Skip to main content

Top mysteries challenge: The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald

There is no going past that point. All the roads are barricaded and all the bridges are blown. The fields are mined and the artillery has every sector zeroed in.


This is a good extended metaphor and an eloquent way of belabouring the point, which is then spoiled by a truce shortly afterwards. Can you guess what the metaphor refers to?

Year of publication: 1974
Series and no.: Travis McGee # 16
Genre: Mystery/thriller
Type of mystery: Murder
Type of investigator: Amateur, crime magnet
Setting & time: Florida, USA, contemporary

Travis McGee gets a visit from Carrie, an old friend, who asks him to store nearly 100 thousand dollars (in cash) for her or, if she doesn’t return within a given time, get the money to her younger sister. Carrie is killed, seemingly in a traffic accident, but McGee senses foul play and he decides he owes it to her to investigate her death. This leads him and his friend Meyer into the company of all kinds of people, some suspicious and some not, and before long the body count begins to rise.

John D. MacDonald had a wonderful way with words. He was a funny and erudite writer with a distinct style, but was perhaps a little too fond of challenging the reader by using words that even a native speaker of English would need a dictionary to understand.

This book sparkles with interesting turns of phrase and a masterful use of language, and is also laugh-out loud funny at times (for an example, see the quote I posted earlier). The plotting is tight and the story has several interesting twists and turns, although there is a bit too much theorising going on that is based purely on how McGee and Meyer would like things to have happened. And of course they always turn out to be right or partially right, without much to go on. This detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of the story.

When I reviewed One Fearful Yellow Eye I mentioned McGee’s paternalistic attutude towards women. There isn’t so much of it here as there was in that book – here it comes more across as a deep and almost profound respect for women – but as per both anonymous comments on that book, there was indeed a woman who needed a touch of sexual healing in this book as well. I can well imagine that this would begin to grate if one were to read too many of the books within too short a span of time...

Rating: 4 stars
Books left in challenge: 81
Place on the list(s): CWA # 87
Awards and nominations: None I am aware of
Labels:

Comments

George said…
A Deadly Shade of Gold is my favorite Travis McGee novel. Yes, Travis provides a little too much "sexual healing" in this series for my taste. But, most of these books were written in the Sixties and Seventies when attitudes were different.
August 21, 2010 3:37 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more