38, WG34, M27, E38, / NG4, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

John D. MacDonald, Cinnamon Skin

Der vorletzte Band, in dem Meyer seine Nichte und sein Boot verliert und sich mit McGee auf die Suche nach dem Mörder macht, gehört mit Sicherheit zu meinen Top Five der Serie. Nebenbei ist es auch der erste Band in dem er ein Buch von Stephen King erwähnt.
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.. I wonder about her. When they filmed that introduction she had no way of knowing that she would be frozen there in time, anxious and running. Does she ever think about how strange that is? Multiply viewers times original episodes and the countless reruns on hundreds of stations, and you can see she has been looked at a billion times. What do you pay a person to be looked at a billion times? How many thousand miles has she run? It's the fly-in-amber idea, plus a paradox of time and space. Maybe she never thinks of it these days. Or yawns when she sees herself. Last night I saw her again, late, in a Toronto hotel room. And she became Norma: dark hair and vitality. Now she is caught in some eternal time lock. Death is an unending rerun until the last person with any memory of you is also dead."
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.. She was my very last blood relative. It's like a superstitious fear, having no one left in the world directly related to you by blood. As if you had started somehow to disappear.
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..The brain has time to realease the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why,what, who ... and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We're each expert in our own death."
And I knew that strange last statement was correct. We're experts. We get it done the first time we try it. And we spend too much time thinking about it before we do it.
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(John D. MacDonald, Cinnamon Skin, 1982)

37, WG33, M26, E37, / NG4, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

John D. MacDonald, Free Fall in Crimson

Das Buch schien mir schon früher eines der schwächeren in der Reihe zu sein, aber der Vollständigkeit wollte ich es noch mit reinnehmen - und vielleicht ihm noch eine Chance geben. Es gefällt mir immer noch nicht so gut wie andere aus der Serie, aber einige Kapitel sind schön, besonders das mit der ersten Ballonfahrt und wie Travis mit Anne Renzetti zusammenkommt.
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What I did not want, most of all, was to become some symbol of challenge, so that their buddies would look me up to take a chop and try their luck. I wanted no part of any OK Corral syndrome. I had long outgrown that kind of testicular lunacy. People who become legends in their own time usually have very little time left.
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"My dear, you have put your finger on the artistic conundrum we all struggle with. How, in these days of intensive communication on all levels, can you tell talent from bullshit? Everybody is as good, and as bad, as anybody wants to think they are."
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(John D. MacDonald, Free Fall in Crimson, 1981)

36, WG32, M25, E36, / NG4, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

John D. MacDonald, The Scarlet Ruse

Irgendwann beim letzten oder vorletzten Band fiel mir ein, dass es in diesem Buch um Briefmarken geht und das und ein paar andere Erinnerungen daran bewogen mich dazu, den Band noch dazwischen zu klemmen bevor es in die Zielgerade geht. Als ich zu der Stelle kam, wo Travis ein paar der seltenen Briefmarken beschreibt und dabei eine mit einem verkehrt herum fliegendem Doppeldecker ist, war das pure Freude.
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35, WG31, M24, E35, / NG4, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper

Ich hatte Bedenken, diesen Band wieder zu lesen, weil Gretels Tod so traurig ist, aber konnte dann doch nicht wiederstehen, schon weil die Story so gradlinig ist und ganz anders als die anderen Bände, wohl hauptsächlich weil McGee sein eigener Auftraggeber bei seinem Rachefeldzug ist. Und der Titel ist einfach nur genial.
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It had taken most of the five months to finish the job of sorting myself out. Meyer had put me on the right track. I didn't know what he had meant when he said to me, "Not one of us ever grows up to be what he intended to be. Not one of us fulfills his own expectations, Travis. We are all our own children, in that sense. At some point, somewhere, we have to stop making demands."
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(John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper, 1979)

