The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald (1979).
1979 was a big year for John D. MacDonald. My local drug store shelves groaned with Travis McGee paperbacks. His 1977 epic Condominium was shown as a syndicated miniseries. And I almost bought a paperback of The Green Ripper. The cover art intrigued me. But the first few pages, read at Struble's Drug Store on a rainy Friday night, left my 13 year old self unmoved.
I did not read my first MacDonald novel until winter 1994, a dark and fretful personal time. I read the first McGee novel, The Deep Blue Goodbye, and then Condominium, which I loved
And this week I finally got to grips with The Green Ripper.
I'm sure this is not a typical McGee adventure. The Deep Blue Goodbye was strictly small-bore, local, and tightly observed. I'd have to read a few more to assure myself The Green Ripper is aberrant, and I'm not sure I will.
The novel begins with McGee and his friend Meyer mulling over the horrible state of the world (for members of the U.S. petty bourgeoisie like themselves) on a dark and stormy December night:
"How much time have we got?"
"If nobody pushes the wrong button or puts a bomb under the wrong castle, I would give us five more years at worst, twelve at best. What is triggering it is the crisis of reduced expectations. All over the world people are suddenly coming to realize that their children and grandchildren are going to have it worse than they did, that the trend line is down. So they want to blame somebody. They want to hoot and holler in the streets and burn something down."
"Whose side are you on?"
"I'm one of the scufflers. Cut and paste. Fix the world with paper clips and rubber bands."
The cry of the panicked middle classes is also heard very clearly in Meyer's line "....there are too many mouths to feed."
MacDonald and his vigilante hero like to have their cake and eat it, too.
In Chapter One, we get McGee pondering the precarious state of the planet. He then makes love to Gretel, the love of his life. And then he gets a chance for some portentous humbuggery:
In Chapter One, we get McGee pondering the precarious state of the planet. He then makes love to Gretel, the love of his life. And then he gets a chance for some portentous humbuggery:
....So the gusty winds of a Friday night in December came circling through the marina, grinding and tilting all the play boats and work boats around us, creaking the hulls against the fenders, clanking fittings against masts. While in the big bed in the master stateroom her narrowed eyes glinted in faint reflected light, my hands found the well-known slopes and lifts and hollows of her warmth and agility. We played the games of delay and anticipation, of teasing and waiting, until we went past the boundaries of willed restraint and came in a mounting rush that seemed to seek an even greater closeness than the paired loins could provide. And then subsided, with the outdoor wind making breathing sounds against the superstructure of the old barge-type houseboat, and the faint swing and dip of the hull seeming to echo, in a slower pace, the lovemaking just ended. With neither of us knowing or guessing that it was the very last night. With neither of us able to endure that knowledge had we been told.
As with any great vigilante revenge potboiler, love's young dream is short-lived. Someone slips Gretel a Georgi Markov stinger, and McGee sets off to find the killers.
Leading him to the rural training camp of The Church of the Apocrypha. MacDonald presents them as a Jonestown-type cult, but bent on terrorism and having received training in Cuba, Lebanon, et cetera.
Jay
14 April 2018
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