The Godfather of St. John Kraft & Jack Reacher
The St. John series is often compared to Lee Child’s (James Grant) Jack Reacher stories. There are certainly similarities between the lead characters and their adventures. But the two are as different as they are alike. So why the comparison?
They both spring from the same source: John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. As Mr. Grant himself said in a 2016 BBC interview, “The 21 Travis McGee books have been an inspiration to me. … I read the Travis McGee novels five years before beginning my own Jack Reacher series and for the first time I was given a sense of "the skeleton beneath" the writing. I could see what MacDonald was doing, how he was compelling me to read on.”
As for myself, I read the McGee series as a very young man. And the qualities often attributed to McGee and Reacher also spoke to me, and perhaps every reader of those works: the iconoclast who adheres to a strict moral code, the call to adventure, the travel through a range of worlds filled with wonders and dangers only glimpsed in ordinary life, inhabited by people in their many varieties, and having the lessons from those worlds etched forever in my consciousness.
My experience of the Travis McGee stories was very much in mind when St. John Kraft came to me.
The McGee books were both of their time and ahead of it. MacDonald’s tales are often decried for their portrayal of women, which is the most glaring artifact of the era in which they were created. But they are also distinguished by their indictments of environmental degradation, unreflective consumerism, and expediency without ethics; lessons we still have yet to fully absorb.
For me, the craftmanship Mr. Grant references was another key ingredient of the magic elixir. As MacDonald himself put it, “a bit of unobtrusive poetry.”
That craftsmanship included the fact that the McGee series was written in the first person. You experience McGee’s world through McGee’s eyes and soul. The immersion is total. You have a trustworthy companion on your journey. A keen observer, yes, but also resonance with a life lived, wisdom gained, and failings felt. Travis McGee was as fully formed as the best protagonists of the best literature ever written. MacDonald cited Hemingway and Dostoyevski among his influences, along with Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.
MacDonald understood in his bones every dimension of escapist literature: Not just the lurid, exotic, and titillating, but also the grounding, an appreciation of the good in people and in life, and occasional if too infrequent glimpses of transcendence. These, too, take us out of our daily lives but set us back down in a slightly better place.
Nine is intended to be one such place. Wherever you are right now as you read this might be another.