“I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved, the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And death.”


Reading The Empty Copper Sea on the heels of the two previous entries, The Turquoise Lament and The Dreadful Lemon Sky, it is easy to see how all three are tied together by the restless introspection of Travis McGee some might call a mid-life crisis. The New York Times was already calling Travis McGee a mythic figure, and The Boston Globe had called MacDonald one of the most entertaining and probing writers in America. This was no small praise considering MacDonald was writing in the mystery/male adventure genre. But as the Washington Post Book World noted all those years ago:

“MacDonald is not to be taken lightly…without any pretensions he has serious things to say, and he says them uncommonly well.”

Vonnegut wasn’t kidding when he referred to MacDonald’s writings as treasures on a par with Tutankhamen. He captured a time and place, but he also captured the human condition, the mingling between the sexes, and societal decay, with an honest and unpretentious eye. Yes, in many ways the Travis McGee series was true to its origins, and it was the male fantasy version. But there was also great insight which MacDonald brought to bear on both society and the human condition. McGee feels real because he is an amalgam of men like him, and the women and girls, who ran the spectrum from free-loving beach bunnies to strong and independent women, and everything in between, felt real because they were girls and women the reader had known. The Empty Copper Sea, as much as any book in the series, shows MacDonald to be a serious novelist, despite his pulp background.

On a May morning as McGee is doing some much needed maintenance on the Busted Flush, Van Harder comes aboard to ask for McGee’s help. A born-again Christian who has left the bottle behind, MacDonald doesn’t take a swipe at that, as many of today’s writers would. It is simply part of the story. It’s been almost a year since the incident where a man named Hub Lawless was lost at sea, supposedly because Van Harder got drunk helming the Julie. Harder has lost his license, and his dignity. Even the money he offers McGee will have to be paid out over time, as he tries to salvage his reputation:

“Everything he had was wrapped up in that request; his pride, his dignity, his seafaring career, his worth as a man. And I sensed that this was the very last thing he’d been able to think of. Travis McGee, the last chance he had.”

So McGee and Meyer head to Timber Bay posing as potential buyers of Hub Lawless’s holdings. They are of course trying to figure out just what happened that night Van Harder took out Hub Lawless and his right hand John Tuckerman, with two young women aboard. There is almost a sense of fun initially to this one, with McGee and Meyer arriving in Timber Bay to con people, and poke around. Empty Copper Sea has a much different atmosphere than Dreadful Lemon Sky, despite the con.

McGee is still at loose ends personally, however, without realizing what’s wrong with him. One of the great sidekicks in this genre, Meyer, does know, and isn’t reticent to tell his old friend that he’s almost become a bore with his melancholy:

“You have felt that horrid rotten exhalation, Travis, that breath from the grave, that terminal sigh. You’ve been singing laments for yourself. Laments, regrets, remorses.”

Meyer goes even further:

“And you are walled, in an emotional sense. There is no genuine give-and-take. There is no real involvement, lately. You are going through the motions. As with the piano player. As with Nick Noyes. You are vaguely predatory lately. And irritable. And listless. You are getting no emotional feedback.”

This is all a carryover from a larger story-line which began with The Turquoise Lament and continued to a lesser degree in The Dreadful Lemon Sky. It is much easier to see when reading this one after Lament and Lemon Sky, that McGee’s wallowing in missed opportunities and regrets is sort of a soft underscore to these three mystery/adventures.

Sheriff Hack Ames, who literally kicked Van Harder when he was down, has photographic evidence that Hub Lawless is actually alive, and somewhere in Mexico with a boatload of money — the amount keeps growing until it’s close to a million. McGee discovers that bad investments and the very sexy architect named Kristin Peterson may have led Lawless to set up Van Harder:

“He was the innocent bystander who’d been run down by somebody else’s fun machine, and all I had to do was repair his reputation somehow. And stop moaning about myself.”

As McGee and Meyer poke around while waiting for the Sheriff’s man and the insurance investigator who went with him to Mexico to return, McGee gets more entangled with cute lounge piano player Billy Jean Bailey than he’d intended. The brief coupling which came about by nature, and McGee’s desire not to damage her pride, will eventually bring about tragedy for someone, and a moment of violence which almost touches Meyer.

The two young women who were aboard the boat, Felicia Amber, and Michelle Burns, are wonderfully drawn by MacDonald, giving the reader a vivid picture of the girls; one Honduran girl who speaks with an accent but thinks she doesn’t, and another who has the looks and personality of Doris Day but is what is commonly known among men as a semi-pro.

There is more going on in Timber Bay, however, than trying to figure out whether Hub Lawless is alive or not. While McGee ingratiates himself into the fabric of Timber Bay, we get the sharp and insightful social commentary for which MacDonald is known. Some of it, as is so often the case, involves Florida:

“Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got here. So why should they fight to turn the clock back? It looks great the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it for the first time and wouldn’t change a thing. And meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard.”

