Books like A Purple Place for Dying

John D. MacDonald is my latest crime/mystery reading 'crush'. Once again I'm surprised/amazed at how good some writer turned out to be who for years I never thought anything of. In this MacDonald's case I actually didn't realize that him and Ross MacDonald weren't the same person (because I'm stupid, which has been proven on many occasions here by those with more smarts and less manners than I have). And I remember finding the one Lew Archer book I read as being boring in the same way I've felt after reading Hammett. JDM is so fucking good though. I've only read some of his early novels so far, this is my third Travis McGee novel, and I've read a handful of his early standalone novels, but what stands out is how dark most of them have been. But offscreen dark generally--things happen that because so much is left for the imagination there is more effectiveness than if he had tried to 'shock'. So far though this has been my least favorite of his novels. It's more of a traditional mystery than the first two McGee novels, and it lacks any of the darkness I have been enjoying in his other novels. It's still good, just not as good. Part of the problem was the pacing of the novel. It takes so long for the investigation part to really get going. And then a lot of the elements of the story just seem to fall into place. McGee doesn't seem so much like an active participant in unraveling the corruption of a small Western city but instead just happens to show up someplace and something will happen. Partly though I was expecting something more. The previous novel, a pink something or other, had a similar feel for awhile (not really, it wasn't as passive in book 2, but just felt a little too tame, no one seemed like a real villain or something like that), but then it sharply veered into total fuckedupness. I was kind of expecting something like that in this book, but that never happened. I'm just glad this wasn't the first book I had chosen to read of his. Next up A Quick Red Fox, which has to be good because I'm sure it will be about an actual fox and all.