Concept and Creation
| “ | At the request of Knox Burger, then at Fawcett, I attempted a series character. I took three shots at it to get one book with a character I could stay with. That was in 1964. Once I had the first McGee book, The Deep Blue Good-by, they held it up until I had finished two more, Nightmare in Pink and A Purple Place for Dying, then released one a month for three months. That launched the series. | ” |
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—John D. MacDonald, Interview by Edward Gorman |
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MacDonald was also quoted stating that he considered all the novels in the McGee series as one long story in many installments on the life and times of Trav, as McGee preferred to be called. As such, The Deep Blue Good-by is a good starting point for new readers interested in the series. While each of the 21 novels adds more information on the history, background and psyche of McGee, one of the more interesting aspects of the series is seeing him mature, evolve and age through the decades. At the same time, we see the American culture change, from the Kennedy years in The Deep Blue Good-bye through the upheaval of hippie counterculture and the sexual revolution of the late 60s and 70s until the last book in the series at the end of the Reagan Revolution in the mid-80s. As a chronicler of the cultural zeitgeist, MacDonald has been compared favorably with Charles Dickens. Reading the McGee novels in sequence therefore gives the reader a fascinating experience of seeing McGee change through the decades as American culture also changes.
Read more about this topic: The Deep Blue Good-by
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