The Deep Blue Good-by (1964).
“Home is where the
privacy is. Draw all the opaque curtains, button the hatches, and with the
whispering drone of the air conditioning masking all the sounds of the outside
world, you are no longer cheek to jowl with the random activities aboard the
neighbor craft. You could be in a rocket beyond Venus, or under the icecap.”
Nightmare
in Pink (1964).
“She worked on the
twentieth floor, for one of those self-important little companies which design
packages for things. I arrived at five, as arranged, and sent my name in, and
she came out into the little reception area, wearing a smock to prove that she
did her stint at the old drawing board.”
A
Purple Place for Dying (1964).
“She took the corner too
fast, and it was definitely not much of a road. She drifted it through the
corner on the gravel, with one hell of a drop at our left, and then there was a
big rock slide where the road should have been. She stomped hard and the drift
turned into a rough sideways skid, and I hunched low expecting the white Alpine
to trip and roll. But we skidded all the way to the rock and stopped with
inches to spare and a great big three feet between the rear end and the
drop-off. The skid had killed the engine.
The
Quick Red Fox (1964).
“A big noisy wind out of
the northeast, full of a February chill, herded the tourists off the afternoon
beach, driving them to cover, complaining bitterly. It picked up gray slabs of
the Atlantic and smacked them down on the public beach across the windshields
of the traffic, came into the cramped acres of docks and boat basin, snapped
the burgees and hoooo in the
spider-webs of rigging and tuna towers. Fort Lauderdale was a dead loss for the
tourists that Saturday afternoon. They would have been more comfortable back in
Scranton.”
A
Deadly Shade of Gold (1965).
“A smear of fresh blood
has a metallic smell. It smells like freshly sheared copper. It is a clean and
impersonal smell, quite astonishing the first time you smell it. It changes
quickly, to a fetid, fudgier smell, as the cells die and thicken.”
Bright
Orange for the Shroud (1965).
“Another season was
ending. The mid-May sun had a tropic sting against my bare shoulders. Sweat ran
into my eyes. I had discovered an ugly little pocket of dry rot in the windshield
corner of the panel of the topside controls on my houseboat, and after trying
not to think about it for a week, I had dug out the tools, picked up some
pieces of prime mahogany, and excised the area of infection with a saber saw.”
Darker
than Amber (1966).
“We were about to give up
and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.”
One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966).
“Around and around we
went, like circling through wads of lint in a dirty pocket. We’d been in that
high blue up yonder where it was a bright cold clear December afternoon, and
then we had to go down into that guck, as it was the intention of the airline
and the airplane driver to put down at O’Hare.”
Pale
Gray for Guilt (1968).
“The next to last time I
saw Tush Bannon alive was the very same day I had that new little boat running
the way I wanted it to run, after about six weeks of fitzing around with it.”
The
Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968).
“After I heard that
Helena Pearson had died on Thursday, the third day of October, I had no trouble
reconstructing the immediate past.”
Dress
Her in Indigo (1969).
“On that early afternoon
in late August, Meyer and I walked through the canvas tunnel at Miami
International and boarded a big bird belonging to Aeronaves de Mexico for the
straight shot to Mexico City. We were going first class because it was all a
private and personal and saddening mission at the behest of a very sick and
fairly rich man.”
The
Long Lavender Look (1970).
“Late April. Ten o’clock
at night. Hustling south on Florida 112 through the eastern section of Cypress
County, about twenty miles from the intersection of 112 and the Tamiami Trail.”
A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971).
“The socket wrench
slipped, and I skinned yet another knuckle. Meyer stood blocking out a sizable
piece of the deep blue sky. He stared down into the bilge and said, ‘Very
inventive and very fluent. Nice mental images, Travis. Imagine one frail little
bilge pump performing such an extraordinary act upon itself! But you began to repeat
yourself toward the end.’”
The Scarlet Ruse (1972).
“After seven years of
bickering and fussing, the Fort Lauderdamndale city fathers, on a hot Tuesday
in late August, killed off a life style and turned me into a vagrant.”
The
Turquoise Lament (1973).
“The place Pidge had
borrowed was a studio apartment on the eleventh floor of the Kaiulani Towers on
Hobron Lane, about a hundred yards to the left off Ala Moana Boulevard on the
way toward downtown Honolulu.
The Dreadful Lemon Sky (1974).
“I was in deep sleep,
alone aboard my houseboat, alone in the half acre of bed, alone in a sweaty
dream chase, fear, and monstrous predators. A shot rang off steel bars.
Another. I came bursting up out of sleep to hear the secretive sound of the
little bell which rings at my bedside when anyone steps aboard the Busted Flush. It was almost four in the
morning.”
The Empty Copper Sea (1978).
“Suddenly everything
starts to snap, rip, and fall out, to leak and squeal and give final gasps.
Then you bend to it, or you go live ashore like a sane person.”
The Green Ripper (1979).
“Meyer came aboard the Busted Flush on a dark, wet, windy
Friday afternoon in early December. I had not seen him in nearly two months. He
looked worn and tired, and he had faded to an indoor pallor. He shucked his
rain jacket and sat heavily in the biggest chair and said he wouldn’t mind at
all if I offered him maybe a little bourbon, one rock, a dollop of water.”
Free Fall in Crimson (1981).
“We talked past midnight,
sat in the deck chairs on the sun deck of the Busted Flush with the starry April sky overhead, talked quietly,
and listened to the night. Creak and sigh of hulls, slap of small waves against
pilings, muted motor noises of the fans and generators and pumps aboard the
work boats and the play toys.”
Cinnamon Skin (1982).
“Every man can be broken
when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity
that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do,
but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like and unbearably
shrill sound.”
The
Lonely Silver Rain (1984).
“Once upon a time I was
very lucky and located a sixty-five-foot hijacked motor sailer in a matter of
days, after the authorities had been looking for months. When I heard through
the grapevine that Billy Ingraham wanted to see me, it was easy to guess he
hoped I could work the same miracle with his stolen Sundowner, a custom cruiser he’d had built in a Jacksonville yard.
It had been missing for three months.”
