Dress Her In Indigo by John D. MacDonald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"His eyes had that look. [...] Any man who outgrows the myths of childhood is ninety-nine percent aware and convinced of his own mortality. But then comes the chilly breath on the nape of the neck, a stirring of the air by the wings of the bleak angel. When a man becomes one hundred percent certain of his inevitable death, he gets The Look."

My third review of a novel in John D. MacDonald's famous series featuring Travis McGee and colors in the titles. Dress Her in Indigo (1969) is a much earlier installment than The Empty Copper Sea and The Green Ripper which I have reviewed on Goodreads.

We meet Travis McGee and his sidekick (as well as a world-renowned economist) Meyer as they fly to Mexico City to probe the circumstances of a young woman's death in an auto accident in Oaxaca. The woman's father has hired McGee to investigate.

This is the end of the 1960s, the times of the hippies: many young people from the US go to Mexico for freedom, adventure, and to escape the Vietnam drama. McGee and Meyer spend a lot of time talking to American tourists and expatriates in Oaxaca. They begin learning details about the young woman's last months in Mexico.

The ending of the novel is fast-paced and contains one particularly brutal fragment: the reader who will not wince when reading the passage must have no heart. I certainly prefer the earlier parts of the novel which manage to convey the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, to some degree, at least. In the slow-action parts of the novel the reader will find a few well-written passages like the one I used for the epigraph above. There is some humor like in

"But I discovered I was already trying to pull the trousers off with the shoes still on, so I sat down again and untied the shoes, thus solving that problems with hardly any trouble at all.

The love scenes are quite well-written too.

Therefore I am totally at loss to explain why some dialogues are so badly written: stilted, unnatural, awkward. The conversations between McGee and Meyer on the plane sound completely unrealistic, but the following sentence, spoken by Meyer, takes the Awkwardness Prize:

"I would rather have one handful of cold mashed potato than two handsful of warm young mammalian overdevelopment."

Very marginal recommendation.

Two-and-a-half stars.

View all my reviews