The Dud Drawer

The brief article below was written by an unnamed reporter for the Associated Press and was published -- in this instance -- in the May 3, 1992 issue of the Tampa Bay Times. There’s absolutely nothing new here, even for the most casual fan of John D MacDonald, with the exception of the last two paragraphs. It confirms something I’ve long suspected about several latter day short stories. More on that after the article, which was titled (in the Times, at least) “JFK Shooting Altered Character Name”.

GAINESVILLE – John D. MacDonald's famous hard-boiled detective, Travis McGee, originally was called Dallas McGee, but the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy led the author to change the name.

That and other revelations have come from papers MacDonald and his estate left to the University of Florida.

MacDonald, Florida's most successful writer, was finishing The Deep Blue Good-by when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.

Until then, the mythical Fort Lauderdale detective, complete with his houseboat The Busted Flush, a high-powered sex drive and a brooding social conscience, was to be called Dallas McGee — "Dall” to his friends.

"John D. didn't like the connotations,” explained Carmen Hurff, literary manuscripts curator for the UF libraries. MacDonald decided to change the name and began looking for a substitute.

"He was talking to a friend of his who said Air Force bases have good names, so he started looking down a list of Air Force bases," Hurff said. Eventually, he came to Travis Air Force Base — and hence, Travis McGee.

Travis worked out pretty well.

Twenty more Travis McGee novels followed The Deep Blue Goodby, ending with The Lonely Silver Rain in 1984, two years before MacDonald's death.

Travis accounts for the bulk of the more than 70-million copies of MacDonald's works, in 18 languages, that have been sold.

MacDonald started sending materials to the UF collections in the 1960s. Now the library has acquired the remnants of his office from the writer's estate.

The extensive MacDonald manuscripts, books, correspondence, photographs and other effects in the UF library special collections would fill seven shelves the length of a football field.

Most archive users so far have been students of pop culture or simply John D. MacDonald fans.

The manuscripts include a rejected first ending to The Deep Blue Good-by. There are false starts and endings to books. Sometimes MacDonald wrote 50 pages before deciding he was at a dead end.

The letters show his impact on modern popular fiction, including homage from many of today's generation of writers who use the mystery and suspense format as a springboard for other themes.

MacDonald grew up in the Northeast, earned a master's in business administration from Harvard and decided he wanted to be a professional writer. He tried it in Texas and Mexico a few years before moving to Florida in 1949. eventually settling in Sarasota and developing into a passionate Floridian.

MacDonald suffered, by his estimate, 1,000 rejection slips before finally breaking into pulp magazines with names like Shocking Stories with detective stories and science fiction.

MacDonald always knew writing was only part of the business of being a writer, and that marketing was part of it.

The Travis color scheme - every title had a different color in it — baffles many readers, Hurff said.

According to his notes, the books always were intended to be a series, and the colors were simply intended to make it easier for readers to remember which stories they already had read.

He also believed in protecting his investments. The manuscripts include stories magazines rejected early in his career.

“Bimini Kill” was published in the July 1987 Yacht magazine. A letter to his agent submitting the piece said, “I went through my Dud Drawer and found this one, circa 1961. ... It doesn't seem too bad."

John D MacDonald had almost 400 original short stories and novellas published during his lifetime, almost all in the popular magazines of the era. His output prior to 1950 -- the year he wrote his first novel The Brass Cupcake -- was nothing short of phenomenal, with almost half of his output appearing in the four short years before he hooked up with Fawcett Gold Medal. The remainder was spread out over three and a half decades, and that final decade-and-a-half saw a mere 14 short stories published, five of which were collected in his 1971 anthology S*E*V*E*N.

Part of the reason for this drop off had to do with the general reduction in fiction being published in popular magazines, especially beginning in the 1960’s. Another was the fact that MacDonald’s focus changed to producing novels rather than short stories, a trend that accelerated with the introduction of Travis McGee in 1964. But a third factor had to be the fact that JDM was simply worn out with the short form: there are only two big bursts of creativity after the 1950’s. The first was a series of works done for This Week Magazine, a periodical he had first worked with in 1950. From 1963 to 1966 he wrote 12 stories for this Sunday newspaper supplement, the most for any other title during that decade. The second began in 1967 and ended in 1971 with the publication of S*E*V*E*N, which contained three original stories, with the balance being stories that had been published in Playboy.

