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.