The John D. MacDonald novels, reissued

Obviously the existence of e-publishing, with its flexibility and low overhead, is what makes this new MacDonald edition possible, but as one who still reads books only if they’re printed on real paper, I welcome the trade-paperback MacDonalds with gratitude and enthusiasm; e-book readers doubtless will be happy to pay $11.99 apiece for the titles. For some years it has been my conviction that, even as MacDonald’s reputation has risen considerably over the past few decades, he remains pigeonholed as a genre writer although there is far more to him than that: a fluid, economical prose stylist, a mordantly witty cultural and social critic, a sympathetic but clear-eyed observer of the human comedy — and a comedy, despite all the violence and human meanness that course through his work, is just what he knew it to be.

MacDonald, a purposeful and organized man, set the stage for Travis McGee in the opening pages of “The Deep Blue Good-by” and adhered to it throughout the series. Each of the books is similar (he color-coded the titles to help readers remember which they had and hadn’t read) in much the way that each Jeeves and Wooster novel is similar: In the latter it’s boy meets girl, girl chases boy, boy escapes by the skin of his teeth, while in the former it’s Travis at ease, Travis visited by someone who desperately needs help, Travis takes on the case, Travis rides to the rescue. But beyond that each novel is different, with twists of plot — and usually with one or more twisted characters — that invariably are surprising and often border on the hilarious.

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(Random House) - ’The Deep Blue Good-by’ by John D. MacDonald

McGee lives aboard the Busted Flush, a “52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale,” and works only when he needs the money or can’t resist a victim’s pleas, the latter being the case in “The Deep Blue Good-by.” As a salvage operator, he has a simple if often dangerous system, as described by a friend: “You said that if X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back, and keep half. Then you just . . . live on that until it starts to run out.” Or, as McGee himself puts it: “I like to work on pretty good-sized ones. Expenses are heavy. And then I can take another piece of my retirement. Instead of retiring at sixty, I’m taking it in chunks as I go along.”

As that makes plain, McGee is in tongue-in-cheek mode much of the time. He is (in his own words; he narrates all the novels) “that big brown loose-jointed beach bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl- seeker, that slayer of small savage fish, that beach-walker, gin-drinker, quip-maker, peace-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject from a structured society,” and his list of dislikes fills the fat part of a paragraph: “plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.”

Variations on that list appear in other McGee novels, but the sense of alienation from the worst of the modern world is a constant. As has been noted elsewhere, he is a knight errant, though somewhere along the line he remarks that his armor is on the rusty side. He isn’t exactly a Don Quixote, since he wins more jousts than he loses, but there’s more than a little that’s quixotic about him, and it adds to his appeal, especially his appeal to the ladies, to whom he’s catnip pure and simple, not least because he’s “an incurable romantic who thinks the man-woman thing shouldn’t be a contest on the rabbit level.” This is said to Lois Atkinson, a woman who has managed to get herself into a very large batch of trouble thanks to a creature named Junior Allen, a perpetually smiling monster, one of those “men in this world who are compelled to destroy the most fragile and valuable things they can find, the same way rowdy children will ravage a beautiful home.” Junior is a classic MacDonald twisted creep, and lives hang in the balance as McGee tries to bring him down.

So what a grand way to begin the new year: with a bit of the “Good Old Stuff,” to borrow the title of a collection of early MacDonaldiana, a title soon to be available in an e-book, and with the promise of a great deal more of it in the months to come. Every once in a while, against all the odds, justice rears its lovely head in the world of books, and a publisher does itself proud. Thanks, Random House.

THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY

By John D. MacDonald

Random House. 222 pp. Paperback, $16