The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper: A Travis McGee Novel: 10

As usual a Great read with a plot that keeps you booked to the end. Loved it!!!!

Travis McGee receives a letter from a friend, Helena Pearson, after her death. In it she asks him to see if he can help her daughters, one of whom seems intent on killing herself and no one knows why. Travis inserts himself back in the daughters' lives - he knew them as children - but things are not very clear. There's something shadowy moving underneath the surface and nothing makes much sense. Why are there so many deaths? How does Maureen manage to keep coming so close to killing herself yet not remember the attempt? Is there a greater evil behind the scenes pulling the strings?All of John D MacDonald's books are thoughtful and explore human nature often at its most venal and this book is no exception. The sharp intelligence and superficial charm of the sociopath is beautifully drawn in this mystery and at the end Travis is forced to abide by someone else's choice for resolution rather than his own ideas of what is the right thing to do. This gives the ending a moral ambiguity which is unusual in one of these novels. It's still a satisfying story but with an intriguing twist at the climax.Highly recommended.

Have just started reading John D. MacDonalds stories, and so far they come up to my expectations,I am looking forward to the rest.

Surely you've read one or another of John MacDonald's "Travis McGee" novels. If you haven't, you might want to start with the very first, "The Deep Blue Goodbye." But you can also read them out of order, as I did, and "The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper" isn't a bad way to start. It's vintage MacDonald / McGee, a page turner worth every minute you choose to invest in it.MacDonald was a master, a creator of characters, images, story lines, and profound concepts that you never really forget. A creator of prose that at times is unbelievably beautiful: elegant, deceptively simple, and often just perfectly constructed. He's the sort of writer other writers dream of being (exemplified by Stephen King's many heartfelt tributes to MacDonald).This isn't really a review of the specific novel. I honestly don't see the point: the summary here at Amazon tells all you really need to know about the specific story. What you REALLY need to know is that -- with rare exceptions -- you simply can't go wrong with a MacDonald book. Every story is unique, and sturdy, and will leave you permanently affected.Update 7-20-18: I have been meaning to come back and revise this review for a long time. Indeed, for the last two or three years I've been thinking about it. As a working writer, and a fan of great crime fiction, my love of John McDonald's work and the Travis McGee series remains strong. He is still -- decades on -- one of the giants in the field. But as I started re-reading these novels, starting 3-4 years ago, I realized something that didn't penetrate my thick skull sufficiently on the first round: McDonald is just awful in the way he deals with his female characters. He truly has no idea how to assume a woman's voice; consistently, his female characters sounds like sex kitten morons. They don't sound like any women I've ever known, and once you become aware of it -- unless you steal yourself for it, accepting it as part of the era and style in which he wrote -- it invariably detracts from the novels.It's not entirely his fault. McDonald wrote in the 1940s through mid-1980s, and certainly his tone vis-a-vis women is very consistent with how most (not all) TV, movies and books treated women at least through the mid-1960s. I lately have been binge-watching the old Peter Gunn series (1958-1961). The lead, Craig Stevens, was a fine actor and very decent man to boot, and is always fun to watch. But I feel so sorry for actress Lola Albright, who played Gunn's girlfriend Edie. The actress was probably pretty bright but in the show she, too, is a purring kitten moron. I guess it just would have killed the writers if she'd been given some intelligent lines, had discussed anything besides sweet nothings and how she was going to pout because Pete had to work. Well, the McGee books have female characters who sound an awful lot like that. Less defensible is how McDonald kept writing them like that, mostly, right up until the end (mid-1980s). I mean, by the 1970s it was getting very, very out of step with reality. Oddly, in The Green Ripper (the only one is the series that I really dislike), the female character is slightly more adult, capable, and coherent.Of course, he kills her off quickly enough, and in general McDonald whacks most of his female characters. I've seen recent criticism of crime novels generally for doing this -- introducing women only as damsels in distress / conveniently agonizing murder victims -- and McDonald is very, very guilty of this sin also. Of course lots of men die in his novels, too.(And don't get me started on his sex scenes. In an interview, John Grisham said he only ever once tried to write a sex scene, and he thought it awful, so he never did it again. Smart guy! Most men, in fact, aren't very good at it. And McDonald is exceptionally bad at it. This is not him being sexist per say, just awkward and even embarrassing. Fortunately it's only, typically, a few pages per novel).I've been meaning for ages to return and amend my review to say all of this. (In fact, I even tried once, but couldn't for the life of me find how to get to my old reviews in Amazon's byzantine screens). But the recent emergence of the MeToo movement gave me even more incentive. It's certainly raised my consciousness: I knew before how women are often treated badly, but I never imaged it was so ubiquitous and damaging, so CONSTANT in the lives of most women. That made me feel that my failure to mention this in the original review here was a serious omission.Now to his credit, McDonald did NOT ever have his hero -- McGee -- acting like a damned grab-ass buffoon around the female characters. Well, they all wanted to bed him in any case, so he little incentive to. But even at that, there are a number of moments in the books when he makes clear that McGee is a stand-up guy not given to taking ugly liberties. So at least there's that.Here's my conclusion: this and ALL the McGee novels remain essential reading for mystery buffs (even The Green Ripper, which I really detest). Just go in with eyes open, aware that as marvelously skilled a writer as McDonald was -- and he really was one of the greats of the 20th century! -- he was a long way from perfect due to his ham-handedness dealing with female characters.

clever, pacey