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McGee-McGraw stumbles into the camp and is immediately captured. After being forced to murder one of the terrorist group, he is tentatively accepted by the crazies, nine distinctly characterized men and women who have come to mania from all over the map. After a harrowing indoctrination, "Dads," as the kids call him, finds out that they have blown his cover. He has no choice but to blast his way out, killing all his captors—and nearly blowing his mind. It is the most intense and savage narrative that MacDonald has ever written. As for McGee, he recovers in time quite nicely in the arms of an old flame, en route home to Miss Agnes and The Busted Flush.
No plot summary can so easily capture the real McGee. One of the most complex long-run characters in American fiction, he is moody, sensuous, suspicious, quixotic, cynical, compassionate—and funny. He has achieved independence from "plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, checklists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, Junior Chambers of Commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny." Hence his license to purge iniquity. Unlike most of his fictional colleagues, the creaky crusader visibly ages. "He grows older at about one-third the natural rate," says MacDonald, who hovers above 60. "Otherwise, I could be senile before I'd finished with him." Trav is now about 45.
There are two more McGees in the works on the author's blue IBM Selectric, which he totes between a house in Florida and a summer fishing camp on a lake in New York's Adirondacks. MacDonald's wife, Dorothy Prentiss, is an artist. He has long since shed any resentment against the other Macdonald, that more critically esteemed thriller writer whose real name is not John Ross Macdonald at all but Kenneth Millar. ("At least," allows John D., "the guy is literate, even if he does keep hitting the same barrel.") The real MacDonald is a graduate of Syracuse University, the Harvard School of Business Administration and the OSS in World War II.
When embedded in McGeeish boredom in Burma he wrote his first short story. After a few disastrous jobs in the Manhattan jungle, the apprentice author be came a penny-a-liner for the pulps; since then he has banged out 70 novels and some 600 short stories. He calls his tales "why-did-its," not whodunits, and likes to think of them as "folk dances." Since most of his books have been published in paperback, he has thus far escaped serious critical attention in the U.S. A pity.
MacDonald is one of the few crime writers since Arthur Conan Doyle to rate a regular newsletter for fans (JDM Bibliophile is published twice yearly at the Uni versity of Southern Florida); he is also one of the American authors to have won France's coveted Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. But critics and scholars have lots of time to catch up. MacDonald's mind still brims with mayhem for McGee. And there are lots of colors to go. "Let's see," says John D., sitting down to work. "There's ocher, ultramarine, peach, beige, cherry, white . . . and black."
Michael Demarest
Excerpt