A Purple Place for Dying: A Travis McGee Novel

By John D. MacDonald and Lee Child

From a beloved master of crime fiction, A Purple Place for Dying is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
 
Travis McGee’s taking his retirement in installments while he’s still young enough to enjoy it. But sooner or later, his money runs out and he has to work. This time McGee’s lured out West to a strangely secretive meeting with a woman in trouble, in a place whose beauty hides some ugly, dangerous secrets.
 
“John D. MacDonald created a staggering quantity of wonderful books, each rich with characterization, suspense, and an almost intoxicating sense of place.”—Jonathan Kellerman
 
Mona is in love with a poor, young college professor and married to a wealthy man whom she is convinced is stealing from her trust fund. So she does what any self-respecting girl would do: She hires someone to steal her money back so she can run away with the love of her life.
 
Travis isn’t sure he wants to help out until he sees Mona getting shot and killed out on the cliffs near her cabin. Now he’s a lead suspect in a plot to help her escape, and to clear his name, he needs to get to the bottom of things. But the murders just keep mounting, and for Travis, even working with Mona’s husband doesn’t seem to help matters. Will he be able to uncover the complex plot in time to save his own skin?
 
Features a new Introduction by Lee Child

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307827272

Reviews for A Purple Place for Dying

[lamour_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Travis McGee reluctantly agrees to help a woman prove her husband has defrauded her of her inheritance. Before he really gets to know her she is shot in front of him. Even though she did not had time to hire him, he felt he should find her killer. Was it her husband or one of his business partners? Was it one of the illegitimate children he sired? Travis woks his way through the many loose ends which ends with terror filled standoff in the wilderness.

[judycroome_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I came across my old copies of John D MacDonald's laconic McGee when clearing out a dusty old box. First published in 1964 (53 years ago!) Travis McGee's third adventure is still rollicking good fun. Excellent writing that has stood the test of time - comments like "remorse is the ultimate in self-abuse" and "education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living ... it needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonsing question of all: Why?" never age; they are as applicable today as they were when I first read McGee's adventures in the early 70's. To enjoy the stories in the second decade of the 21st century a reader has to put aside the gender and racial politics of the day. McGee is the Hero who saves the little woman, and does a damn fine job of it too! Great plotting, fast pace, interesting characters and a maverick hero. What more can one ask when whiling away a lazy afternoon?

[ikeman100 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of MacDonald's famous Travis McGee novels. This one is #3 in the series but it does not matter in which order you read. This very successful author can really tell a story. These are period pieces set in early sixties and work really well today if you understand the times. Great author!

[waldhaus1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Going through McGee one o time. I pay more attention to the details and the markets for the era, things like Formica and pay phones. Still out of Florida. Waiting for MacDonald to bring him back.

[kmartin802_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When his money gets into the reserve, Travis McGee sets aside his retirement and goes looking for a lucrative job. This time he has headed out West to work for a woman named Mona who is convinced that her husband has stolen the money she inherited from her father. She needs money because she wants to run away with a college professor.McGee is ready to say no since he doesn't like Mona and doesn't know what he can do that lawyers and accountants aren't already doing. But things change when Mona is shot and killed while standing next to Travis. By the time Travis walks down to the nearest phone and calls the sheriff a couple of hours have gone by. When he returns to the isolated cabin there is no body and no indication that anything happened. The police are skeptical especially since a couple looking like Mona and her college professor got on a plane for points South just the day before.Travis knows what he saw and begins his own investigation. The college professor's sister is on his side since she can't believe that her brother would have run off without talking to her and he certainly wouldn't have run off without his insulin and supplies. Travis also convinces Mona's husband that things are not like they look at first glance. The husband has his own assortment of possible enemies and also has the Feds looking into his business practices which are decidedly shifty. Travis agrees to work for the husband because he likes him more than he liked Mona.This was an engaging historical mystery filled with attitudes that sort of made me cringe while listening to the audiobook. Husbands using physical punishment on their wives wouldn't be acceptable these days and were likely illegal then too. Travis's attitudes to women would not make a desirable partner these days for most women. Not that he is looking for any relationship deeper than a sidewalk puddle after a summer rain. He's proud to be a beach bum and take his retirement in chunks while he is young enough to enjoy it. But when problems need an unconventional, maybe even illegal, solution, no one is better than Travis McGee.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have read most of the Travis McGee series before but somehow not this one.

