Talk:Travis McGee

McGee's wartime experience
It seems to me that McGee never actually says which war he fought in. JDM himself was in the India/Burma theater in WWII, but if we take McGee's birth year to be somewhere around 1934 (as I do) then he would obviously have to have been in Korea. When McGee does talk about his wartime experience it's obvious that it was in a tropical climate of some sort, since he mentions leeches and jungles. Does Korea have those? Wspencer11 13:36, 10 July 2006 (UTC)


 * In "Nightmare In Pink" McGee states he wagered on a pass with Mike and McGee won to spend "..all those Japanese hours in a silk robe...". Don't think he would be doing R&R in Japan during WWII but it was quite common during the Korean conflict. Jsadamsjr (talk) 19:03, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It's pretty clearly Korea in the earlier books, but later there's a reference to a paratroop drop that sounds like WWII, and later still there's an account of a jungle war that the US didn't win, which sounds like Vietnam. Actually he couldn't possibly have been in Nam, the first books came out in 1964.  (I guess conceivably that could be a reference to Burma, since the US didn't win that one, the British did.  Seems unlikely though.)  MacDonald is generally pretty meticulous, but he seems to have gotten a little mixed up on this one.  BTW, the article says McGee was in the Marines, but I don't think that is ever stated, and I seem to recall that at one point McGee specifically refers to the Army. 76.199.89.188 (talk) 14:15, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I’m going with Army Special Forces in both Korea and Vietnam, giving the benefit of the doubt to JDM’s OSS experience/knowledge and commitment to detail. Remember that members of the 10th Special Forces Group were on the ground in Korea in 1953, conducting covert ops. And just three years later (1956) members of the 1st Special Forces group were already in Vietnam, with the first green beret casualties in VN being recorded that year. McGee would have trained and taken R&R in Japan for both missions.  And as for the combat jump, green berets were jumping into combat as advisors throughout the mid to late 1950s with Vietnamese and hybrid forces. 2601:14D:C200:1FF0:FD38:AEA6:BB08:BE25 (talk) 15:15, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

"Reading for Survival"
The essay was distributed by the Book of the Month Club to its many members, giving the piece far wider distribution than the Wikipedia article suggests. Source: http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/1994/94-007.html

New sources to stave off deletion
Due to the AFD I did a quick check for sources. Found three - placing them here so that I can use them later to help improve the article.

Beacham's popular fiction in America

Journal of American Culture

Private eyes : one hundred and one knights : a survey of American detective fiction, 1922-1984

Have yet to see copies of the above but based on the Google Books excerpts there should be enough to cover WP:NOTABLE. Madam Fatal (talk) 18:00, 21 November 2023 (UTC)