Travis McGee as Traditional Hero

Last week I posted John D MacDonald’s remarks, made after a reading of the paper "Travis McGee as Traditional Hero," at the first John D MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detection in November 1978. Written by Erling B. Holtsmark of the University of Iowa, the paper opined that McGee was a descendant of a long line of ancient, Indo-European heroic types, a monster slayer who rescues maidens, eradicates the corruption and corrupt monsters that besiege the community, and wins the treasure. MacDonald eventually wrote a longer and more thought-out response which was published, not in the Journal of Popular Culture as originally intended, but in the inaugural issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection. As before, the author provides lots of interesting details on the genesis of the series and its two main characters.

Though I have had a certain amount of exposure to the classics, I certainly did not try to adapt ancient patterns to my contemporary fellow. It just came out that way. And maybe, for those ancient tellers of tales, it just came out that way too. Maybe we are dealing with a Jungian concept of the symbols mankind must have in his fireside tales of heroism.

I will try to explain as honestly as I can, how the characteristics of the McGee stories, as underlined by Holtsmark, came to be.

During the first few books of the series, there was no Meyer. As I began to work ever harder to try to obviate the need for endless internal monologues on the part of McGee, I began to realize that there had to be some middle ground between achieving all exposition through show rather than tell, and achieving it through all tell. I invented Meyer out of fragments in the vast scrap basket in the back of my head, vowing that I would not have a clown on scene, nor would I have someone dependent upon McGee emotionally, financially or socially.

I worked with Meyer, throwing away paragraphs and pages and chapters until he finally emerged, nodding in hirsute satisfaction, little wise blue eyes gleaming with ironic amusement, amused at himself and at my efforts, proclaiming like the bottle genie that he had been there all along, waiting for someone to perform the magic spell of rubbing the right words together.

Holtsmark tells us that the classical hero is a loner. Be that as it may, it is also a neat solution to the problem of a diversity of plot and situation. If one is enmeshing a hero in but one adventure, then it would not matter were he encumbered by wife, kiddies, tax consultant, bowling team and his very own Siamese twin. But to lug the whole emotional-personal environment along into further events involves more arrangement and manipulation than all that baggage is worth. I added Meyer only because the problems of tugging him along into the ensuing dramas was an effort overbalanced by his usefulness in establishing atmosphere and physical detail through dialogue.

We can find analogies in the television theater. Gunsmoke depicted Marshall Dillon as the classic hero, tough, moral, laconic and fearsome. Even with his retinue --Kitty, Doc, Chester (long ago) etc.-- he was the loner, often roving far. There was always the hint that long ago he had been a more pure loner, unencumbered by town and badge, or by the hints of a liaison with Miss Kitty. There, in a kind of outdoor theater, the world was brought in as evil people, and presented to the classic hero through the words and actions of his retinue, begging violent solution.

That long-departed series The Fugitive is a purer example of the loner as hero, seeking his own absolution, smiting evil along the way.

Without attempting an impertinence, my guess is that those tellers of tales about "Odysseus, Herakles, Philoctetes, Ajax and scores of others" were solving plot problems by making their heroes loners. And when he is a loner, he must have standards of behavior variant from the norms of his culture, otherwise the evil he goes out to correct would have already been taken care of by society.

As to the next characteristic, that of the lack of information about McGee's early years, I must confess that here I was guided by instinct rather than guile. It just did not feel right to me to be specific about McGee's early years, family, education and so on. If I were forced to conjecture about my probable reasons for this reluctance, I would have to say that by giving him a specific background, I would have thus related him in time and space to a very small percentage of the populace. This way, he could have been brought up in your development, gone to your schools, served in your battalion, dated your sister-long before life sent him off at an ever-diverging angle from the rest of us. There are the hints of the war service, the brief pro ball episode as a tight end, death of a brother. If we do not know the specifics in detail, then we can fill in our own. I am careful to also keep the physical image just a bit blurred, so that except for dimension, you can fill in your own ideas of him.

Curiously enough, when Otto Penzler was compiling a collection of biographies of detective heroes written by their creators, I thought about it for a long time and then said I did not want to do it. I suspect he was somewhat miffed, but I feel my instincts were right. Too much depiction would corrode the magic.

The next characteristic, the strong erotic element shared with the ancient heroes, is once again related to making a plot compelling. The constant reader is going to know, subliminally, that no matter how grievously I endanger McGee, he will survive-at least until I do a book with black in the title. The reader does not know whether or not a person for whom McGee has formed a strong attachment will survive. When there is nothing to lose, there is no menace. McGee's emotional attachment must be to someone who can capture the reader's fancy as well as McGee's. The casual roll in the hay, though it would not in our age especially devalue the damsel, would not elevate her to the status of object of great value either.

