A Purple Place for Dying (1964) - John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee is living the good life. He lives comfortably on a Florida houseboat and takes a “salvage consultant”job only when it appeals to his curiosity or when he urgently needs a quick infusion of cash. He’s tall and tanned, the kind of man who can be physically intimidating to other men without really trying while attracting more than his share of women. McGee, though is not your typical “salvage consultant.” He’s the guy you call when you need someone who’s handy with a gun - and you want to keep the whole transaction under wraps.

When Mona Yeoman contacts him about recovering the cash she believes her husband has stolen from her trust fund, McGee is almost broke and he knows that it’s time to go back to work. Mona's offer of a free plane ticket to Arizona, not to mention McGee’s usual hefty fee if he successfully salvages the missing cash, is exactly the kind of job offer he needs. Mona’s timing could not have been more perfect. But things do not go as expected, and just a couple of hours after meeting Mona Yeoman on the ground, McGee finds himself without a client and without any chance of collecting a fee from her. McGee, however, outraged by what he has witnessed, is not ready to call it a day - fee or no fee. He knows he can’t just walk away, but the can of worms he is about to open up is one he never expected. 

A Purple Place for Dying is classic sixties hardboiled stuff that benefits from MacDonald’s fast pacing and his sharp, clean prose. MacDonald is not an author who wasted words, but this third Travis McGee novel still manages a strong sense of place and is filled with multiple interesting characters with problems of their own. But let’s also say that A Purple Place for Dying did not exactly age gracefully, especially in how women are presented. 

Even McGee’s potential client is introduced with misogynistic, almost dismissive, comments that set the tone for every female character to follow - especially the young woman who later becomes a key player in McGee’s investigation. What I, as a modern reader of this 52-year-old novel, find most off-putting are the casual references to putting wives in their place with beatings and spankings. I was in high school in 1964, but I still find it hard to believe that comments like those would not have been offensive to most readers even when the novel was first published. In a more humorous vein is McGee’s assumption that sexually repressed women of the time only need a man like him to help them heal emotionally before they willingly jump into bed with him. But I have to remind myself that, as are the popular James Bond movies of the same era, A Purple Place for Dying is a product of the times from which it sprang, that it was not especially misogynistic in its day.

All of that said, A Purple Place for Dying is a fast paced mystery thriller that today’s mystery fans can still enjoy and appreciate as long as they remember to keep it in the context of its own time. It’s meant to be a novel of escapism, and it is exactly that.