[2] Commissioned in 1964 by Fawcett Publications editor Knox Burger, the book establishes for the series an investigative protagonist in a residential Florida base.

[citation needed] Each of the 21 novels adds more information on McGee's history, background and psyche, as the character evolves over the decades.

[citation needed] MacDonald originally planned to call the character Dallas McGee, after the city, but after the Kennedy assassination he decided that name had too many negative connotations.

[4] The McGee novels feature a variety of female companions and villains, exotic locales in Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and appearances by a sidekick known only as "Meyer," a Ph.D. economist of international renown.

As Sherlock Holmes had his well-known address on Baker Street, McGee had his trademark lodgings on his 52-foot (16 m) houseboat, the Busted Flush, named for the poker hand that started the run of luck in which he won her.

McGee also owns a custom vintage Rolls-Royce that had been converted into a pickup truck long before he bought it, and painted "a horrid electric blue" by the same hand that did the conversion.

However, in The Turquoise Lament he admits to a sports-trivia fan that he played professional football for a couple of seasons before his knees were wrecked in a tackle by an opponent from the Detroit Lions.

Despite his age (his rare but recurring allusion to "birthdays with a zero in them" indicates he was about 30 at the beginning of the series and about 50 at its end), he retains the quickness and agility of a professional athlete.

(93 kg), he is much stronger than he looks, with thick wrists and long arms; occasionally, a more perspicacious adversary notes these features when deciding whether to tangle with him.

However, unlike other fictional detectives such as Raymond Chandler's jaded and world-weary Philip Marlowe, McGee clings to what is important to him: his senses of honor, obligation, and outrage.

In a classic commentary in Bright Orange for the Shroud, McGee muses, Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass.

In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him "waterfront" lots to sell.

The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.This was in a paperback originally published in 1965 when the general public was still not conversant with the concept of environmentalism.

In this first story the antagonist is Junior Allen, a smiling, seemingly friendly man, large, "cat quick", powerful, and pathologically evil.

A film version of The Deep Blue Good-by, directed by Oliver Stone with Leonardo DiCaprio as Travis McGee, was in development with a tentative release date of 2011 or 2012.

[9] On July 15, Christian Bale was attached to play the title role for the film The Deep Blue Good-by with screenplay by Dennis Lehane.