HjemGrupperSnakMereZeitgeist
Søg På Websted
På dette site bruger vi cookies til at levere vores ydelser, forbedre performance, til analyseformål, og (hvis brugeren ikke er logget ind) til reklamer. Ved at bruge LibraryThing anerkender du at have læst og forstået vores vilkår og betingelser inklusive vores politik for håndtering af brugeroplysninger. Din brug af dette site og dets ydelser er underlagt disse vilkår og betingelser.

Resultater fra Google Bøger

Klik på en miniature for at gå til Google Books

Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee Mysteries)…
Indlæser...

Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee Mysteries) (original 1967; udgave 1996)

af John D. MacDonald (Forfatter)

Serier: Travis McGee (7)

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
8481325,384 (3.8)39
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:From a beloved master of crime fiction, Darker Than Amber is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
 
A fishing trip is anything but relaxing when Travis McGee is involved. As McGee and his friend Meyer settle down to some midnight casting, a woman falls into the water from the bridge above them. Her name is Evangeline, and the hints she gives about the events leading to her near drowning suggest a less than pristine past. But McGee has saved her, and now he wants to see her make a new life??even if it means confronting a gang of murderers that makes his blood run cold.
 
??John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in his field.???Mary Higgins Clark
 
Evangeline may be the intended target in a complex scheme, but she??s no ordinary victim. Behind her darker than amber eyes is a woman who lures men onto her boat and robs them, throwing them overboard when she??s done with them. And now she??s enlisted the resistant Travis and Meyer to rescue her ??savings? from her partners in crime.
 
When Evangeline winds up dead, McGee and Meyer must get involved. But the stakes are high??and Evangeline may not be the only casualty of her cruel game.
 
Features a new
… (mere)
Medlem:Brad0801
Titel:Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee Mysteries)
Forfattere:John D. MacDonald (Forfatter)
Info:Fawcett (1996)
Samlinger:Dit bibliotek, Læst, men ikke ejet
Vurdering:***
Nøgleord:Ingen

Work Information

Darker Than Amber af John D. MacDonald (1967)

Indlæser...

Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog.

Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.

» Se også 39 omtaler

Viser 1-5 af 11 (næste | vis alle)
A chance encounter causes the hero infiltrates a complex and deadly con game in one of the better Travis McGee novels. I liked the details of the con game and how each of the supporting characters was their own person with their own motivations and personality, and the bittersweetness of the ending. ( )
  yaj70 | Jan 22, 2024 |
I liked this book, but I like all of the thoughtful and passionate reviews it has animated in this forum even more than the novel itself.
  Mark_Feltskog | Dec 23, 2023 |
“All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.”


Once John D. MacDonald wrote A Deadly Shade of Gold, the Travis McGee series began to take on a resonance that separated it from others of its ilk. Over the course of twenty-one books, Travis McGee became one of the most enduring and beloved characters in mystery fiction. Praise for this tremendous saga comes from nearly every great mystery writer in MacDonald’s chosen genre, and many great writers outside his genre. These include many female mystery writers, who give their praise without reservation, and with nary a whisper about misogyny; because it simply does not exist.

Praise from these female writers, and a public still devouring this series decades after it first hit bookshelves proves, in my opinion, just how misrepresented this series and its protagonist, Travis McGee, has become in some quarters. If you know a little about life, you’ll often feel like you know some of the people in MacDonald’s influential series — both the males, and especially the females — as well as the protagonist himself. And that is certainly the case with this very dark entry in the series, part of a three-book section in the series (A Deadly Shade of Gold, Bright Orange For the Shroud, Darker Than Amber) of such high quality, that only later in the series, when the resonance was even deeper, did we get three that surpassed them (Free Fall in Crimson, Cinnamon Skin and, as it turned out, the final entry, The Lonely Silver Rain). In between there were good to great ones, always enjoyable, but never a three-book stretch like the former, or the latter.

Darker Than Amber begins with a great opening line, and lives up to it. Amber is a tawdry and unpleasant look at women pretty on the outside, but so rotten at their core, they are capable of disconnecting themselves from the crimes they commit. Meyer emerges in Amber as the important character he will be for the remainder of this legendary series. It is in fact Meyer who talks about the complete disconnect from empathy these outwardly attractive women share:

“That pair disposed of fourteen objects, not fourteen brothers. Their unease comes not from pity, not from any concern for the dead objects, but merely from their awareness that society frowns upon such actions.”

