Travis McGee, loner prototype

Travis McGee, created by US author John D MacDonald, is a superb prototype of a loner hero. Lee Child cites him as an inspiration for his solo tough guy, Jack Reacher.

If it’s good enough for Lee Child…

I greatly admire Lee Child, creator of loner hero Jack Reacher. My 2018 post, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher: 8 reasons the books are classics (links in bold italics are to other posts on this site) sets out why.

So my ears pricked up when I heard Child, in a talk on “Writing Popular Fiction” on BBC Maestro, say that John D MacDonald’s character Travis McGee had been an inspiration for Jack Reacher.

Lee Child said Travis McGee had characteristics that made him a great protagonist:

• He was a “mysterious stranger” or “noble loner” who helped vulnerable people;
• He never settled down, but was always “riding into the sunset”;
• He was based in the United States, a familiar environment for readers;
• He was an enjoyable character to spend time with.

Child said he wanted Jack Reacher to be “successful,” “who I want to be” and “leading my ideal life”. He rejected the “dysfunctional hero” exemplified by Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.

The first three Travis McGee novels

I went off and read the first three Travis McGee novels immediately. I found that all the characteristics Lee Child describes for his ideal action hero could also be applied to Travis McGee. McGee lives a relaxed life on a sea-going barge in Florida, rejects polite society, enjoys a drink, and defends the underdog.

Travis McGee and Jack Reacher

When Lee Child acknowledges John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee as an inspiration for Jack Reacher, you can see where he’s coming from. Take McGee’s description of himself:

• I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.

Apart from the dated references to Green Stamps, this could be Jack Reacher talking. He, too, is famed for rejecting the trappings of society and having no possessions except a toothbrush.

Travis McGee on Travis McGee

For an action hero, Travis McGee thinks about himself quite often, as here:

• I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
• I tried to look disarming. I am pretty good at that. I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, when needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in violent directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell, but I wouldn’t know about that.

Here, Travis McGee describes his attitude to work:

• “I work when the money gets low. Otherwise I enjoy my retirement… I’m taking it in installments, while I’m young enough to enjoy it. I am commonly known as a beach bum. I live on a houseboat. I live as well as I want to live, but sometimes I have to go to work. Reluctantly.”

Travis McGee’s voice

The “voice” of Travis McGee is perhaps John D MacDonald’s outstanding achievement. It is lyrical, rich and tough. Listen to how he describes a couple of people:

• Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.
• Pete arrived. He had a dead handshake, like a canvas glove full of hot sand.
• Her heart was as cold as a stone at the bottom of a mountain lake.
• He smiled, swiveled the bulk of his nose around, and followed it out of the bedroom.

Splendid stuff. Combined with his introspection and frequent musings, Travis McGee’s “voice” makes him a deeper, more fully-worked character than many action heroes. For example, I greatly enjoy Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp and his adventures. But Mitch Rapp is less fully-worked and engaging than Travis McGee, and his “voice” perhaps less unique.

Hard-boiled McGee

Travis McGee is a hardboiled protagonist in the tradition of Mike Hammer and Phillip Marlowe (see link for my review of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler). But his introspection, and his wide-ranging views on everything from modern manners to the environment, set him apart.

Travis McGee is, inevitably, a product of his time – John D MacDonald published these first three books in 1964. Some of McGee’s attitudes come across as strikingly contemporary; others, including his attitudes to women, are dated. But the depth and richness of his character are a model for any writer – and make him an entertaining companion to spend time with.

Travis McGee on young people

McGee’s comments on young people have a curiously contemporary ring:

• Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets.
• They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious.
• Frankly, I was sorry when he quit. The people you get these days, they don’t want to work.

But he also recognises that he is in a different place to the young:

• Vague glances, empty as camera lenses, moved across me as I drove slowly by. I was on the other side of the fence of years. They could relate and react to adults with whom they had a forced personal contact. But strangers were as meaningless to them as were the rocks and scrubby trees. They were in the vivid tug and flex of life, and we were faded pictures on the corridor walls—drab, ended and slightly spooky.

Travis McGee on the apocalypse

Travis McGee has a pretty pessimistic view of the world, particularly cities. Such attitudes are widespread today, for example among “preppers” – people who stockpile supplies and weapons against an anticipated breakdown of civilisation. McGee does it with humour:

• New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point.
• One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others’ throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.

