Pale Gray for Guilt (1968)

I wanted to revisit a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald partly to test myself. Admittedly, MacDonald is a good mystery writer in the hard-boiled vein and McGee is a certain classic. I read a half-dozen or so of them some years ago but finally had to give them up. They almost always included scenes that triggered me, usually women being mistreated or assaulted in ways that left me sick. I had the impression MacDonald enjoyed writing them. Someone once described his style as rabbit-punching and that clarified it for me. But the people blurbing and praising him remain big names: Lee Child (who wrote an introduction for my 2012 edition), Donald Westlake, Roger Ebert, Sue Grafton, etc., etc. As it turns out, I can say “almost always” because—happily—no such scene occurs here. It has all the stuff I remembered: a senseless title that is there to name a color, the brooding loner on a Florida houseboat Travis McGee, a revenge story, a sting, various beautiful women, and me thinking her? Is she the one who gets it? But nothing, or very little. I’m going to try another and see how it goes. I picked this from a generic google search (“best travis mcgee novels”). Later I found it at #13 on a ranked list of all 21 and nowhere near any rando top 5. What up, google? Maybe people like those terrible scenes? As usual, damsels in distress are all over Pale Gray for Guilt, as well as many shades of gray (literal, not figurative). But MacDonald is just good at pulling you into his crazy storylines. Here a friend of McGee’s is murdered, which isn’t clear at first because it was elaborately staged as a grotesque suicide. That leaves behind a widow in distress and a thirst for cold as you can stand it revenge in McGee. It all comes to revolve around a stock swindle, which gets complicated and I got lost. But you can see it works by the way the bad guys yelp and carry on and somehow MacDonald makes even that satisfying. Pale Gray for Guilt (ninth in the series btw, which don’t really need to be read in order) also has a poignant love story that runs parallel to the main mystery story, with an affecting, bittersweet ending. Still, there’s always a little more Hugh Hefner than I like in MacDonald. A lot of things about Travis McGee have not aged well—but all the bigs love him.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.