And earlier, we get this exchange between Vangie and Meyer:

“You are the nicest, Meyer. So nice you'd have to blow the whole bit, and it would mess up my girlfriends and keep the law looking for me forever. If I get my hands on that money, I want to stay dead, thank you.” — Vangie

“Knowing that your...friends are still murdering for profit?” - Meyer

“People are dying all over the place for all kinds of reasons, Meyer, and if I'm out of this one, it couldn't bother me less.” — Vangie

But that’s getting ahead of things. Before McGee gets tangled up in the affairs of Vangie/Tami Western, he reminisces about Vidge, a broken bird who had come to stay with McGee for a bit. She had married the wrong man — as women are so often prone to do — and, as McGee notes, he nearly destroyed her soul:

“Finally he had gone to work on her sexual capacities. Were the sexes reversed, you could call it emasculation. People like Charlie work toward total and perpetual domination. They feed on the mate. And Vidge didn't even realize that running away from him had been a form of self-preservation, a way of trying to hang fast to the last crumbs of identity and pride.”

McGee is patient, waiting for her to stop blaming herself for everything, and finally explode. Yes, as other readers have noted — and made far too much of — there does comes a point when he sleeps with her. McGee gives back to Vidge her self-confidence, allowing a trampled flower to spring back to life, toward the sunshine. The situation and the solution resonate with the ring of truth. There is nothing predatory here by McGee at all. MacDonald the writer simply understood the psychological underpinnings of the situation he’d created, and had his character do likewise; and I might add, at a personal cost to himself, reflected by this comment late in the narrative:

“Vidge had soured me a little, and Vangie had dropped off the bridge and accelerated the process, and then I had really put the lid on it by trapping that dumb empty punchboard into a life sentence.”

McGee's rescuing of Vangie from the water after someone has tried to kill her has no fairy-tale ending whatsoever, because Vangie, as McGee eventually discovers, is a hooker into something very nasty; so nasty that she obviously expected to come to a bad end one day:

“All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.”

There is money involved, a lot of it, and a string of homicides to go with it. All Vangie wants is the money, and to disappear. McGee, despite his experience, develops a grudging sort of admiration for Vangie; not so much because there is more to the Hawaiian beauty than other girls like her, but because once, there might have been:

“In the silence I tried to sort her out. Her twelve years on the track had coarsened her beyond any hope of salvage. Though I know it is the utmost folly to sentimentalize or romanticize a whore, I could respect a certain toughness of spirit Vangie possessed. She had not howled as she fell to her death. She had not flinched or murmured as we cut the hooks out of her leg.”

Vangie tries to protect not only McGee and Meyer, but herself when they offer to help:

“Oh, h*ll, Travis, it isn’t so much finking out as keeping you guys from knowing how lousy I really am.”

Because McGee nearly lost his own life beneath the water simply because Vangie had grabbed his wrist, and because he eventually gets her horrific backstory — Vangie is 26 and has been a pro for 12 years — he feels an obligation when things end badly for her — very badly. There is a wonderful piece of writing as MacDonald describes a youthful dance by Vangie aboard the Busted Flush. It culminates in this melancholy observation by McGee:

“When the flesh is taut, the dance becomes strangely ceremonial. It is a rite that celebrates the future, and it was eerie to see how accurately it could be imitated by a woman who had left any chance of love so far in the past.”

What we get when McGee and Meyer decide they can’t let any more men fall prey to this deadly sea carnival, is a tawdry and violent and insightful look at the heartless and wicked. Trying to con his way into the lives of the men and women running the deadliest of games, McGee nearly loses his life right off the bat in a violent duel with one of the men involved. He buries him and tries to deal with the emotional repercussions even as he and Meyer continue pressing toward their objective. In essence, this is a dark tale of predatory men and predatory women with no conscience, at least not as the rest of us understand such. MacDonald does an especially wonderful job of capturing with honesty the essence of the women:

“It was interesting to me in a clinical way that in the distance from the table to the street door she managed to sway a tautly fabricated hip against me three separate and insistent times, though she'd had no trouble with sway or balance on the way in. With instant practicality, she'd changed masters. Now it was merely a case of firmly cementing the new relationship in the only way she knew how.”

