At a marina in the middle of Fort Lauderdale there is a boat slip that readers still seek out for a man who never actually existed. Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar, right on the Intracoastal near Las Olas, is the fictional home berth of Travis McGee, the salvage consultant and reluctant knight errant of one of the best-loved series in American crime fiction.
The novelist John D. MacDonald, who lived up the coast on Siesta Key in Sarasota, created McGee in 1964 and gave him a houseboat called the Busted Flush, supposedly won in a long poker game, tied up at Slip F-18. Across twenty-one novels, each with a color in the title, McGee prowled the docks, beaches, and shady land schemes of a fast-changing Florida, and MacDonald used him to rage against the paving-over of the state he loved, decades before it became a common complaint.
The books made Bahia Mar a literary landmark, and a bronze plaque there honors the slip as the Busted Flush's home port, even though no such boat was ever registered.
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Fans from all over the world still walk those docks looking for Slip F-18, proof that a good character can put a real Fort Lauderdale marina on the map more firmly than most living residents ever manage.
If you've never read any of these books, I strongly recommend any or all of them. The fact that they're somewhat dated adds to to pleasure of reading them. I've read them all...
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