The hero must always be deeply, emotionally, tragically involved, or the novel of suspense becomes merely a string of set scenes of a meaningless violence. If the hero's motivations in a story are trivial, interest sags. The kind of strong motivation depends on the structure of the series. I have forfeited the chance in the McGee structure to have him struggling to avoid imprisonment for life for something he didn't do, or to regain a lost reputation, or to save his blood relatives from disaster, or to recover his own courage, or to save his own soul. So it must always be a threat of ugly disaster for himself and for those he holds near and dear, close friends or lady loves. The element of sensuality must depend upon the mores of the culture in which the hero appears. In times gone by the same effect might have been attained by his having been given a fragile scarf to tie to his lance before going into combat.

The fifth aspect, which Holtsmark covers in some detail, is the necessity of having a monster handy, a Junior Allen or a Boone Waxwell or a Paul Dissat. Here we deal with one of my own beliefs, that there exists in the world a kind of evil which defies the Freudian explanations of the psychologists, and the environmental explanations of the sociologists. It is an evil existing for the sake of itself, for the sake of the satisfactions of its own exercise. In our real world we have, for example, a two hundred and thirty pound teenager who roams the streets, mugging children for the pleasure of gouging out their eyes. For me it is less satisfying to say that this is the action of a sad, limited, tormented, unbalanced child than it is to see that this is a primordial blackness reaching up again through a dark and vulnerable soul, showing us all the horror that has always been with mankind, frustrating all rational analyses.

I admit to the primitive and superstitious aspects of my belief. But it does make it easier for me to depict a villainy that is without mercy or scruple, that grows strong through its own pursuit of evil, that is as heartstopping as the sudden breaking of the glass of the bedroom window a little before dawn. Blackness for its own sake is ever more difficult to deal with than quirks and neuroses.

This paper intrigued me and will continue to do so, while at the same time it has made me a little bit edgy. I do not want to give McGee the flavor of being contrived within a pattern laid down in pre-history. If he does work some subliminal magic in creating reader response, that is all to the good. But he has become a person. When I try to manipulate him, to take him outside his established patterns of thought and behavior, the book in process falls apart. In the past he has had no specific protest. He has just stood there. From now on, I suppose, he will shake his head and say, "John, that is not the way an ancient hero would act."

On the Background of Travis McGee

Back in 1978 Ed Hirshberg, a University of South Florida English professor and editor of the JDM Bibliophile, arranged the first ever Conference on the Works of John D MacDonald. It took place in November in Tampa and was, primarily, a one day affair preceded by an evening of cocktails and dinner. (Plymouth Gin was served.) Scholarly papers on both the works of JDM as well as other mystery writers were read by their authors and commented on by the guest of honor, none other than John D MacDonald himself. MacDonald’s comments were off-the-cuff, as he had not read or heard the papers prior to their presentation at the conference, and the intention was to have him eventually produce more lengthy and thoughtful responses in writing and have them published, along with the papers themselves, in a future issue of the Journal of  Popular Culture.

One of the papers, titled "Travis McGee as Traditional Hero," and written by Erling B. Holtsmark of the University of Iowa, postulated the idea that McGee was a descendant of a long line of ancient, Indo-European heroic types, a monster slayer who rescues maidens, eradicates the corruption and corrupt monsters that besiege the community, and wins the treasure. The paper was interesting not just for what Holtsmark had written, but for MacDonald’s responses, which reveal how he began the series with a full biography of the hero, how he developed the character of Meyer, and how he turned down a request to publish McGee’s bio in Otto Penzler’s 1977 The Private Lives of Private Eyes: Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys.

Below are MacDonald’s initial comments made after the reading. Next week I’ll post his long, written response that appeared a year later.

What was to me the most interesting thing about that paper was that it illuminated something to me that had been puzzling me a bit. When I first started the series I had a pretty well organized biography of McGee, from early childhood, family relationships, even to the occupations of his grandparents on both sides, where he grew up, where he went to school; also the emotional and psychic trauma of his early years. I had intended to imbed these biographical facts here and there in the books as the series proceeded.