MacDonald also expounds on the biker culture:

“They are fading into history, like Pancho Villa’s irregulars. All the macho whiskers and the leather clothes and the dead eyes and their feral, abused little women.”

When McGee goes out to speak with the man Hub Lawless left behind, John Tuckerman, this very good story turns into something more, as the emotional feedback Meyer spoke about to McGee stares him in the face. It turns out she’s the sister of John Tuckerman, caring for a brother who has drunk himself into mental simplicity. McGee’s reaction to Gretel is visceral, and any man who’s ever had that reaction to a woman will appreciate the eloquence of MacDonald’s description:

“When she looked away, I had a very strange feeling. I felt as if I had shucked some kind of drab outer skin. It was old and brittle, and as I stretched and moved, it shattered and fell off. I could breathe more deeply. The Gulf was a sharper blue. There was wine in the air. I saw every grain of sand, every fragment of seashell, every movement of the beach grasses in the May breeze. It was an awakening. I was full of juices and thirsts, energies and hungers, and I wanted to laugh for no reason at all.”

Gretel snaps McGee out of his crisis, and being, as Meyer notes, a child of his times, he’ll have none of this nonsense about demeaning the feminine sex by using the term girl, rather than woman:

“Meyer, would it offend your sense of fitness if I called Gretel a girl?” — McGee

“Instead of person or a woman or some such? You want to be patronizing and chauvinistic, eh? Look down upon her?” — Meyer (perhaps facetiously)

“Cut it out, Meyer. I can go with all that approach right up to a point. When it doesn’t mean much one way or another. You know. But here we have one of the truly great, all-time, record-breaking, incomparable girls. And I want to call her a girl.” — McGee

Though it takes some time to get there, there is a terrific ending to this one I suspect some readers won’t see coming. It’s violent and exciting, and unexpected. It begins with a pair of binoculars, and leads to a moment of terror for McGee, a moment in which he finally, after all these years, grows up.

It’s all tied up neatly, with only the relationship between Gretel and McGee left up in the air. McGee loves her, but is Gretel ready? It is hardly as simplistic as her not wanting to be McGee’s solution, because she is more than that and knows it. Perhaps it’s because I know about The Green Ripper that I don’t feel Gretel’s reaction rings quite as genuine as Cindy Birdsong’s did in The Dreadful Lemon Sky. Both relationships have a rich mature feel to the male/female dynamic but Cindy’s reasons in Lemon Sky feel more grounded, and resonated with me more than Gretel’s.

Overall, a truly stellar entry in this great series. It’s probably a 4.5 for me, as Lemon Sky was, so I’ll round up as I did there. MacDonald captured the mood and spirit of his times and his location better than anyone, while still giving readers a thrilling and involving tale. The Empty Copper Sea is funny, insightful, suspenseful and resonating. A great writer at his very peak. ( )

IF YOU READ ONE OF HIS BOOKS , THIS WOULD BE IT. GREAT WRITING STYLE.
HE INTRODUCES A LOVE NAMED GRETEL WHO IS PROMINENT IN THE PLOT THAT INVOLVES A MANS DISAPPEARANCE TO AVID BANKRUPTCY. IS HE DEAD FROM APPARENT SUICIDE? ( )

Another good book by the author that set the standard for thriller series in the 1960s. This was not the usual 4 stars but worth the read. ( )

For once, McGee isn't trying to save a damsel in distress or investigate the murder of a former lover. Instead, an old acquaintance asks him to restore his reputation and enable him to get his license to run ships back after he was accused of drunkenness and negligence during an incident in which a small-town Florida business kingpin fell off a boat and drowned. So McGee and Meyer (thank goodness) head to the Florida Gulf Coast to see what they can do. Meyer has obtained a letter of introduction from a tycoon who owes him a favor, so he and McGee get cooperation from most of the town's key players, including the sheriff, banker, insurance salesman, lawyer, and so on. Restoring the reputation becomes a minor and almost peripheral part of the book, however, as they find themselves delving into the mystery of whether the drowned man is actually dead or whether he ran off to Mexico with his Scandinavian architect, with a million dollars stolen from his various businesses, while leaving his wife and two teenage daughters with a $2.2 million insurance policy. This book provides lots of neatly drawn character studies of the folks McGee and Meyer deal with, which are the highlights of the book. The observations about the changes to Florida as a result of the real estate boom are less emotional than usual. Other factors are also at play, including drugs, which have become a primary subject of the last few McGee books. McGee is on good behavior here. He only breaks one heart and there is far less emphasis on his sexual exploits than in the two previous volumes. What a relief, since MacDonald's sex scenes are laughable. Overall, this is a pretty good mystery. It still contains its quotient of violence and death, but it is far less gratuitous than usual. ( )

An okay entry in the McGee series ( )