Cover image of "The Quick Red Fox," a novel in the Travis McGee series

Before there was Jack Reacher, there was Travis McGee. Lee Child, who created Reacher, has never been shy about the debt he owes. Neither have Carl Hiaasen, Dean Koontz, and a long list of other bestselling writers. Between 1964 and 1985, John D. MacDonald wrote 21 novels about McGee, a self-described “salvage consultant” who lives aboard a 52-foot houseboat called the Busted Flush at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale. Every title includes a color. The Quick Red Fox, the fourth, appeared in 1964. Remarkably, MacDonald published the first four books in the series that same year. And it shows.

A movie star in a jam

Lysa Dean is a Hollywood star at the peak of her career. Years earlier, she spent four boozy days at a remote house near Big Sur with nine other people. They drank. They lay in the sun. And they swapped partners. Meanwhile, somebody with a telephoto lens recorded the whole thing from a hillside nearby. Now the photos are surfacing, along with demands for money. Lysa has already paid once. But the demands keep coming, and she’s about to marry a very rich and very straitlaced man. If the pictures surface, the wedding is off. So, most likely, is her career.

Lysa doesn’t approach McGee herself. She sends her personal secretary, Dana Holtzer, a reserved and efficient woman with a deep sadness she keeps to herself. McGee is repelled by the whole tawdry business. But he’s running low on funds, and the $5,000 advance for expenses is persuasive. So is Dana.

The Quick Red Fox (Travis McGee #4 of 21) by John D. MacDonald (1964) 160 pages ★★★☆☆

Photo of Hollywood party unlike the orgy in this novel in the Travis McGee series
Hollywood luminaries attend a decorous party around the time in this novel. In no way does it represent the scene at the orgy that is at the center of The Quick Red Fox. Image: Threads

Following the trail of the partygoers

Together, McGee and Dana set out to identify and track down everyone who attended that long-ago party. One of them, they reason, must be behind the blackmail. Or must know who is. Their search takes them from one coast to the other, and into a string of seedy lives that have gone nowhere good in the years since Big Sur. Some of the people they find are pathetic. Others are dangerous. And before long, the bodies begin to accumulate.

Meanwhile, McGee and Dana grow close. Very close. This is, after all, a Travis McGee novel.

A novel of its time

Reading The Quick Red Fox today is a little like opening a time capsule. The gin flows freely (this is the first book in which McGee switches from bourbon to Plymouth gin). Everyone smokes. And the attitudes toward women are, to put it gently, of their era. MacDonald treats his female characters with more sympathy than most of his contemporaries in the genre. Still, McGee’s conviction that a few nights in his company can heal a wounded woman’s soul wears thin. It wore thin for me, anyway.

Then there’s McGee’s habit of pausing the action to deliver little sermons on the state of American society. Sometimes these asides are sharp and funny. MacDonald was a shrewd observer of the hustlers, phonies, and developers who were busily paving over Florida, and of the hollow glamour of Hollywood. At other times, the commentary simply stops the story dead in its tracks.

The plot itself is serviceable but thin. The search for the blackmailer amounts to a series of interviews, one after another, until the culprit falls into place with less surprise than I’d hoped for. The real interest lies elsewhere: in Dana Holtzer, who emerges as one of the more fully realized characters in the early books, and in a melancholy ending that hits harder than the solution to the mystery. That ending suggests why the series endured long after so many of its imitators have been forgotten.

Lysa Dean, by the way, returns 17 years later in Free Fall in Crimson, the 19th novel in the series.

Now, time for a confession

I didn’t write this review. As an experiment, I turned to Claude, instructing the chatbot to draft a 600-word review in the style of my blog and formatting it for publication in WordPress. What emerged was almost exactly what you’ve seen above. To my amazement, Claude produced a review that not only matches my own reading of the book but did so in what is recognizably my style. And its review includes details about the book that I’d forgotten.

I did supply the headline. I made a few minor changes in the syntax. And I had to make a number of technical changes to the review to fit it neatly into the standard format of my blog. But everything else came from Claude, as you see it.

Scary, isn’t it?

About the author

Photo of John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series
John D. MacDonald. Image: Sarasota History Alive!

John D. MacDonald (1916-86) was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Syracuse University and earned an MBA at Harvard in 1939. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, in the China-Burma-India theater. After the war, he wrote hundreds of short stories for the pulp magazines before turning to novels. In all, he published more than 70 books, including The Executioners, the basis for the film Cape Fear. The Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master, and The Green Ripper, the 18th McGee novel, won a National Book Award in 1980. MacDonald spent much of his adult life in Florida. He died in Milwaukee in 1986.

I’ve reviewed all three of the books preceding this one in the series:

You’ll find other great reading at:

And you can always find the most popular of my 2,500 reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.