In Time of Peril...

dispatchesfromnoir:

I love noir and hardboiled crime fiction of all varieties.  But there’s a special place in my trench coat-wearin’ heart for the little pulpy paperbacks.  They’re the perfect size to tuck in a jacket or coat pocket and read during any otherwise unoccupied moments.  I’m most apt to run across these in used bookstores, because they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.  

This little gem is John D. MacDonald’s One Fearful Yellow Eye, a Travis McGee novel.  South Florida is McGee’s usual haunt, but One Fearful Yellow Eye (all of the McGee novels had colors in the title) finds him in Chicago.  I know the hardboiled trinity is generally believed to be Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, but I think John D. MacDonald is far better than the similarly-named Ross (a pseudonym for Kenneth Millar).

McDonald (whether in the Travis McGee series, or his numerous non-series novels) has an unruffled, hardboiled, observational style of writing that I really dig.  I’ll be sharing snippets from the book over the coming days.

Fuckin’ LOVE the McGee series, and most of MacDonald’s other stuff…