Travis McGee on women: the downside

Many people criticise thrillers as having two-dimensional female characters. I try to avoid this in my own thrillers, including my protagonist Helen Gale in Blood Summit – but I’d welcome readers’ feedback. Some of McGee’s descriptions of women (the books are all in the first person) are hard to read today:

• She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not. She had a big white smile and she was mildly bovine, and I had the curious feeling I had met her before…

He has a dismal tendency to lecture women on relationships – such as the following bit of mansplaining:

• “By feeling insecure about our making love, Nina, you make the inference we are a pair of cheap people involved in some cheap pleasant friction. Pull on the pants and walk away, adding up the score. I think we’re interested in each other, involved with each other, curious about each other. This was a part of exploring and learning. When it’s good you learn something about yourself too. If the spirit is involved, if there is tenderness and respect and awareness of need, that’s all the morality I care about. Take your choice, honey. It’s up to you. You can look at us from the inside, and we can be Nina Gibson and Travis McGee, heightened and brightened and expanded by something close and rare and dear. Or you can look at it from the outside, and then it makes you that silly little broad I banged when I was up in New York.”

…and man as the hunter

The following damning conclusion on a woman could come straight from the misogynistic pen of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond:

• Finally I realized that we could generate no particular tension between us because the result was preordained. She was a stately and beautiful girl, fashionable and bright, with shining eyes and a good mouth. But there was no spice of pursuit. A doe which runs up and stares down the gun barrel is not a sporting venture. There is an electric tension in the chase, in searching out the little clues and vulnerabilities, making those little adjustments which favor the hunter.

As one reviewer observes on Amazon: “How times have changed… These… stories hold your interest as the plots are well thought out and written. But… I’m glad the treatment of women has improved in the last few decades, and at least we don’t get the vapours any more.”

Travis McGee on women: the upside?

At other times McGee comes across as more measured:

• Blue eyes came closer and the voice was more of a whisper. “Mike said you have a strange thing about women.” “I happen to think they are people. Not cute objects.”

Travis McGee compares his attitudes to women favourably with other men:

• I knew in that moment that this sort of thing could never interest me. I had to have the involvement of the spirit. These tasty goods were for other kinds of men: the ones for whom sex is an uncomplicated physical function one performs with varying degrees of skill with every broad and chick who will hold still for it; the men who are the cigar chompers, gin players, haunch-grabbers; the loud balding jokesters with several deals going for them on the long-distance lines; the broad-bellied expense-account braggards who grab the checks, goose the cocktail waitresses, talk smut, and run-run-run until their kidneys quit or their hearts explode.

Agency and strength

John D MacDonald also gives women agency and strength, even if most of them find Travis McGee implausibly irresistible:

• Her laugh was deep. “What would you expect of me, sweetie? Coyness, for God’s sake? I’m a vulgar honest woman inspecting prime male. I don’t see too many of your breed. They’re either pretty boys or dull muscular oxen or aging flab. You move well, McGee. And I like deep-set gray eyes, hard stubborn jaws and sensuous mouths. Aren’t you a girl-watcher?” “Of course.” “I’m too old for you, sweetie. But not too old to think of taking you to bed.”

Here, a woman describes how she sorted out her life:

• “Once upon a time I pried my third husband loose from a greedy bit of fluff by marrying her off to my second husband’s younger brother, and then got them both out of the way by getting a dear friend to offer him a job in Brazil, and nobody ever realized I had anything to do with it.”

Like Lee Child’s protagonist Jack Reacher, Travis McGee has a phobia of settling down with anyone:

• I guess I wasn’t particularly gracious. Mine are bachelor ways, tending toward too much order and habit. Some affectionate little guest for a few days is one thing. A party cruise is another. But a lady in residence is potential irritation.

McGee makes clear his commitment-phobia to anyone who asks. In this way he is different from the more openly misogynist James Bond of Ian Fleming, who in the early novels actively seeks a life partner.

What to do next

I plan to read more Travis McGee novels. As Lee Child points out, the glory of a series such as the 21 Travis McGee books is that if you enjoy one, you want to read the rest of them. I’d encourage readers to sample them, too.

If you like thrillers, you might also want to sample my own efforts, such as Blood Summit, set in Berlin…

…or Palladium, set in Istanbul:

Both books draw on my decades of experience as a diplomat, including working on counter-terrorism. Palladium is also available as an audio book on Audible. I’d love to know what you think of them.