As Carla and I were getting ready to head out of town last week, I walked across the orchard to her grandparents' old house where we store the legacy of my misspent youth -- the boxes upon boxes of paperbacks I collected as a geeky, gawky, how's-the-weather-up-there kid. I grabbed a handful of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels and we hit the road.

And, well, ... wow. Sure, the books are dated, particularly in terms of what McGee would probably call "the man-woman thing." But the entertainment quotient is high -- off-the-charts high by today's bloated bestseller standard, in fact -- and the writing is seldom less than quietly spectacular. Here's a fairly typical passage from 1971's A Tan and Sandy Silence that might be of some small interest to bloggers (and blog readers) like me and thee:

The motel television was on the cable. We turned the sound off and watched the news on the electronic printer, going by at a pace for a retarded fifth grader, white on black printing with so many typos the spelling was more like third grade than fifth.

The woes of the world inched up the screen. Droughts and murders. Inflation and balance of payments. Drugs and demonstrations. Body counts and new juntas.

Spiro was dead wrong. The trouble with the news is that everybody knows everything too fast and too often and too many times. News had always been bad. The tiger that lives in the forest just ate your wife and kids, Joe. There are no fat grub worms under the rotten logs this year, Al. Those sickies in the village on the other side of the mountain are training hairy mammoths to stomp us flat, Pete. They nailed up two thieves and one crackpot, Mary. So devote wire service people and network people and syndication people to gathering up all the bad news they can possibly dredge and comb and scrape out of a news-tired world and have them spray it back at everybody in constant streams of electrons, and two things happen. First, we all stop listening, so they have to make it even more horrendous to capture our attention. Secondly, we all become even more convinced that everything has gone rotten, and there is no hope at all, no hope at all. In a world of no hope the motto is semper fidelis, which means in translation, "Every week is screw-your-buddy week and his wife too, if he's out of town."

As the Post's Jonathan Yardley wrote not long ago, "For my money, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction -- not crime fiction; fiction, period..." Give old Trav a read, and see if you don't agree.

NOTE: No Amazon link because digging through the musty stacks in your local used bookshop is at least half the fun....

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