As I went on, I found a reluctance to do that, which I did not understand. I just didn't know why I felt so reluctant. So I didn't do it. It sort of came to a head last year when Otto Penzler wrote to me and he said that I'm putting together a book; all of these people are going to write a biography of their protagonists. So-and-so is going to do so-and-so, and so on. We want you to do a biography of McGee. I dug out my old records on that and looked them over and I would have had to turn it from outline form into a sort of an essay. I wrote back and I said, "I don't want to do this." He wrote back and said, "Everybody's doing it. Why not? Why the reluctance?" And I said, "I don't know why I'm reluctant, but I don't think it's the right thing to do. I think people should use their own imagination to try to figure out in their minds what the background of this contemporary American character is."

When I read Mr. Holtsmark's paper, it was sort of a justification of my reluctance. Then I began to wonder, "How about these people who were devising initially these classic heroes of the past? I wonder if they had the same reluctance to go into the background of their people?" My classical education is very spotty. I was in the Wharton School of Finance and in Business Administration at Syracuse University and then took a Master's from Harvard Business School. So when I should have been studying classical heroes and monsters I was studying double-entry book-keeping and what insurance companies can do to you and for you. I don't know whether that particular aspect of it has been studied before, but it just intrigued me.

Why should there be a reluctance for me to tell the readers what my knowledge of the background of McGee is? I just don't know. But I begin to see, through that paper, a sort of possible justification for it.

"High Dive to Oblivion"

Out of the hundreds of stories John D MacDonald wrote for the pulp magazines in the early days of his writing career, some were terrific examples of mid-twentieth-century popular fiction, some were so-so, and others were downright awful. There were relatively few in either extreme, leaving a lot of okay-but-not-great tales as JDM’s real pulp legacy. Most of the best of them were collected and published in the early 1980’s in the Good Old Stuff anthologies, leaving the remainder to molder away in the crumbling pages of the surviving issues of Detective Tales, Startling Stories, Doc Savage and the like. Several of the good stories not collected in the MacDonald anthologies appeared in other pulp anthologies over the years, collections like American Pulp, Hard-Boiled Detectives, A Century of Great Suspense Stories, Pulp Masters, and their ilk, and I have written about all of these that I know of.

This leaves the orphans, the stories that have never been reprinted outside of their original publication. There is usually a reason for this, mainly that the tales aren’t really worth reprinting. But for fans of a particular author, every story bears at least one examination, and here on this blog I intend -- eventually -- to write about every story MacDonald ever wrote and had published. Given the size of this task, the frequency that I post, and my age, this is a road I will probably never see the end of, but hey, it’s a goal. So today we come to a randomly selected tale titled “High Dive to Oblivion,” originally published in the April 1948 issue of Dime Detective. It’s a perfect example of these middle-tier JDM tales that bear reading but don’t really stand up with the best of them.

Dime Detective published more JDM stories than any other pulp magazine. Here’s what I wrote about it a few years ago:

“Of all the magazines John D MacDonald published short stories in, Dime Detective holds the record for printing the most. From October 1946 until August 1952, MacDonald's works appeared there 39 times, either under his own name or as one of the "house authors" such as Scott O'Hara. The pulp magazine was one of the earliest to accept his submissions and, beginning with only his second appearance, prominently displayed his name on the covers of nearly every issue his stories appeared in.

“Dime Detective began publication in 1931 and ran until August 1953. It was the premier pulp magazine of Popular Publications, who published other "Dime" fiction magazines such as Dime Sports, Dime Western and Dime Adventure. It was, according to anthologist Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, "the one legitimate rival to Black Mask," publishing many "name" mystery writers such as Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, and the father of the hard-boiled detective, Caroll John Daly. Chandler appeared there exclusively from 1937 to 1939, and some of his most iconic short fiction was published within its pages, including "Red Wind," "The Lady in the Lake" and "Trouble is My Business." According to Dziemianowicz in the Introduction to Hard-Boiled Detectives, a 1992 anthology of Dime Detective stories, the magazine lured many of these big names away from Black Mask by paying "the princely sum of of four cents per word -- one cent more than Black Mask and quadruple the going pulp fiction rate." Their newsstand price was also a nickel less than Black Mask.

“He goes on to point out that the magazine "made only two stipulations to its authors: there were to be no novel serializations and the characters they created could not appear in competing magazines. Beyond that, they were given relatively free rein to write what they chose." (Chandler obviously cheated by changing the name of his detective John Dalmas to Phillip Marlowe when he harvested his Dime Detective stories for his later novels.) And although the focus, as one might imagine, was on detective stories, Dziemianowicz explains that "in its later years, it also published a good many non-detective crime stories written in the grim noir style that would become the trademark of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and other writers of the paperback originals that helped put the pulps out of business."

