Book Review: Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

In the second Travis McGee novel, Nightmare in Pink, McGee heads to New York at the request of one his former war buddies. The friend, now bed-ridden and close to death because of a war injury, asks McGee to help out his sister, Nina Gibson, whose fiancé was recently killed in a mugging gone bad. After the requisite swooning of a number of females at his feet, McGee does some digging and unearths a muddled (muddled that is, in terms of what the reader ever finds out about it) scheme involving a real-estate investment firm being fleeced of millions of dollars. The boyfriend worked at the firm and started having suspicions of his own, and his curiosity appears to have cost him his life.

The first-person, detective-novel trope rears its head and McGee is captured just as he starts to uncover the details behind the scam that left his friend's sister (she quickly becomes McGee's love interest) with a dead boyfriend and an envelope full of ten thousand dollars that he, the boyfriend, had finagled as part of his own snooping around. McGee and Nina aren't sure whether the dead boyfriend was himself part of the scheme as evidenced by the envelope full of money, though McGee soon determines that he had hoped to use the money as proof of the bad intentions of his colleagues at the real-estate investment firm.

John D. MacDonald's tight writing and the relentless cynical observations of McGee really make this book worth reading. However, there is little suspense in the book, either in individual scenes or in the overall arc of the plot. As mentioned, the reader never gets any real idea how the multi-million dollar scam, apparently planned and executed by a handful of people over a period of years, is pulled off. Details like that aren't always necessary in a well-written crime novel. But the lack of anything beyond a cursory glimpse of the bad guys involved in the fraud also detracts from the book. We get plenty of second-hand comments about some of nasties who are part of the plot, and then one brief passage in which one of the masterminds encounters McGee after he, McGee, has been drugged and held against his will at a bizarre mental institution. But it simply isn't enough to engender much hatred in readers or to fuel the inevitable revenge scene.

Yet, there still are many enjoyable passages throughout. That inevitable revenge scene does come about, although there is little imagination involved when McGee gets an opening and is able to initiate his escape from the mental institution. Sure, the psychedelic drugs McGee dumps into a coffee urn in the hospital's cafeteria do result in some bizarrely entertaining results, but as McGee himself laments numerous times, the only people who suffer are innocent hospital staff.

It's fairly easy to believe that MacDonald constructed the character of McGee partly as a parody of the playboy fantasy of easy women who readily offer themselves up or only need a solid right hook to make them contrite for their manipulative ways while simultaneously turning them on. So only the most frustrated and deluded readers will take this kind of dialogue seriously:

"So let's call it a draw. I'm an acceptable stud, and from the neck down you're Miss Universe. And if there was ever any reason to go to bed, we'd probably find each other reasonably competent. But I came here to talk about Charlie." 

McGee delivers the above lines to a woman minutes after meeting her. Of course, despite the absurdity of such encounters, they can be entertaining. And MacDonald recognizes the unbelievable fantasy-world, male-female interactions he creates and offsets them with McGee's own self-deprecating analysis of himself and his usual pessimistic take on everything, especially modern relationships.

And for readers who love a noirish, bleak take on life, McGee's running commentary about the state of the world and how he loathes so much of it, is one of the best parts of the book. For example, this passage is just one of many random observations McGee makes as he starts his investigation in New York:

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until the locust population reaches a certain density they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing the critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each other's throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. 

After McGee's escape from the mental institution, the bad-guy scheme falls apart and the perpetrators are caught, though readers are never witness to any of the details. As the book draws to a close, McGee's friend—Nina's brother—passes away after an operation. All that remains is for McGee to take Nina back to Florida for some therapy aboard his boat, the Busted Flush. He hammers the emotional pain out of her and she achieves the appropriate Zen state of recovery, bids farewell to her saviour and returns to the real world.