Travis McGee: Twenty-One Color-Coded Novels and One Houseboat at Slip F-18

Travis McGee lives on a houseboat called the Busted Flush, docked at Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale. He does not have a real job. What he does is recover stolen property for people who have been cheated, and take half the value as his fee. He calls it salvage work.

John D. MacDonald created McGee in 1964 with The Deep Blue Good-by and wrote twenty more novels in the series over the next two decades. Every title contains a color. Most of them stay in Florida, though MacDonald was willing to send McGee elsewhere when a case called for it, out to the desert Southwest in A Purple Place for Dying and into Hollywood in The Quick Red Fox.

MacDonald understood Florida before most writers bothered to try. The books track the building out of the coast, the draining of wetlands and the slow loss of the places that made the state worth living in. McGee notices all of it and is not quiet about it. But the stories never read as lectures. They move fast, they hit hard, and they leave you wanting to drive to Fort Lauderdale to see whether Slip F-18 is still there.

The series is available at Bookshop.org, Amazon and most Florida libraries. Start with The Deep Blue Good-by, or if you want the best single novel, try The Long Lavender Look.