Ed.Williamson's Full Review: John D. MacDonald - Purple Place for Dying
A we have said previously, If you like fictional stories about beach towns, boats, fighting, ocean voyages, love, fishing, sex, money, murder, shady women, mystery, good food, God, and leveraged stock portfolios, you will probably like the Travis Magee mystery/action tales by John D. McDonald.. This time you have to like stories about the "New" West. These are an action-person's action-mystery genre of story, and yet there is a deeply intellectual twist in each of the tales which is like a revealing portrait of the multifaceted levels of life in late twentieth-century America, especially as played out in that hotbed of the senses, South Florida- but here it is played out amid the cactus needles of Arizona.
A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING is the third novel in this 21-book serial of tales about our good friend Travis. Travis, if you don't know, is to all outward appearances a young-middle-age beach bum, a large athletic man, six-feet-four, two hundred five pounds, who lives on a 52-foot barge-type houseboat called The Busted Flush in Bahia Mar, slip F-18, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He makes his living doing dangerous work: recovering stolen property from thieves when and where the Law can't get to them. He drives a 1936 blue Rolls- Royce converted into a pickup Truck, which he christened Miss Agnes after his fourth-grade teacher whose hair was the same shade of gray.
In A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING, Travis gets a call from a beautiful, buxom young blonde-haired woman, Mona Yeoman, to come to Arizona. After meeting him at the airport, She takes him to a remote place in the hills and desert where they can talk. She, an heiress, begins telling him a story of how she believes her husband, through a shady accountant, bilked her out all her money and plowed it into his small-Arizona-town business ventures, leaving her on a (relatively) meager allowance. Her story is credible but has flaky edges, and Magee is not sure he wants to get involved. But before he can gain more information from his would-be client, a high-powered rifle bullet slams into her and she is dead before she hits the ground.
One of the intriguing aspects of this novel in particular and in many of the novels in the series is how Travis sees and reacts to the act of sudden, violent death. Here the description of Mona's killing is in no way lurid or voyeuristic, but is almost described in the way a philosopher or an artist would describe an apple sitting on a wooden bench with a view through a window behind it. MacDonald had a gift for describing the act of such a crime in a way that is like watching it in slow motion, yet not really seeing the horror of it, but in the aftermath feeling the ennui in terms of wasted promise. It is as if he sees the victim's whole life flash before him, and he sees what might have yet been. So it is with the beautiful young Mona.
The killer shoots at Travis too, but Trav escapes and makes it to a telephone where he phones the local sheriff.
One of the few flaws in the story in my view is the name MacDonald gives to the sheriff: "Buckleberry". This is a comic-book name and it detracts from the story as if you had called him "Bubba" or "Buford T. Justice" or something. A minor flaw.
Buckleberry (what a distracting name), Travis, and the boys all go back and look for Mona's body, but it is gone. The conventional wisdom among the small-town folk is that Travis is lying; that Mona took off with a lover and Trav was paid to give out the story of her "so-called" death to cover her disappearance. Whereas Travis is sometimes the suspect the police are watching in a killing, now he is so unnerved by the situation that instead of packing up and going back to Florida, he sticks around to uncover the real killer. He is driven by pride and chivalry and maybe even a little sympathy for the woman that once was Mona.
Then comes what is really the heart of the story: Trav's relationship with Mona's husband. Jass Yeoman is the kind of character MacDonald creates in perfection: the good-old-boy wheeler-dealer entrepreneur who has taken his money wherever he could (this time from his wife's estate) and has overextended himself. Jass doesn't believe that his wife is dead, but a part of him is unsure, and, shrewd judge of character that he is, he hires Magee to prove the facts in his wife's disappearance. This is a strange-bedfellows relationship, but Travis is broke and he goes along with it.
The trouble is, the more Travis digs into the mystery, the more dirt he brings up about his employer and the townsfolk in general. There are more skeletons buried in the closets of these small-Arizona-towns' folk than in the Long Island cemetery.
But snaky and persistent to the bitter end, as a result of Magee's snoopy sleuthery, those responsible for Mona's death are eventually uncovered, and venom is the way of death in the "Purple Place For Dying."
Oh, yes, in the story Travis rescues a woman from the perils of loneliness and shriveled singlehood. Flooding her with all the gracious gifts of his masculinity, he single-handedly (single somethingly?) brings her from winter into lusty summer, thus saving another female from a fate worse than spinsterhood. And in the end they wind up lolling on a beach, as in many of these books at the end.
Actually, this is one of the better books in the series. What makes it this is that MacDonald spent a lot more time developing and showing the inner Travis, and what Travis thinks about money, women, and American life in a small town. Far from the beach, his normal habitat, different qualities emerge in Travis. All in all, it is an interesting book which demonstrates that MacDonald was starting to like his protagonist. Travis does not yet have his partner in the long saga (yet to come), but here he is a much more sociable Magee than in Pink, and that was a major step up. Sherlock needed a Watson, and Travis needed his…Mr. X.
****
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A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING (1964) by John D. McDonald
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