Travis McGee: 17 - The Empty Copper Sea (original 1978; udgave 1978)

Another good book by the author that set the standard for thriller series in the 1960s. This was not the usual 4 stars but worth the read. ( )

For once, McGee isn't trying to save a damsel in distress or investigate the murder of a former lover. Instead, an old acquaintance asks him to restore his reputation and enable him to get his license to run ships back after he was accused of drunkenness and negligence during an incident in which a small-town Florida business kingpin fell off a boat and drowned. So McGee and Meyer (thank goodness) head to the Florida Gulf Coast to see what they can do. Meyer has obtained a letter of introduction from a tycoon who owes him a favor, so he and McGee get cooperation from most of the town's key players, including the sheriff, banker, insurance salesman, lawyer, and so on. Restoring the reputation becomes a minor and almost peripheral part of the book, however, as they find themselves delving into the mystery of whether the drowned man is actually dead or whether he ran off to Mexico with his Scandinavian architect, with a million dollars stolen from his various businesses, while leaving his wife and two teenage daughters with a $2.2 million insurance policy. This book provides lots of neatly drawn character studies of the folks McGee and Meyer deal with, which are the highlights of the book. The observations about the changes to Florida as a result of the real estate boom are less emotional than usual. Other factors are also at play, including drugs, which have become a primary subject of the last few McGee books. McGee is on good behavior here. He only breaks one heart and there is far less emphasis on his sexual exploits than in the two previous volumes. What a relief, since MacDonald's sex scenes are laughable. Overall, this is a pretty good mystery. It still contains its quotient of violence and death, but it is far less gratuitous than usual. ( )

An okay entry in the McGee series ( )

This time round Travis is sought out by an old friend who has since lost his boat licence due to alleged negligence having lost nearly everything he hires Travis to investigate on the promise of a future IOU. Meyer & Travis travel down whilst the old friend brings Travis's houseboat The Busted Flush down. It would seem things are not quite how the official story states them to be and more digging reveals more secrets.

An excellent addition to the series, plenty of fast talk and fisticuffs. Good ending. ( )

The 17th entry in the Travis McGee series and the best yet. Travis travels to the west coast of Florida to help a fellow boatman regain his sullied reputation, and in the process experiences a revitalization of his own sense of life and purpose.

As usual, there is no shortage of quotable passages here. McGee is accompanied to Timber Bay by his stalwart friend, semi-retired economist Meyer Meyer, who supplements McGee’s brawn with an equal and opposite force of brains. Even as the pair begin to investigate what really happened two months ago that lost Van Harder his captain’s license, it becomes clear that Trav is not entirely invested in his friend’s problem, being somewhat preoccupied with thoughts of life and death and the true meanings of each. Meyer, of course, knows exactly what’s wrong with Trav, and it all has to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

”All organized systems tend to slide slowly into chaos and disorder{, Meyer says}. Energy tends to run down. The universe itself heads inevitably toward darkness and stasis.”
“Cheering thought.”
“The walled city, isolated from its surroundings, will run down, decay, and die. The open city will have an exchange of material and energy with its surroundings and will become larger and more complex, capable of dissipating energy even as it grows. I have been thinking that it would not warp the analogy too badly to extend it to a single individual.”
“Meyer, dammit, I have a lot more interchange of material and energy with my environment than most.”
“In a physical sense, but you are not decaying in any physical sense. Great Scott, look at you. You look as if you could get up and run right through that wall.”
“The decay is emotional?”
“And you are walled, in an emotional sense. There is no genuine give-and-take. There is no real involvement, lately. You are going through the motions. As with the piano player. As with Nick Noyes. You are vaguely predatory lately. And irritable. And listless. You are getting no emotional feedback.”
“Where do I go looking for some?”
“That’s the catch. You can’t. It isn’t that mechanical. You merely have to be receptive and hope it comes along.”
“Meanwhile, I am being ground down by the second law of thermodynamics?”
“In a sense, yes.”
“Thank you so much. I never would have known.”
“Like I said. Irritable.”

Of course, no sooner does Meyer diagnose the problem than possible salvation arrives, in the form of Gretel, a big girl (over six feet tall and nearly 150 pounds of meat, as Travis describes her) whose vitality leaps off the page. It is at this point that experienced readers of McGee’s previous adventures will mentally compose a fond farewell to Gretel, for to become Trav’s love interest is generally to succumb to a grim and gruesome end. Whether that is Gretel’s fate I leave to the next reader to discover. It’s safe to reveal that there is a final confrontation and outburst of violence, accompanied by Trav’s usual overflow of self-awareness.

The initial panic had settled into a reliable flow of adrenaline. It is my fate and my flaw to have learned too long ago that this is what I am about. This is when I am alive and know it most completely. Every sense is honed by the knowledge of the imminence of death. The juices flow. In the back of my mind I tried to tell myself that I had been turned into a murderous machine by the sight of Gretel. But it was rationalization. There was a hard joy in this acceptance of a total risk. I knew that if he got me — whoever he might be — he was going to have to be very damned good at it, and even then I was going to create some astonishment in him. I would live totally on this thin edge until it was over, and then I would either be dead for good or partially dead until the next time.

As always, MacDonald’s most vivid prose is reserved for his descriptions of his beloved Florida in all its natural and unnatural permutations:

Slowly, slowly the whole world was suffused with that strange orange glow which happens rarely toward sunset. The clouds turned to gold as the sun moved behind them, and the reflection of the clouds colored the earth. I have never seen the Gulf so quiet. There were no ripples, no birds, no sign of feeding fish, no offshore vessels moving across the horizon. I had seen this strange coppery light in Tahiti, in Ceylon (before it became Sri Lanka), and in Granada and the Grenadines. The world must have looked like that before the first creatures came crawling out of the salt water to spawn on the empty land. I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved, the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And death.

There are only a handful of books left in this series for me to discover. I will be sad to say farewell to Travis when it's time for us to part. But not yet! Not just yet, please and thank you. For now, there is world enough and time, time for Travis McGee to continue tilting at windmills and righting wrongs. ( )