My sci-fi mystery, Salvagia, is set along the future flooded Florida coast. Protagonist Triss Mackey dives for artifacts of the past known as “salvagia” in the shallow water now known as the “yoreshore”—between where the shore used to be and where it is now. The federal government is abandoning Florida, and the very concept of authority is up for grabs with the usual power brokers filling the vacuum: developers, corporate mafias, and criminals.
Triss is inspired by John D. MacDonald’s most famous hero, the beach bum Travis McGee. Like Travis, she lives on a houseboat, makes her living in the vaguely defined area of “salvage,” and associates with a quirky group of boat-borne people kept together, ironically, by their shared love of intransience. Travis is one of the most iconic sleuths in Florida fiction. But who exactly is he?
Well, most importantly, he’s just a guy. He’s not a spy, or a cop, or even a P.I. He calls himself a salvage expert, but mostly because no one’s quite sure what that means, beyond the general idea that if you have lost something irretrievably, he will retrieve whatever part of it he can, in exchange for half its value.
In practice, he mostly helps friends, or friends of friends. The pitch is important. Where career-minded sleuths can take a case for superficial reasons, Travis needs to be emotionally invested from the jump.
Travis is an environmentalist, many years before there really was such a thing. He mostly laments, as those who care about the wilderness of Florida are wont to do. He speaks despairingly about the destruction of the natural world by the big developers, he warns presciently about building in low-lying, flood-prone areas. He understands, intimately, how all the illegal schemes work, and most of the legal ones too.
In honor of Salvagia’s shared genres, here are four sci-fi and mystery protagonists that would get along just fine with Travis, sipping Plymouth on the rocks on the deck of the Busted Flush, watching the sun set from Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
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Twilly Spree
Carl Hiaasen, Fever Beach
Twilly’s doing triple-duty here: Not only did I chose him to be the main Florida crime protagonist representative on this list, I also chose him to be the main Carl Hiaasen protagonist, among many other McGee-esque choices like Skink Tyree, Andrew Yancy, or RJ Decker. Twilly is a Florida vigilante on the side of the environmental and business little guy.
Despite his court-mandated anger management classes, Twilly lacks Travis’ self-control and easygoing attitude. He has several convictions, unlimited money from a rich grandfather, and likes to blow off steam by blowing things up.
Easy Rawlins
Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress
Neither Easy nor Travis have any official titles, but an essential part of both their characters is that, at the end of the day, they just want to be at home. Where Travis has his fifty-foot barge-type houseboat, The Busted Flush, Easy has a little three-room house in Mid City, with some fruit trees in his yard.
Ostensibly, Travis needs to make enough money to take his “retirement in installments,” though in actual practice the money aspect of his adventures ends up being relatively inconsequential. Less so for Easy Rawlins, who, in the first chapters of his debut, must take a shady fetch job from a shifty-looking white man or miss a crucial mortgage payment.
Though Travis never acknowledges it, so much of his easy-going, chameleon nature, his ability to talk his way into country clubs or sales conventions, are possible because he’s white. He must take jobs to fund his lifestyle, but the Busted Flush itself is rarely in danger, and allows Travis to largely float through life.
Easy Rawlins’ feet are always firmly on the ground. A black man in post-war L.A., he is constantly on his toes, questioning everybody, even his friends, and his little piece of property always feels like it could be lost or taken in an instant.
Fergus Ferguson
Suzanne Palmer, Finder
Fergus is a “finder,” a job description just as opaque as Travis’ “salvage expert,” but usually means “thief.” Originally from a flooded far-future Scotland, Fergus now travels the galaxy practicing his trade wherever he can.
In this first entry, he is trying to locate a spacecraft called Venetia’s Sword and steal it back from a crime lord in a backwater deep space colony called Cernee. The action starts on page one. Fergus is a man just trying to make his way in the galaxy but finds himself pulled immediately into a turf war, with local factions, mercenaries, and even aliens vying for power.
Murderbot
Martha Wells, All Systems Red
Found family is at the heart of the MurderBot Diaries, about a deadly Security Unit who hacks its own governor module so that it can do whatever it wants (which, usually, is to download and watch trashy streaming content). Similarly, Travis has gone to great and dangerous lengths to fund a life where he can do whatever he wants, and mostly what he seems to want to do is go fishing or sit on the deck of his boat and argue with his friend Meyer.
Travis would approve of the way MurderBot negotiates the rules of its transience and freedom, as well as its ability to establish clear boundaries, its curmudgeonliness, and its utter deadly competence.
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