A Flash of Green

This is pre-Travis, early MacDonald. Jimmy Wing, a reporter for a small Florida daily has foreknowledge that beautiful Grassy Bay is about to be dredged by developers into a commercial/housing development. It just needs to be passed by the Board of Commissioners. This battle has been fought two years ago and defeated by the altruistic Save Our Bay organization. But this time, it isn't a wicked outside developers; it is a local consortium, and things look bleak for the S.O.B. contingent.
Jimmy spills the beans to young widow Kat Hubble who is all things demure and honorable. Just exactly why Jimmy does this or why he has a serious case of the lusts for this lady is unclear. Jimmy is sucked into spying for the local power structure headed by delightful old rascal, Elmo Bliss. I was so taken with Elmo; I was almost rooting for him in spite of his very non-correct environmental stance. Elmo was one of the few whose motives were pure; he wanted power and went after it. Maybe he went a mite overboard, but you always knew what he was about. The Save Our Bay people were persecuted, blackmailed and put to rout. Those left standing were sadder and wiser.
The story is a slow starter, and creaks here and there, but MacDonald puts in a lot of work on the characterizations, particularly Jimmy. I saw a few stirrings of a pre-Travis McGee in Jimmy particularly in the latter chapters. Motivation was seriously lacking. Much of the time, the characters were not acting in their own best interests, but we are never satisfactorily told why. MacDonald does shade the opposing groups well; they all have their share of vices as well as some virtues. My biggest problem was I could not work up enough enthusiasm to care very much about the outcome. Grade C.

This is a strangely muted, yet exquisitely crafted , story from the creator of the Travis McGee detective novels. Local wheeler-dealers in a West Florida town devise a residential development that involves filling in a beautiful bay, to the dismay of the town's conservationists. Jimmy Wing, newspaperman, professes to help both camps, but is really in it only for the chance the view the "mechanism" of the conflict at close quarters. In the end, everyone emerges a loser; and Wing finds he has won a pyrrhic victory over his detachment from humanity. In this book, MacDonald probably brushes uncomfortably close to his real persona.

John D. MacDonald has always had the incredible knack for putting character development before plot. A FLASH OF GREEN is the precursor to the Travis McGee books, but MacDonald's gift for characters was already shining. Newspaperman Jimmy Wing, on the trail of a story which may ruin a small Florida ecosystem for development (what else is new?) decides to stick around for the ride, to see who's doing what. Chief among the perpetrators is Elmo Bliss--what a great name! And what a great character! I had just as much fun watching him than I did the narrator. Strangely, I felt I knew more about what made him tick, as opposed to Jimmy. (Then again Jimmy is terribly stand-offish). As the plot unwound, I felt that the pacing did, too. But what held this together, as I said, is the characters, and that's a big plus in my book!

As Kurt Vonnegut observed, John D. MacDonald was a kind of 20th century New World Balzac who got more of the real 1940s to 1980s America into his dozens of novels than many more highly rated-- and more pretentious-- writers. He just tells the story with remarkable vividness, clarity and concision: he doesn't philosophize, symbolize, or otherwise show off. This book is one of his best, and I think it is the first real "eco-thriller," the first to use the "mystery" form to examine in depth the conflicts between rampant, self-assured environmental destroyers and would-be, conflicted environmental protectors.
Abbey, Matthiessen, and Hiassen have mined the vein MacDonald exposed in 1962 more profitably, but never, I think, more effectively. MacDonald's books have a durable originality because they are so unpretentious, so much a part of mid 20th century "here and now." They're like the B-movie "noirs" that people watch long after the Oscar winners are forgotten.
Peter Matthiessen's big south Florida novel, Shadow Country, already seems something of a museum piece, with its heavy influence of Conrad, Twain, and Faulkner. And despite Matthiessen's nature writing reputation, MacDonald somehow gets more ot a feeling for south Florida's primal glory into his short "flash of green passage" than Matthiessen does in hundreds of pages of setpiece descriptions:
"Look how red the sun is going down, will you? Maybe we'll get to make a wish.
"You mean a flash of green? That's tourist talk, Aunt Middy.
"I seen it once, boy.
"You what?
"Don't look at me like that. I'm telling you a true thing, boy. I'll even tell you the year. Nineteen and twenty eight, and I was a twenty-one-year-old girl, feeling older than I do right this minute... We were food-fishing that day.My two were both fevered, and I was sick in my heart with worry, wondering if I was put on earth just to carry my young and watch them burn with fever and die.. I was two month along with my fourth, and I did a man's work that day, helping pole that old heavy skiff and help Josh work the net... We was poling back along the shore, coming with less fish than we needed, and we could see the sun go down red like that , right out through Turk's Pass. I was as low in my spirits as a woman can get, and the night bugs was beginning to gather in a cloud around us. We rested from poling to brush the bugs, and we watched that last crumb of sun go, and the whole west sky lit up with terrible sheets of the brightest green you ever could see. 'Make a wish!' Josh yelled at me from the stern. I wished, all right."
Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hiassen's repetitive Monkey Wrench spinoffs seem pretty "lite"-- sentimental and arch-- by comparison to A Flash of Green, which makes a great companion volume to Silent Spring since they came out at about the same time.

John D. MacDonald's longstanding concern for Florida's gulfcoast ecosystem comes through loud and clear in this 1962 novel, even as he recognizes the inevitable environmental havoc being wrought by the relentless onslaught of civilization.
A Flash of Green is a third person narrative featuring a protagonist named Jimmy Wing. Wing, a reporter for the Palm City Record-Journal, decides to insert himself in the midst of an ugly conflict between land developers and environmentalists, all the while leading each to believe he's on their side.
Ethically challenged, morally ambiguous, hot tempered and obsessional, Mr. Wing is an unusual type of protagonist. It could be argued that his many faults make him all the more human and, therefore, more realistic. But I found him off putting to the degree that I did not care one iota what happened to him one way or the other.
Bottom line: A Flash of Green is one of MacDonald's lesser works. The storyline is uncompelling and the main character falls flat. A rare MacDonald misfire.

This has been one of my favorite JDM books for a long time but for some reason I have been reluctant to review it. I read it when it was first published and have read it twice since. It was the book that made me begin to look at MacDonald as something other than just another good crime writer. It revealed so much about him as a person and his beliefs I think. This book seemed to set the tone for most of his work for the rest of his life. It's a subtle book in some ways, nothing seems to be clearly defined. I have discussed it several times with other MacDonald readers: some who didn't like it at all, and some who saw it in a better light the second time they read it. I think it is one of his best and I highly recommend it.

Arrived ok

good series