Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-boiled sentimentality: the secret history of American crime stories (Columbia University Press, 2009), p.170; MacDonald, John D. "How to Live With a Hero", The Writer (Combat Publishing, Waukesha, WI), 7/2008, pp.22-23. Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.” Kevin Jagernauth (25 April 2011). "Paul Greengrass Eyes 'Travis McGee' For Next Film". The Playlist. Archived from the original on 29 April 2011.

Even when that means believing women are nothing more than objects of his sliding scale of deserved affection and taking advantage of those too weak or too kind or too grateful to say no.Junior Allen, a.k.a., A.A. Allen, a.k.a., Dads, was in jail with her father and somehow learned just enough. Enough to jerk over the Berry family. And to take a liking for it. He seems particularly talented at finding nasty women who like the hurtin' as well as those who will break the worst. Deeleen and Corry are two "little sweethearts" Dads is chatting for the next woman he intends to break, Patty Devlan. Pete was the set-up for Patty. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale. A very well told story. I get a little lost in the descriptions of the boat world because I can't find my way around. 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,

The news that Leonardo DiCaprio was going to play Travis McGee in a movie based on The Deep Blue Good-by had me over the moon. While not quite the physical match for John D. MacDonald's iconic detective, or rather self-described 'salvage consultant,' I was still ready to see Leo chillin' on the Busted Flush in the Dennis Lehane-scripted adaptation. But Leo left the building - but would still produce - so the hunt was on for a new leading man to play the Fort Lauderdale beach bum who takes on clients only when the booze runs dry. Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making-out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in supermarkets.” (MacDonald doesn’t devote as much of his cynicism to young women in his later novels.) A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability. But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out, in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.”

All these women, thoroughbred or common, whole or corrupt, are of one sort, although one minor (possibly continuing) character may be native American. What’s it about? McGee helps recover a lost fortune in stolen goods to help a friend and Allen is the gold hoarding dragon who must first be bested. This comparison to knights errant and romanticism is intentional, MacDonald has drawn McGee to be the last of the free romantics in a world growing increasingly more mechanized and impersonal. And he wrote it in 1964! Frail and broken, Lois can barely get out of bed when Travis finds her, let alone keep herself alive. But Travis turns into Mother McGee, giving Lois new life as he looks for the ruthless man who steals women’s spirits and livelihoods. But he can’t guess how violent his quest is soon to become. He’ll learn the hard way that there must be casualties in this game of cat and mouse. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.