But conning their way in is only part of the problem. McGee, though you rarely hear about it — perhaps because it doesn’t fit a narrative some want to paint — was often turning down opportunities with the opposite sex, and here does so more than once. But even then, MacDonald uses McGee’s reactions to make insightful observations every man of a certain age understands all too well:

“The thing that astounded and disheartened me was to find a very real yen to take a hack at this spooky little punchboard. There had been a lot more to Vangie in both looks and substance, but she hadn't tingled a single nerve. I wanted to grab at this one. Maybe everybody at some time or another feels the strong attraction of something rotten-sweet enough to guarantee complete degradation.”

But McGee shakes it off and goes forward. Along the way, we get to meet Merrimay Lane, a character so wonderful she almost — but not quite — offsets the bad taste left by the other women encountered in this one. From what is supposed to be a safe distance, McGee and Meyer have her impersonate Vangie, just to rattle a brutal guy named Terry. And it does, leading to a very violent end. There is some other stuff in between, including observations on the races and their interactions, and this wonderful gem about a woman’s wrist:

“The wrist of a woman and the small tidy forearm always seemed to have some tender and touching quality, a vulnerable articulation unchanged from the time she was ten or twelve, perhaps the only part of her that her flowering leaves unchanged.”

This is a terrific entry in the series, though without a doubt it’s one of the more seedy story-lines due to the parade of hideous men and women with whom McGee crosses paths. Lee Child has admitted that Jack Reacher is a stripped down version of Travis McGee, but to me the things he left out are what makes McGee stand head and shoulders above nearly all others in the genre. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series resonates, and more often than not it’s deadly accurate when it comes to human interactions and motivations. Darker Than Amber, which makes reference to Vangie’s eyes, is itself very dark, but also involving. I’ll end this one with a quote from Meyer about McGee, because it sums up not only this entry, but the series itself:

“One of the last of the romantics, trying to make himself believe he’s the cynical beach bum who has it made. You permit yourself the luxury of making moral judgements, Travis, in a world that tells us man’s will is the product of background and environment. You think you’re opportunistic and flexible as all h*ll, but they’d have to kill you before they could bend you. That kind of rigidity is both strength and weakness.” ( )
  Matt_Ransom | Oct 6, 2023 |
What can I say? Another grood Travis McGee thriller by the great John D. MacDonald. He was the Lee Child of the 1960s. Fun reads and well done ( )
  ikeman100 | Jan 7, 2020 |
I read and loved many of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels in my high school and college years. I read most of the titles and wrapped up with a hardcover purchase of The Lonely Silver Rain.

While it has an exciting opening sequence, Darker Than Amber (1966) somehow lost me when I started it back in the day, having secured a paperback copy from The Book Nook in Alexandria, LA, where I often scanned the shelves for detective works I'd read about.

My dad read it through and liked it, but I guess the opening passage was a bit slow for me in my younger years.

McGee, you probably know, was a houseboat-dwelling beach bum who took his ongoing retirement in chunks. When funds grew low, he'd take on a salvage job. Recover money or property for someone in exchange for half the value to fund a little more free time of boating, fishing and otherwise enjoying life. McGee had frequent female guests aboard, often for complex though brief relationships.

When Darker Than Amber opens, he's fishing with his pal Meyer. Meyer's an economist who occupies a boat called the John Maynard Keynes a few slips away from Trav's F-18 at the Fort Lauderdale marina known as Bahia Mar marina.

Meyer and Trav's motorboat is anchored beneath a South Florida bridge when a girl's hurled over the railing with weights on her feet. Trav dives to save her and manages to unfurl the wires holding the weights in place, ripping of his shirt to help with the tightly-wrapped metal. Fortunately her would-be killers didn't have time for concrete galoshes.

He takes her back to his houseboat, The Busted Flush and soon learns she's named Vangie, short for Evangeline, though she has about as many aliases as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon.

The color of the title
Vangie seems to be of Hawaiian island lineage and has eyes that provide the book's color title, a conceit devised by MacDonald to help buyers differentiate the books they'd already read.

A former prostitute, we learn Vangie gained a conscience while serving as bait in a con game she's a little vague about as she hangs out aboard the Flush, donning duds left behind by previous guests. She bonds a bit with McGee though he turns down a sexual encounter and winds up posing for a few photos for Meyer.

Then she's off to pick up dough she siphoned off from the con games from a hiding place she's hopeful her former accomplices haven't discovered.

Mild spoilers past this point

McGee's soon at the morgue using a ruse to check the body of a hit-and-run victim, and yes it's Vangie.