But beginning in 1968, and perhaps earlier, some of his stories began appearing that had a different, earlier style and tone to them, certainly different than the S*E*V*E*N tales. I’ve reviewed most of these here on the blog and have often mused that perhaps MacDonald had taken an old story out of the reject pile and submitted it again for publication. “The Reference Room,” which was originally (and only) published in a Mystery Writers of America anthology titled With Malice Toward All read like something the author had written years before. The same was true of “Wedding Present” in 1977, “The Accomplice” in 1980 and “Eyewitness” in 1979. In fact, “Eyewitness” was a rewrite of a 1964 short story that had been published in Argosy.

I haven’t written about “Bimini Kill” yet -- it’s the last original story of MacDonald’s ever published, but the author’s admission that it was an older story from the “dud drawer” confirms that this was indeed a practice he used.

From the Top of the Hill # 30: May 13, 1948

Here's the next installment of John D MacDonald's weekly newspaper column, from the early years of his writing career.

War Surplus:

Two years ago the tub was being thumped to call attention to all of the vast wonderful stocks of super-thermal gimmicks and double-reversing whatchits being offered to the public out of the collapsing grab-bag of our military might.

But the stuff wasn't all dragged out of the warehouses in time to meet the peak of interest -- and thus, right now, weird and wonderful items are being offered for sale without much attention being attracted. Check with your New York paper, last or next Sunday's edition.

Did you know that you can buy:

One ten-man balsa wood raft for only $12.95, a 1000 gallon portable fuel-oil tank for $24.50, one brand-new parachute for only $5.40, two used field desks, with filing cabinets for $11.00?

Or, if you have a terrific desire for one M-3 Medium Tank, with riveted hull and turret, you ought to be able to swing a deal for less than a hundred dollars. This, for a village, makes a most inexpensive and yet durable type of war memorial. Beyond chalking couplets on the outside of it, vandals are relatively powerless.

In fact, some small villages have been bright enough to run a campaign, buy a surplus tank as a visual memorial, and use the surplus to either endow a memorial scholarship for bright youngsters, or buy books for the local library.

Such goings-on are generally considered a bit more creative than an ungovernable yen for statuary.

And there is a venerable precedent. In Jackson Square in New Orleans there is a Civil War Memorial in the form of a Confederate submarine. Yes, we said submarine.

The corroded steel hull, shaped like a fat cigar, is probably twenty feet long. It was propelled by two men pedaling madly, as on a bicycle. This mutual effort turned a stern screw. The fellow in charge steered and, when they muzzled up to a warship below the water line, he manipulated levers which detached explosives fastened to the bow and transferred them to the hull of the warship.

In its day, that little tin cigar was considered a horrible weapon of war, deadly and not quite cricket.

The measure of its success is that it had to be dredged up off the bottom to be put in the park.

Now it is a pathetic and quaint little toy, seeming, like a sea shell, to echo faintly with the shrill yip of the rebel which was heard from Manassas to Gettysburg.

Beyond a doubt those tanks placed on village greens across this country will one day be looked at in the same way that we look at the Confederate submarine. As plaintive and fragile relics of a disastrous war fought in the almost forgotten past, when the technology of warfare was in its infancy.

* * *

Conspiracy:

Here is a subject that needs airing. Adequately aired, it may mean death to a large segment of American industry.

How many millions of dollars worth of lawn mowers are sold each year? And grass seed, and weed killer and strange tools for trimming borders and such?

And for what? After all the purchases are made, and all the energy is expended, the net result is a smooth green expanse of little grass blades. Somehow we have all been deluded into thinking that grass is the only thing to have around a house. Grass is a frail and stubborn organism. An incredible amount of effort is expended to get it to grow, and then to crop it off to the required shortness. Industry could certainly devise a plastic substitute. Once installed, there would be no seeding, rolling, clipping, cutting and cursing.

Evidently the manufactures of gimmicks for the lawn subsidise the magazines which show pictures of impossibly beautiful lawns. They keep the myth going. After a full season of enormous labor, all the homeowner has to show for his efforts is an expanse of snow and the prospect of starting all over again in the Spring.

The ultimate insanity is encouraging the grass to grow, and then cutting it down before it can grow tall enough to seed itself.

It's time for revolt. All that is necessary is to have brave men in the community allow their lawns to grow into the lush, untamed beauty of a vacant lot. Pleasant little flagstone paths can wander through the tall grasses.

Once the movement is started, those who follow the leaders will see the natural beauty of wild lawns, and soon the lawn mower manufactures will feel the crimp in sales and realize at last that this incredible conspiracy they have nurtured throughout the years is at an end. They can turn to the manufacture of something practical.

Like hedge clippers.

* * *

See you next week.