Books: The Mid-Life Surge of McGee

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THE GREEN RIPPER by John D. MacDonald; Lippincott; 221 pages; $9.95

Locked inside a beige file cabinet in Sarasota, Fla., is an unfinished manuscript entitled A Black Border for McGee. May it never be published. The book, as its name suggests, would write finis to Travis McGee, the perdurable, persnickety shamus whose demise, white-haired Author John Dann MacDonald once vowed, would occur after his tenth color-coded* starring role. "I keep the MS.," says the author, "as leverage on my publisher." The latest McGee, The Green Ripper, is the 18th in the Travis saga, and the best.

Everyone knows McGee's address, if not his destination. He is usually to be found at Slip F18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, aboard The Busted Flush, the old tub he won in a poker game with "four pink ones up and a stranger down." Trav is calls himself a "salvage consultant," but his real business is not in maritime wreck age but rescuing lost souls and money. In recent years, starting with The Dreadful Lemon Sky (No. 16, 1975), McGee has had troubles of his own. He has become increasingly morose, and the cases he handled were no real challenge. In the middle of the journey the Big was "embedded in a life I had some curious way outgrown. I an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale-eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lamp shade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon." John MacDonald acknowledges that his hero "could not have gone on in that vein without boring me. I had to shake him up." In Green, Travis gets rocked, socked and knocked from boots to brains.

Indeed, for most of the book, McGee seems headed straight from Green to Black. A hardhearted trifler by inclination, Trav has fallen deeply in love this time around. Then Gretel, his live-aboard mate, dies a hot and horrible death, the victim of an inexplicable assassination. Desperate and half demented, McGee writes a note leaving all — The Busted Flush and Miss Agnes, the elderly "hand-hewn" Rolls-Royce pickup truck — to his old pal and counselor, Meyer, a famed economist who inhabits the next-door houseboat, John Maynard Keynes. The salvager plucks his life savings of $9,300 from a cache and becomes Tom McGraw, a retired fisherman. Following a ritual clue Gretel had given him a few days before dying, he heads for northern California, in search of a fictitious missing daughter who has supposedly disappeared in the moil of a fanatical religious commune. Its remaining inhabitants, when he finds them, are no Moonies. Armed to the bicuspids and as pious as piranhas, the communards turn out to be dedicated members of an international conspiracy to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist world.