34, WG30, M23, E34, / NG4, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

John D. MacDonald, The Empty Copper Sea

Blöderweise konnte ich der Leseprobe am Ende von "The Dreadful Lemon Sky" nicht lange widerstehen und lud mir den Band als Sonntagslektüre auf den Paperwhite. Immerhin ist das der Band, in dem Travis Gretel Howard kennenlernt, die Frau, die nur fünf Monate oder so Travis' Traumfrau sein darf - aber sonst hätte MacDonald die Serie ja auch da schon drangeben können. Bemerkenswert war noch, dass ich mich zu Beginn noch erinnern konnte, wer der Mörder war, aber im Laufe des Buches doch wieder zweifelte, weil ich soviel anderes vergessen hatte.
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If I were King of the World I would roam my kingdom in rags, incognito, dropping fortunes onto the people who are nice with no special reason to be nice, and having my troops lop off the heads of the mean, small, embittered little bastards who try to inflate their self-esteem by stomping on yours. I would start the lopping among post-office employees, bank tellers, bus drivers, and pharmacists. I would go on to checkout clerks, bellboy, prowl-car cops, telephone operators, and U.S. Embassy clerks. By God, there would be so many heads rolling here and there, the world would look like a berserk bowling alley. Meyer says this shows a tad of hostility.
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(John D. MacDonald, The Empty Copper Sea, 1978)

33, WG29, M22, E33, / NG4, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

John D. MacDonald, The Dreadful Lemon Sky

In diesem Band befand sich die Szene, die ich gesucht hatte (in der McGee einem gierigen Bestattungsunternehmer im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes einen Strich durch die Rechnung macht) und auch der Rest der Story kam beim lesen wieder und war wie zu Erwarten der reinste Genuß. Ich denke, alle noch folgenden Bände werde ich nicht lesen, aber vielleicht noch zwei oder drei.
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We are never the best judges of what is meaningful and what is trivial in our lives, I guess. The accidents of time and place change the script, and later we say it happened on purpose.
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I whapped a mosquito which tasted the side of my neck and rolled him into a tiny moist goblet of meat and dropped him out of his life onto the deck. In many ways the Hindu is right. All life in all forms is so terribly transient there is an innocence about all acts and functions of life. Death, icy and irrevocable, is the genuine definition of reality. In my unthinking reflex I was doubtless improving the mosquito breed. If, over a millennium, man whapped every side-of-the-neck-biter, maybe the mosquito would bite only neck napes.
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Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all the skies.
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(John D. MacDonald, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, 1974)

32, NG4, M21, E32, / WG28, F11, MF0, B2, D0, Frz0, C0, NA1

Joe R. Lansdale, Born for Trouble - The Further Adventures of Hap and Leonard

Endlich wieder neuer Stoff von diesem einmaligen Duo, wurde auch zeit. Zur Hälfte kannte ich die Stories, wie Briar Patch Boogie und Cold Cotton, in dieser neuen Sammlung zwar schon, aber zähle sie trotzdem als neu, weil ich mich kaum noch an sie erinnern konnte. Dazu ein paar neue Stories - vor allem Hodoo Harry gefiel mir sehr - und ein Vorwort von Lansdale über seine spezielle Beziehung zu seinen "Boys" und was es mit ihrem Alter und Lebensumständen auf sich hat. Da hatte ich auch schon einige Male drüber gegrübelt und Lansdales Erklärung scheint mir bis jetzt die sinnvollste, und auch eine die sich auf alle Serienfiguren anwenden lässt.
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A note. This really should go without saying, but some readers say, "Well, wouldn't they be old by now? Unable to do what they do?"
In reality they would be slightly older than me. And I am no spring chicken. Though I'm spry. But here's the thing - as real as they seem to me, they have a different relationship with time than the rest of us.
I let them age, but I have never done it on a year-by-year basis. Like Travis McGee, Philip Marlowe, James Bond, and numerous other fictional characters, they move at a different pace and have multiple adventures that no living person might have in a lifetime, or two.
I consider a year when I do not write about them to be a year in which they remain, timewise, in amber. When I return to them, or they return to me, the clock starts again, though I don't worry if it's the year it should be after their last adventure. If I wait eight years between novels, or what have you, they are only slightly older than when I ceased writing about them eight years before. Their current adventure will take place in the current year, which means they do not maintain a realistic chronology. I may even decide to write about them when they are younger, or middle-aged. I get to chose.
Some folks are really bugged by this. I'm not sure why, but they are. It pops up in a lot of discussions. At the same time, this approach is one that has been around forever; story heroes are not necessarily subject to the ticking of the clock.
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(Joe R. Lansdale, Born for Trouble - The Further Adventures of Hap and Leonard, 2022)