Darker than Amber

"I love him. He’s not read very much in this country, but he sold millions of copies in his day. He wrote Cape Fear under a different title, The Executioners , so some people may have half-heard of him because of that. I would definitely advise getting into his books. The only warning is that they were written in the 1960s and 70s and, especially with a male author writing a male protagonist, the sexual politics is not great. With all these books written more than half a century ago, they have their moments. There’s antisemitism, there’s racism. I don’t know what you think, but I feel fairly comfortable with that, if you’re able to read these books critically. I wouldn’t get rid of it, I wouldn’t rewrite it, I wouldn’t whitewash it. I’d just accept that it’s there and have a critical engagement with it. And you have to do that with John D. MacDonald. But beyond that, they’re brilliant novels. The conceit behind the central character is magnificent. He’s called Travis McGee and lives in a boat called the Busted Flush in Florida. He wants to have his retirement while he’s still young enough to enjoy it. He’s this charming knight errant. People who have things stolen from them, who can’t get legal recourse, come to him. He says, ‘I’ll get it back for you, but I’ll take half the value.’ That’s how he earns money, and that enables him to live this beach bum lifestyle. Each book has a colour in the title and each one is an attempt to recover something. He’s an environmentalist, which has dated well. He’s constantly bemoaning the building up of the Everglades and environmental pollution in Florida. His best friend, who helps him in Darker than Amber , is called Meyer and lives on a boat called the John Maynard Keynes. He’s this big, hairy economist—this wonderful, completely original sidekick you don’t really get anywhere else. One writer who loves these books is Lee Child—and you can see a little bit of Jack Reacher in Travis McGee. He’s much more gregarious than Jack Reacher. It’s the idea of a man who goes into the uncharted, small-town badlands of America, where there are some pretty rough people. He’s really rough as well. He’s six foot five and good at fighting. He kicks ass and gets stuff back. But he also thinks about things. If you like 60s Americana, there’s loads of it in the book. I think for people who’ve read lots of crime books but have never heard of John MacDonald, it’s quite nice to find a whole unexplored avenue. If you can just have a critical engagement with some of the sex side they’re brilliant. Darker than Amber is a really good tale. A woman is dropped with a cement block into a river where they’re fishing. Then they go after the people who went after her. I’ve read all of them. I’ve got them all in a line on a shelf at my house. The first one in the series is The Deep Blue Good-by, I think it may have been part of that Penguin paperback crime library I had growing up, so I read that. There are about 20 of them, and they’re mostly brilliant. I’ve read them multiple times. Again, it has this charming, very memorable figure at its heart, which I think is really nice. And whoever comes up with a sidekick who is an economist? It is very funny. People might read this and think ‘I can take Dorothy Sayers and Sherlock Holmes, but John D. MacDonald is going too far.’ As I said, he’s not brilliantly read in this country but if you look at the history of publication, his books sold more than 30 million copies. That’s what it says on my mass market paperback, which I bought in the US. He was very much a figure."