NIGHTMARE IN PINK: Tarnished Hero Travis Magee Trips Out On L.S.D.
Written: Sep 02 '01 (Updated Sep 02 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: The Magee character receives further development.
Cons: The story line is a lot weaker than in the first novel in the series.
The Bottom Line: The Second novel of the Travis Magee Series advances the fullness of the character, but MacDonald was taking a bit of a breather here.
Ed.Williamson's Full Review: John D. MacDonald - Nightmare in Pink
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.. Oh, yes, and you just have to like film-noir-type detective stories; that helps too. If you're not into those things, then the stories of Travis Magee probably won't appeal to you. 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.
NIGHTMARE IN PINK is the second installment of this serial of tales about Magee. Magee is 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 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 NIGHTMARE IN PINK, Travis gets a call from an old war buddy asking him to help his little sister, Nina, who husband , Howard Plummer, was recently killed. Nina discovers $10,000 among her dead husband's possessions, and is suspicious that he may have been up to something illegal. Soon Magee is delving into this, and he also finds himself infatuated with Nina.
Eventually Magee stumbles into a massive plot wherein the mastermind is intent on embezzling $20,000,000 from a certain millionaire, and Magee knows too much. However, rather than go through the inconvenience and trouble of simply killing Magee, the mastermind has something a bit more "humane" in mind: Magee will be given a long-term "therapy" of LSD and then lobotomized. No nasty murder investigations that way and Magee will still be silenced. So Magee is injected with the acid under duress.
Travis hallucinates with the best of them, and MacDonald illustrates the trip he is on so artfully that one wonders if MacDonald…well…surely he didn't..hmm...research for the novel, John? Surely not. I'm shawked to even think so. But...well, ahem... Anyway, only a freak accident allows Magee to break the cycle of his injections and to break the case, and in the process he breaks other things as well.
The second Travis Magee adventure is not as good as the first, THE DEEP BLUE GOODBYE. The plot is much more melodramatic and staid, without as many twists and turns as the first novel. Whereas in the first novel it seemed that Travis was deeply committed to "getting" the monster that was Junior Allen who was hell to women, here he is merely trying to solve a case and his attachment to his ladylove is really rather superficial. All in all, MacDonald seems to have been fumbling around with the character when he wrote Pink. It is one of the weaker novels in the series.
PINK was written before BLUE was published, as a sort of "NRTP" (Novel Ready To Publish) for a quick follow-up if BLUE was a hit. It was, and PINK was launched soon after. It was not terrible, but it was not great either. MacDonald was onto something with Travis Magee, though, and he made headway as he moved into the later novels of the series.
_________________________________________________
NIGHTMARE IN PINK (1964) by John D. McDonald
_________________________________________________
A knight in slightly tarnished armor, the thinking man s Robin Hood, McGee lives alone on his boat, the Busted Flush. Rejecting the modern world, adhe...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.