McBee, McGee, and TMI

Beginning in my teen years in the 1960’s I read every paperback novel I could find written by John D. McDonald. Mostly I found his books on the twirling metal racks in 7-11 type stores or in the news-stall downtown that was popular with teenage boys because the guy would sell us Playboy magazines.

McDonald wrote pop crime fiction and was best known for his serial anti-hero, Travis McGee, whose book titles each included a different color. (Pale Gray For Guilt; The Girl In the Brown Paper Wrapper; A Deadly Shade of Gold) If you pick up on the similarity of my main character McBee to McGee, I assure you it's coincidental. :)

I’ve read that VP Dick Cheney got Prez W. Bush hooked on McGee novels while Bush lived in the White House.  I’ve never been comfortable with that bit of information, as I’m not sure I want a President who puts himself to sleep reading the same fluffy-sexy-violent paperbacks that I enjoy. I mean, the President has important stuff to think about.  On the other hand, maybe W needed to escape reality for a while each evening more than I did. At our professional peaks, he was running a war on the other side of the world, while I was running a high school just around the corner.

The image here of The Deep Blue Goodbye is of one of the very first McGee books. It’s not hard to tell what about this cover appealed to me, and it wasn’t the 40 cent price. In fact I bought a Spanish version of this same paperback during my only trip to Mexico City during spring break of 1970, but it didn’t work to self-teach me the language, since I rarely got past the A’s: Adios Azure

One of McDonald’s traits as a writer besides the inevitable gruesome death and his occasional great wit was his tendency to go into minute detail when describing random things. Things like stereo systems or boats or even the interior of a restaurant. As a teenager, and even in my 20’s and 30’s, I usually scanned over those details as TMI-Too Much Information. I was much more interested in getting to the sex, violence, and wit.

Last night, on the Facebook page of a reenacting friend, a lady, I read a new term that I can relate to every week during a part of our church service. When the pastor asks the congregation what prayers need to be collectively offered, the result is often an organ recital. Not music, but a string of people who stand and describe the dysfunctional organs of someone in their family, or a friend, or co-worker, or a Christian on the other side of the world. We all seem to enjoy voicing grim details, when just a name would do nicely. Again, a case of TMI. We don’t want or need the bloody details and the Lord already knows them, so just a name would do nicely.

I’m facing the same issue that some paragraphs in every chapter are either Too Much Information or Really Neat Facts, depending on the reader. As a writer of historical fiction, I’m prone to want to educate the reader about the 1860’s, to teach them how different life was before the essential inventions we take for granted, like air-conditioning, cars and refrigerators, not to mention computers, cell phones and Twitter and so on. And that’s not even getting into the military side of my novels, where solders’ ranks and organizational terms like brigade and division confuse readers.

So, I walk the fence and depend on my critiquing group of non-Civil War enthusiasts to help me keep things simple. But I still yearn to describe how many brass buttons of what kind were on the wool frock coats of a certain shade of gray worn by the Fifth Texas Infantry in 1861. And I want to elaborate on the differences between 1853 British Enfields, 1861 American Springfields, and 1854 Austrian Lorenz muskets. But that’s TMI, for sure. If you really want to know that arcane stuff, you can google damned near anything.

And honestly, I’m still more interested telling the reader how Faith, John, Levi, and Edwina sort things out among them while they cope with the hardships of 1864 in the last of the McBee trilogy: Defiant Honor.