JOHN D. MacDONALD
John Dann MacDonald (born 1918 in Sharon, Pennsylvania - 1986) was one of the 20th Century’s most successful popular authors. Almost 30 when he sold his first short story, he made up for lost time with hundreds of short stories under a variety of names and went on to write 78 books which sold over 70 million copies by one estimate. After that notable birth in our state, he grew up in Utica, New York, attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, quit during his sophomore year, went to Syracuse University, graduated in 1938 (meeting his wife-to-be), and went on to an MBA at Harvard University, ‘39. The Second World War intervened in what could have been a great business career. He entered as a lieutenant, worked for the OSS in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations, and was discharged as a lieutenant colonel in September 1945.
In 1949 he moved his family to Florida, eventually finding Sarasota to be home, and there the writing legend began. After an insanely obsessed stint at breaking into the pulp magazines (which were dying in the postwar years), his first novel, the excellent The Brass Cupcake, was published in 1951. His first Travis McGee mystery, a series that made his name golden and international, was The Deep Blue Good-by, published in 1964. Twenty-one novels make up the series, ending with The Lonely Silver Rain in 1985. They are listed here in alphabetical order by title, but the order in which they were written, which is useful, is appended below. On this page, after the McGee novels, those stand-alone titles still in print are listed.
As popular as he was and remains, MacDonald was also a writer’s writer, acclaimed and claimed as influential by scores of later writers from Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen King, from Carl Hiaasen to Dean Koontz. In his novels the cost is always counted, the right thing to do is the hard thing to do, and people in pain call out for justice and sometimes, always at cost, find it.
(1964) The Deep Blue Good-by
(1964) Nightmare in Pink
(1964) A Purple Place for Dying
(1964) The Quick Red Fox
(1965) A Deadly Shade of Gold
(1965) Bright Orange for the Shroud
(1966) Darker than Amber
(1966) One Fearful Yellow Eye
(1968) Pale Gray for Guilt
(1968) The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
(1969) Dress Her in Indigo
(1970) The Long Lavender Look
(1971) A Tan and Sandy Silence
(1973) The Scarlet Ruse
(1973) The Turquoise Lament
(1975) The Dreadful Lemon Sky
(1978) The Empty Copper Sea
(1979) The Green Ripper
(1981) Free Fall in Crimson
(1982) Cinnamon Skin
(1985) The Lonely Silver Rain
One Fearful Yellow Eye
One Fearful Yellow Eye
From a beloved master of crime fiction, One Fearful Yellow Eye is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
It only takes one word to get Travis McGee to leave the sunny deck of his houseboat in Ft. Lauderdale for the gray cold of Chicago. The word is help, and it’s uttered by Glory Geis, an old girlfriend of McGee’s and the pretty young widow of world-renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Fortner Geis. The trouble is, the good doctor converted his considerable estate into cash before he died. But where he stashed it, no one knows.
“John D. MacDonald was the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King
Although everyone from the IRS to Dr. Geis’s greedy grown children suspects that Glory is hiding the lost fortune, she hasn’t a clue as to its whereabouts. To prove her innocence, she must find the money and the culprits who stole it. Enter McGee, for one of the most challenging salvages of his career.
How do you extort $600,000 from a dying man? Someone must have done it very quietly and skillfully. While untangling the mess of Dr. Geis’s last days, McGee makes a startling discovery: Some folks would love nothing better than to bring down the whole family—by any means necessary. But McGee is starting to actually like a few members of the Geis clan—and he vows to bring the guilty to justice.
Features a new Introduction by Lee Child