I have conflicting feelings about this book and the series overall. I love the way MacDonald uses words and the plot is, as usual, well crafted and satisfying. I have a more difficult time with McGee's, and one assumes McDonald's, attitude towards women - it isn't exactly sexist or patronizing but it has some of those overtones. On the other hand, the more you learn about McGee over the course of the series, the less sexist he appears. Is it just the 1960s/70s way of talking or that background culture? Or is it something specific to Travis McGee? I don't know but I can see some female readers hating this character (and therefore inevitably the book).

[kevn57-163679 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

MacDonald is a superb writer and the Travis McGee series just continues to get better and better. A series of mysteries can often take on a pattern and sameness of tone that make it to familiar and slightly boring, MacDonald has avoided that in the first three McGee novels.

This McGee novel has my favorite quote “People who censor books are usually illiterate” this quote from 1964 seems even more appropriate with the recent battle in the Senate over SOPA and how the internet really works.

[davewilde-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a tale of murder and despair in the enchanted hills of the Southwest. Travis McGee is almost like a fish out of water in this world. Not only is he far from his beloved marina in Florida, but this is a county ruled by a feudal oligarchy and he isn’t quite one of the good old boys in this neck of the woods. At one point, he muses that “This was the foolish end of all foolish things, in a purple place for dying. I was too far from the bright water and the bright boats.” This is also one of the best, most well-written, of the twenty-one Travis McGee novels.

It is more of a classic hardboiled murder mystery than most of the McGee novels. This one involves a woman named Mona Yeoman with eyes that “were the beautiful blue of robins’ eggs, and had just about as much expression.” She didn’t seem to fit this rough, isolated country. “She was a big ripe-bodied blonde of about thirty.” She was arrogant, in control. “She would have looked more at home on Park Avenue and Fifty-Something,” but here “she strode up the gravel road in six-stitch boots, twill trousers, a tweed hacking coat, a sand-pale cowgirl hat.” “She was destined to walk ahead with most of the world following in single file.” “She had a lot of vitality, a lot of gloss and bounce and directed energy.” She was married to an older gentleman, the richest man in the county, who owned every lawyer, every banker, and every judge in the county, and she told McGee that she had a boyfriend, a poor college professor, and she wanted him to find some way out of her marriage and he would get half the settlement. She was tired of being a captive princess, but moments later, there was a “wet hole punched high in her spine, through the silk blouse, dead center, about two inches below where her neck joined her good shoulders.”

McGee is now somehow mixed up in something he didn’t bargain for and no one seems to want him hanging around, not the sheriff, and not the businessmen. No one buys his story. Not much. What with Mona and the boyfriend having been seen at the airport that afternoon, catching a flight out.
This is one terrific novel that is more focused and tight than most McGee novels are. There doesn’t seem to be any ranging off into banter about unconnected things here. There are no wasted words or wasted actions. It’s a mystery and McGee is going to solve it or die trying. The mood and atmosphere of this novel is captured by the dry harsh climate of the Southwest so different from McGee’s native world in Florida.

[datrappert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yet another book length meditation on the weaknesses of the fairer sex and the ability of a good man to rescue at least one suicidal virgin. MacDonald is consistent, in any case, from book to book in this regard. Written in the form of a murder mystery. The story will hold your interest, of course--this is MacDonald, but it does make you wonder what it was like being married to him....

[andyray_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The purple in this case is the purple of the western scenery at twilight in the closest thing JDM comes to a shootout.