“High Dive to Oblivion” was MacDonald’s ninth appearance in Dime Detective and the story was written when the MacDonalds were living in Clinton, New York. As referenced last week, this period was the beginning of JDM’s great science fiction output, but he was still writing plenty of traditional crime stories. The story begins promisingly, with just the right mixture of mystery and uncertainty.

He worked in a bank, in one of those jobs where you've got to lead a clean life or they can't take a chance on you. He was smart enough to know that. I had his schedule figured out pretty well. I worked on it long enough. I gave up my job to work on it, and now that it's over, I think I'll go back to that little out-west town that I came from -- that Clara came from.

The protagonist, speaking in the first person, is named Deven, and his search for a girlfriend he had before the war has led him to the big city. When he returned from overseas Clara had left to work as a stenographer at a big city bank, and it took Deven some time to recover from post-tramatic stress before he left to go look her up. When he asked about her at the bank he was told that she had left her job two months ago, that she didn’t indicate where her new job was, and that all they have is her home address where she lived when she worked there. A check of the residence reveals that she move out of there as well, around the same time. Also around this time, her letters home to her mother ceased.

Deven goes to the police to ask about her, and for reasons the author never clarifies, tells them that he is looking for an old girlfriend named Alice Williams. He tells an inspector the last date he “saw” her and is then shown photos of four dead Jane Doe’s.

Four dead girls, unidentified. I looked at the pictures. A truck had nearly cut one in two. She was too hefty to be Clara, and the face wasn't right. The second one was a swarthy one who had been hauled out of the harbor. Not her. The third one came out of the river too, only she had been there a long, long time. Probably right through the winter. He said the lab gave the natural hair color as auburn. Not Clara. When she was a little kid her hair was as black as the crows in her old man's corn patch. The fourth was a mess. Her face was smashed. She could have been Clara. She was the right size to be Clara. The blood-soaked hair was black.

The fourth woman was the victim of a fall from an eighth floor apartment, her face so badly damaged from her landing in the back of a truck that her features could no longer be determined. The driver of the truck had only a vague idea of where he was when he heard the landing, but when he stopped to look (thinking he had been hit by another car) he saw nothing. It was only when he arrived at his destination that he found the body, dead, nude with no identification.

When Deven asks about any scars or marks found on the body, he is told of an old scar on the neck, a feature he immediately recognizes as one Clara had, but he bluffs his way out of the police interview by telling the inspector that this couldn’t be his “Alice Williams.” He finds his way to the driver of the truck, who remembers only the block he was on when the crash took place, and Deven spends time visiting every one of the cheap apartment buildings that lined the street. Eventually he finds someone who recognizes her picture. She was a “Mrs. Charles Driscoll” and she and her “husband” were there only infrequently, with many midnight departures on the part of Mr. Driscoll. Through more detective work Deven eventually identifies the man, a bank employee named Alexander Warder who is married to another woman. Convinced that Warder and Clara were engaged in an extramarital affair and that Alexander was responsible for Clara’s fall from the apartment window, he sets out the right this wrong on his own…

Story art from the Cavalcade reprint

There is a lot of uncharacteristically sloppy writing and plotting in “High Dive to Oblivion,” some of it so bad as to jump out at the reader like a typo. In order for MacDonald to make his plot work he had to elbow in a lot of unrealistic, insensible and downright ridiculous situations that don’t stand up to the first reading, let alone repeated ones. The detective work Deven does is simplistic enough that it could have been done by the laziest of policemen, so one wonders why is wasn’t done in the first place. Well, I guess MacDonald wouldn’t have had a story otherwise. I’m not sure he has one here: a good idea that he can’t really pull off successfully. Still, a lot of the writing is expertly done, and the haunted mood of the protagonist is especially well handled. “High Dive to Oblivion” is worth reading for that fact alone.

Although this story has never been reprinted as part of an anthology, it was republished in another magazine. It appeared in the July 1949 issue of an Australian men’s magazine called Cavalcade, under its original title, with new artwork and a few editorial changes. (New York changed to Sydney, color to colour, harbor to harbour…). I’m making an educated guess about these changes, since I don’t own the issue of Dime Detective but do have a copy of Cavalcade. I’m also guessing that that “little out-west town” where Deven and Clara came from was originally an “upstate” town, since this reference is repeated later in the story and apparently slipped by the Australian editor. It would certainly make more sense coming from a writer who lived in an upstate town. Perhaps some of the inconsistencies evident in the version I own are the result of other editorial decisions I am not aware of. I’ll have to wait until I can locate a copy of Dime Detective to know for certain. The April 1948 issue seems to be rarer than most.