Contemporary American society provides far more than the setting for MacDonald's Travis McGee novels; it directly generates the problems McGee encounters in each of them and clearly spawns the antagonists McGee must overcome. From The Deep Blue Goodbye, where Junior Allen preys on the young and uncertain female victims of newfound social and sexual freedom, to The Lonely Silver Rain, whose villain embodies both the organizers and the victims of the South Florida drug trade, MacDonald offers readers an always critical, often bitter view of American culture. In fact, the series as a whole constitutes a thoughtful if informal social history of the last twoand-a-half decades of American life.

Although McGee's adventures sometimes take him far afield, MacDonald's Florida offers an environment conducive to revealing cultural extremes. It is at once the home of assorted social renegades (boat bums like McGee, for example, or free-lance figures...