The Long Lavender Look: A Travis McGee Novel - Softcover

Buch 12 von 21: Travis McGee

MacDonald, John D.

 
9780812984026: The Long Lavender Look: A Travis McGee Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812984021 ISBN 13: 9780812984026
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Long Lavender Look is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.

A lovely young thing, wearing little more than a determined look, streaks out of the darkness and into Travis McGee’s headlights. McGee hits the brakes, misses the fleeing soul by inches, and lands upside down in ten feet of water—and right into the heart of a violent mystery.

“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut

McGee and his old friend Meyer are cruising along on their way back from a wedding when the girl darts in front of their car. They manage to emerge from the wreckage and are limping along the deserted Florida road when someone comes by in an old truck and takes a couple of shots at them. So much for Southern hospitality. McGee and Meyer head to a service station to regroup, but are there arrested and charged with murder.

It turns out a local thug has just been killed, and the lead suspects are Meyer and McGee. Someone’s obviously out to get them—and in this Twilight Zone they’ve found themselves in, they must gather their resources to fight for their lives against a deeply corrupt system.

Features a new Introduction by Lee Child

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short-story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980, he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life, he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business, he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One
late april.  Ten o’clock at night. Hustling south on Florida 112 through the eastern section of  Cypress County, about twenty miles from the intersection of  112 and the Tamiami Trail.
So maybe I was pushing  old Miss Agnes  along a little too fast. Narrow  macadam. Stars  above, and some wisps of ground mist below. But not much of it, and not often.
The big tires of the old blue Rolls pickup rumbled along the roughened surface. Big black drainage canal paralleling the road  on the  left side. Now and then an old wooden bridge  arching across the canal to serve  one of the shacky little frame houses tucked back in the swamp and skeeter country. No traffic. And  it had been  a long long day, and I was anxious to get back to Lauderdale,  to Bahia Mar, to The Busted Flush, to a long hot shower and a long cold drink and a long deep sleep.
 
I had the special  one-mile spots turned on. They are bracketed low on the massive front bumper. Essential for fast running  through  the balmy Florida nights on the straight narrow back roads, because her own headlights are feeble and set too high.
Meyer, beside me, was in a semidoze. We’d been to the wedding  of the daughter of an old friend, at the fish camp he owns on Lake Passkokee.  It is a very seldom  thing to be able to drink champagne, catch a nine-pound bass, and kiss a bride all within the same hour. Meyer had been giving me one of his lectures on the marital condition.
So I was whipping along,  but alert for the wildlife.  I hate to kill a raccoon. Urban Florida is using the rabies myth to justify wiping them out, with guns, traps, and poison. The average raccoon is more affable, intelligent, and tidy  than the average meathead who wants them eliminated, and is usually a lot better looking.
It is both sad and ironic that the areas where  the raccoon are obliterated are soon overrun with snakes.
I was alert for any reflection of my headlights in animal eyes in the darkness  of the shoulders of the road,  for any dark shape moving  out into the long reach of the beams.
But I wasn’t prepared  for the creature of the night that suddenly appeared  out of the blackness, heading from left to right,  at a headlong run. At  eighty, you are covering about a hundred and twenty feet per second. She was perhaps sixty feet in front of the car when  I first saw her. So half of one second later, when I last saw her, she was maybe ten inches from the flare of my front right fender, and that ten inches was the product  of the first effect of my reaction time. Ten inches  of  living  space instead   of  that  bone-
 
crunching, flesh-smashing thud which, once heard, lingers forever in the part of the mind where echoes live.
And I became very busy with Miss Agnes. She put her back end onto  the  left shoulder, and then  onto  the right shoulder. The swinging  headlights showed me the road once in a while. I could not risk touching the brake. This was the desperate game of  steering  with the  skid each  time, and feeding her a morsel  of gas for traction whenever  she was coming back into alignment with the highway. I knew I had it whipped,  and knew that each swing  was less extreme.
Then a rear tire went and I lost her for good.  The  back end came  around and there was a shriek of rubber, crashing of brush, a bright cracking explosion inside my skull, and I was vaguely  aware of being underwater, disoriented, tangled in strange objects, and aware of the fact that it was not a very good place to be. I did not feel any alarm. Just a mild distaste, an irritation with my situation.
Something started grabbing  at me and I tried to make it let go. Then I was up in the world of air again,  and being dragged up a slope, coughing and gagging, thinking that it was a lot more  comfortable back under the water.
“You all right,  Trav? Are you all right?”
I couldn’t answer until I could stop retching and coughing. “I don’t know yet.”
Meyer  helped me  up.  I  stood,  sopping wet, on the gravelly shoulder and flexed all the  more useful parts and muscles.  There was a strange glow in the black water. I realized Miss Agnes’s lights were still on,  and  she  had  to be ten feet under. The light went off abruptly as the water shorted her out.
I found a couple of tender places where  I had  hit the wheel and the door,  and a throbbing lump on my  head, dead center, just above  the hairline.
“And how are you?” I asked Meyer.
“I’m  susceptible  to infections  of  the upper respiratory tract, and  I’d like to lose some weight. Otherwise, pretty good.”
“In a little while I think I’m going to start being glad you came  along for the ride.”
“Maybe you’d have gotten out by yourself.” “I don’t think so.”
“I’d rather think  so. Excuse me. Otherwise I have to share the responsibility for all your future acts.”
“Do I ever do anything you wouldn’t do, Meyer?” “I could make a list?”
That was when  the reaction hit. A nice  little case of the yips and shudders. And a pair of macaroni knees. I sat down gently  on the  shoulder  of  the  road,  wrapped my  arms around my legs, and rested my forehead on my wet knees.
“Are you all right,  Trav?”
“You keep asking me that. I think I will be very fine and very dandy. Maybe five or ten minutes from now.”
It seemed  very very quiet. The bugs were beginning  to
find us. A night bird yawped way back in the marshland. Vision  had adjusted to the very pale wash of starlight on the road and on the black glass surface of the drainage canal.
Miss Agnes  was down there, resting on her side, facing in the direction from which we had come, driver’s side down. Sorry,  old lady. We gave it a good try, and damned  near made it. Except  for the tire going,  you did your usual best. Staunch, solid, and, in a very dignified way, obedient. Even in extremis, you managed  to keep from killing me.
 
I got up and gagged and tossed up half a cup of swamp water. Before he could ask me again, I told Meyer I felt much improved.  But irritable.
“What I would dearly like to do,” I said, “is go back and
find that moronic female, raise some  angry welts on her rear end, and try to teach her to breathe underwater.”
“Female?”
“You didn’t see her?” I asked him.
“I was dreaming that I, personally, Meyer, had solved the gold drain dilemma, and I was addressing all the gnomes of Zurich. Then I woke up and we were going sideways. I found the sensation unpleasant.”
“She  ran across in front of us. Very close. If I hadn’t had time to begin  to react, I’d have boosted her with the right front fender, and she would  be a piece of dead meat in a treetop back there on the right side of the road.”
“Please don’t tell me something.” “Don’t tell you what?”
“Tell me she was a shrunken  old crone. Or tell me she looked exactly like Arnold Palmer.  Or even tell  me you didn’t get a good look at her....

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812984021
ISBN 13 
9780812984026
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
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Deutschland

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