Dress Her in Indigo

One of the best writers of detective fiction was John D. MacDonald, who wrote 21 novels concerning Travis McGee, a "salvage consultant" who lives on a houseboat in Florida. He is tall, good-looking, and has an insatiable need to know the truth. MacDonald, much like Raymond Chandler, wrote in a very literary style, but happened to wallow in the genre of pulp fiction. I believe I read the last of his McGee novels, The Lonely Silver Rain, when I was a teen, so the second of his books I've read is one from 1969, Dress Her in Indigo.

MacDonald, who was born in 1916, takes on hippie culture in the book. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he takes a clear-eyed look at it, noting it's problems (drugs, hygiene) and it's nobler intentions (personal freedom, a scorn of hypocrisy). The book is set largely in Mexico, where many young people went to find themselves. McGee is trying to find out what happened to the daughter of a friend, who drove off a road in Oaxaca, killing herself.

McGee, along with his ever-present friend Meyer, head to Mexico to nose around. Though MacDonald's prose is excellent, it does have the dated, 1960s Playboy attitude about women. McGee scores twice, once with a voracious older woman we would today stereotypically call a cougar, and then a luscious senorita. This allows MacDonald to frequently write detailed descriptions of how women look: "She stood without moving. It was a lithe and lovely back. Droplets of water stood on her back and shoulders. Crease down the soft brown back. Pale down, paler than her skin, heaviest near the vertical furrow. The bikini bottom came around her just a little above the widest part of her hips, leaving bare that lovely duplicated tender concavity of the girl-waist, leaving bare two dimples in the sun-honeyed brown, half a handspan apart, below the base of her spine." Concavity of the girl-waist!

Leaving aside those breathless moments of analysis of the female, the book hums along with sterling prose, as McGee navigates, with the assistance of Meyer and a local investigator, the world of counter-culture ex-pats. It turns out there are two crimes to solve, and I must admit feeling a little smug that I figured one out--anytime a body has to be identified by what someone was wearing I smell a rat. Still, we get back to a little misogyny when the climax of the book involves McGee beating up on an older, nude, lesbian woman.

But I had to marvel at some of the passages. The book is written in first person, with McGee narrating, and his conversations with Meyer are great fun. McGee tells Meyer at one point: "'Old friend, there are people--young and old--that I like, an people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from the scripture of an old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me."

MacDonald, like Chandler, can come up with some wonderful similes: "Meyer shrugged, massively, slowly, expressively. He wore that inexpressibly mournful look of the giant anthropoid, of the ape who knows there is not one more plantain in the rain forest."

I think I'll try to read the entirety of the McGee series, at one book a year. That would make me 74 when I finish. A worthy goal.