Travis McGee

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.

He stands 6′4″ (1.93 m) tall and, although deceptively unimposing at his "fighting weight" of 205 pounds (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.

Among the few explicit mentions of family are a memory of attending a Chicago parade with his father as a boy, and a brother with whom he planned to go into business after his military service.

While McGee notes in Free Fall in Crimson (1981) that he has a history of womanizing, having "cut a wide swath through a wall of female flesh," he is honest and cynical enough to understand what this says about himself.

This is a part of his introspective nature that frequently appears throughout the series, with observations about society around him, with particular notice paid to the changing Florida environment.

McGee's cynical image of himself, some variation of which appears in every book in the series, is as a knight in rusty armor with a broken lance and swaybacked steed, fighting for what he fears are outdated or unrealistic ideals—these are clearly allusions to Don Quixote.

Professor Hugh Merrill, MacDonald's biographer, suggests that despite McGee being squarely in the hardboiled tradition, the character is nonetheless a marked departure from the typical protagonists in the genre by being a gregarious and essentially likable person rather than a loner.

[2] 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 later novels such as The Green Ripper and Free Fall in Crimson, there is a sense of desperation that the violence in the world is too senseless to be explained and will never end.

A longtime resident of Sarasota's Siesta Key, MacDonald said he placed McGee on the opposite side of the state to protect his privacy in case the series became popular.

the first great modern Florida adventurer, preceding characters and situations that appeared in novels by authors such as Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Paul Levine, Tim Dorsey, James W. Hall, and Les Standiford.

Hiaasen specifically acknowledged his debt in an introduction he wrote for a new edition of The Deep Blue Good-by in 1994, commenting that even though MacDonald was then eight years gone, he believed McGee was still around, probably sipping gin on the deck of the Busted Flush and pondering whatever it was that Florida had become or was becoming.

In Salem's Lot by Stephen King, County Sheriff Homer McCaslin berates author Ben Mears's writing.

Mystery novelist Lee Child wrote the introduction for the Random House Trade Paperback Edition of The Deep Blue Good-by published in 2013.

It has been rumored for years that MacDonald was planning a 22nd book to be titled A Black Border for McGee[6] about the death of his famous character and told from the point of view of his friend Meyer.

The prior abridged series from Random House audio featured Darren McGavin in all but two, Darker Than Amber and Cinnamon Skin, which were read by Kevin Conway.

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

The plaque was remounted on a movable wooden base, which is presently located inside the marina Dockmaster's Office and Gift Shop.