Back In Print Publisher Reissuing Novelist John D. Macdonald’s Popular Travis Mcgee Mystery Series

Dean Koontz calls him his all-time favorite writer. Stephen King thinks he’s the great entertainer of our age. Sue Grafton considers him a dominant influence. Carl Hiaasen says he was “the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise and breath-grabbing beauty.” All of these best-selling writers are talking about the late John D. MacDonald, the Florida novelist who created the Travis McGee mystery series more than 30 years ago. And the occasion for all this praise-singing nine years after MacDonald’s death is the paperback reissue next Saturday of that first color-coded entry, “The Deep Blue Good-by” (Ballantine/Fawcett Crest, $6.99), complete with new cover art, blurbs by a bunch of best-selling mystery writers and an introduction by fellow Floridian Hiaasen.

“We’re hoping to attract a whole new generation of readers this summer,” said Kim Hovey, Ballantine’s director of author promotion. “We’re going to reissue all of the books in order, so ‘Nightmare in Pink’ will be next, sometime in 1996.”

Not that you can’t go out right now and purchase paperback copies of “Blue,” “Pink” or any of the other 19 McGee books, right up through the last one, 1985’s “The Lonely Silver Rain.” All are still in print, having collectively sold some 32 million copies over the years. In fact, it’s kind of hard to imagine that there are readers of popular fiction - especially Floridians - who aren’t familiar with McGee, that not-so-perfect knight-errant, the thinking man’s Robin Hood, who lives aboard a houseboat called the Busted Flush docked at slip F-18 at Bahia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale.

Bahia Mar is a real place, but you could find slip F-18 only in the pages of a McGee mystery until 1987. That was when the resort designated such a slip, which was then dedicated as a Literary Landmark by the Florida Center for the Book and the national Literary Landmarks Association.

Since then, Bahia Mar has been host to conferences on mystery and detective fiction for MacDonald fans, and the landmark plaque is cited on a new Literary Map of Florida. (For a single copy of the map, send a double-stamped, self-addressed envelope to the Florida Center for the Book, Broward County Main Library, 100 S. Andrews Ave., Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 33301).

And Fort Lauderdale is not the only place in Florida associated with MacDonald and McGee. MacDonald, who was posthumously inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1991, was a longtime resident of Siesta Key, near Sarasota.

McGee, too, roamed all over Florida, from the Keys to Orlando, from Palm Beach to the Panhandle. But he was most at home in South Florida and was often appalled by what was happening to its natural beauty as cypress swamps were plowed under and paved over.

“The Deep Blue Good-by” was first published in 1964; I must have read it for the first time sometime in the mid-1970s. Rereading it the other day was like meeting up with an old friend after a long time.

I’d forgotten most of the plot, which involves McGee helping a dancer from the Keys recover her dead father’s war loot from a miscreant called Junior Allen. But MacDonald’s storytelling skills kept my attention as McGee tracked the nefarious Allen from boat yard to marina, with quick sidetrips to New York and Texas.

The climactic scenes, with McGee and Allen duking it out aboard a pitching boat, were taut and tense. They also were tame compared to the blood-spattered violence of today’s serial killer thrillers.

But what gives the book its somewhat dated feel is McGee’s attitude toward women. Although he’s a die-hard romantic who almost always feels slightly ashamed after casual sexual encounters, he invariably describes women in sexual terms.

And women are invariably victims in McGee adventures, in need of saving both from themselves and from creeps who specialize in exploitation.

A standard joke among mystery fans is that you never want to be McGee’s love interest because you’re bound to come to a bad end sooner or later, thus freeing up our hero to remember you fondly as he climbs aboard his “spavined white steed” and goes riding off to rescue another damsel in distress.