Feeling a sense of duty as well as a desire to pick up the funds she might not have accessed, McGee sets off to find out what Vangie was a part of.

Soon, McGee's got her hidden cash and is unraveling the con game with a murderous component and devising an elaborate scheme of his own to rattle the bad guys and exact justice. That includes a dangerous character named Ans Terry, who has a touch of a conscience but a brutal side as well. He was kind of forced to throw Vangie off the bridge.

I guess originally the opening dragged a little for me. On this reading at a more patient age, it flowed well and overall it offers an interesting and different entry point into the adventure for McGee.

The scheme Vangie was part of is a bit complicated, and the pains and lengths McGee and Meyer go to in order to rattle the culprits make up the latter part of the action. This is not my favorite McGee because it all seems just a little shaky and strained, but it eventually comes together well with some satisfying action, a bit of McGee role playing and an exciting climax.

The book features many South Florida locations and offers a look into the cruise industry of the mid-sixties as well. Any McGee is a fun and rich reading experience. I'm happy to have returned and taken this additional step toward being a McGee completist. I still have a few steps to go.

I should note I saw the movie version with Rod Taylor on TV in the early '80s with a trimmed version of the famous fight scene between Taylor as McGee and William Smith as the Terry character sans the Ans.

I didn't care for the film either back in the day. Re-watching it today in uncut form, I think it does a good job overall with the novel, is pretty true to the McGee spirit and dishes up a pretty cool fight scene directed by Robert Clouse who was destined for Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.

Taylor's a pretty good McGee as well. Makes me a little sad the planned movie series didn't pan out. ( )
  SidWilliams | May 10, 2018 |
Viser 1-5 af 11 (næste | vis alle)
ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse

» Tilføj andre forfattere

Forfatter navnRolleHvilken slags forfatterVærk?Status
John D. MacDonaldprimær forfatteralle udgaverberegnet
Hiassen, CarlIntroduktionmedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Du bliver nødt til at logge ind for at redigere data i Almen Viden.
For mere hjælp se Almen Viden hjælpesiden.
Kanonisk titel
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Originaltitel
Alternative titler
Oprindelig udgivelsesdato
Personer/Figurer
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Vigtige steder
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Vigtige begivenheder
Beslægtede film
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Indskrift
Tilegnelse
Første ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.
Citater
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
"I'm in the logic business, McGee. I deduce possibilities and probabilities from what I can observe. My God, man, compared to the mists and smokes of economic theory and practice, the world of actual events seems almost oversimplified. A corporate financial statement is the most nonspecific thing there is. If a man can't read the lines between the lines between the lines, he might as well stuff his money into a hollow tree."
Sidste ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen Viden Redigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
Oplysning om flertydighed
Forlagets redaktører
Bagsidecitater
Originalsprog
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

Henvisninger til dette værk andre steder.

Wikipedia på engelsk

Ingen

Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:From a beloved master of crime fiction, Darker Than Amber is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
 
A fishing trip is anything but relaxing when Travis McGee is involved. As McGee and his friend Meyer settle down to some midnight casting, a woman falls into the water from the bridge above them. Her name is Evangeline, and the hints she gives about the events leading to her near drowning suggest a less than pristine past. But McGee has saved her, and now he wants to see her make a new life??even if it means confronting a gang of murderers that makes his blood run cold.
 
??John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in his field.???Mary Higgins Clark
 
Evangeline may be the intended target in a complex scheme, but she??s no ordinary victim. Behind her darker than amber eyes is a woman who lures men onto her boat and robs them, throwing them overboard when she??s done with them. And now she??s enlisted the resistant Travis and Meyer to rescue her ??savings? from her partners in crime.
 
When Evangeline winds up dead, McGee and Meyer must get involved. But the stakes are high??and Evangeline may not be the only casualty of her cruel game.
 
Features a new

No library descriptions found.

Beskrivelse af bogen
Haiku-resume

Current Discussions

Ingen

Populære omslag

Quick Links

Vurdering

Gennemsnit: (3.8)
0.5
1 2
1.5
2 9
2.5 1
3 30
3.5 15
4 67
4.5 4
5 30

Er det dig?

Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter.

 

Om | Kontakt | LibraryThing.com | Brugerbetingelser/Håndtering af brugeroplysninger | Hjælp/FAQs | Blog | Butik | APIs | TinyCat | Efterladte biblioteker | Tidlige Anmeldere | Almen Viden | 203,222,980 bøger! | Topbjælke: Altid synlig