purely a hedonist. McGee puts up with these women but he doesn't really like them and MacDonald doesn't plead their case. This is a man's man's man's world and if women are often frivolous or materialistic, it seems like man would assume some of the responsibility for that.

-- MacDonald allows himself one too many editorial asides about mankind for my taste, but does them with such flourish, I really couldn't fault him for it.

It was a cheap and dirty little death, a dingy way to die. When dawn came, there would be a hundred thousand more souls alive in the world than on the previous day, three quarters of a million more every week. This is the virus theory of mankind. The pretentious virus, never knowing that it is a disease. Imagine the great ship from a far galaxy which inspects a thousand green planets and then comes to ours and, from on high, looks down at all the scabs, the buzzings, the electronic jabberings, the poisoned air and water, the fetid night glow. A little cave-dwelling virus mutated, slew the things which balanced the ecology, and turned the fair planet sick. An overnight disease, racing and explosive compared with geological time. I think they would be concerned. They would be glad to have caught it in time. By the time of their next inspection, a hundred thousand years hence, this scabrous growth might have infected this whole region of an unimportant galaxy. They would push the button. Too bad. This happens every once in a while. Make a note to re-seed it the next time around, after it has cooled down.

-- McGee doesn't have much interaction with the antagonists of the story. Danger is lurking around, but it's not personal. One hallmark of the James Bond stories is that the bad guy is introduced very early on and 007 usually gets up close and personal, typically at a casino or perhaps on a tour of his evil facility. Bond wants to figure out what the villain is up to. The villain wants to have Bond killed, maybe after he finds out how much his majesty's secret service has learned about what he's up to. It's a routine development certainly in the 007 movies but very dramatic and effective. Here, I was confused who the antagonists really were until near the 75% mark of the book.

-- MacDonald is great at addressing what it's really like, whether we're talking about Mexico or boating or police interrogations or knife wounds or this business of being an amateur sleuth. Instead of writing detectives as seen on TV, he has a marvelous facility for addressing how this would work or not work out in "reality."

She wanted immediate confrontations. She had no patience with research. She wanted us to go at once to Puerto Altamura and start slamming around. She threatened to go by herself. I explained to her that it worked on television dramas and in muscular movies, but in the far drearier vistas of life itself, a man could pry nothing open unless he had a pry bar. And knowledge is that pry bar. Strangers do not suddenly open up because you confuse them. Confusion leads to a cautious silence. Strangers talk when they know that you have facts. They talk when it is in their interest to try to convince you your facts are wrong.

-- I learned how an amateur sleuth writes.

I printed her name and address on the outside of the envelope in square block letter. It is an old caution, and the only way any person can completely disguise their own handwriting. Merely hold the pencil as straight up and down as possible, use all capitals, and base them all on a square format, so that the O for example, becomes a square, and an A is a square with with the base line missing and a line bisecting it horizontally. No handwriting expert can ever make a positive identification of printing done in that manner, because it bears no relation to your normal handwriting.

-- I learned how an amateur sleuth can get ahead of themselves.

Sometimes, when things are coming together, when fragments start to fit, you can get the dangerous feeling of confidence that you are hovering over the whole thing, like a hawk, unseen, riding the lift of the wind. Like all other stimulants, it is a perilous thing to rely on. It makes you reckless. It can kill you.

-- Finally, I learned that murder is something most people can't take move on from. MacDonald evokes pity or sadness in a way that feels honest and earned.

She had explained something I had felt about Sam Taggart. There had been a strangeness about him. During the short time I'd been with him, I'd felt that we could never be as close as we had once been. He'd traveled too far. The little boat ride had taken him a long way. At the time he died, he was trying to come back, but he probably knew he could never make it all the way back. He could pretend for a time. But the act of murder was still with him. Nora would have immediately sensed that strangeness, that apartness. And she would not have rested until she learned the cause of it.