Short Story Update

The June 1946 issue of Doc Savage

The task of compiling a complete and definitive listing of John D MacDonald’s published short stories began back in 1965 when Len and June Moffat published the first issue of the JDM Bibliophile, a single sheet printed on both sides containing MacDonald’s books printed up to that point in time. In the pre-internet age where little if any indexing of pulp magazines existed, this was no small task, but as the JDMB began to circulate, fans, researchers and fellow bibliophiles started contributing information for what would become The JDM Master Checklist. MacDonald himself was contacted and became interested, as he was in the process of renewing the copyrights on these works, and he provided much valuable information from his vast files. Finally, in early 1969, the work was published: a 56-page mimeographed, stapled, stenciled work that contained everything known -- up to that point -- on the works of JDM.

Eleven years later Walter Shine, a retired attorney living in Palm Beach, along with his wife Jean, expanded on the Checklist with their invaluable reference work John D MacDonald: Bibliography Biography, at 209 pages the most comprehensive JDM bibliography ever published and my primary reference for writing this blog. But even that was a work in progress, as there were ten stories that had been purchased by publishers but could not be identified. Throughout the 1980’s we (I myself worked with Walter in hunting down these stories) managed to find a few, such as “Underwater Safari” (Published in the February 1961 issue of Bluebook for Men as "A Dark People Thing"), “Devil Head” (retitled “Three Strikes -- You’re Dead!” for the June 1949 issue of All-Story Detective), “A Good Judge of Men” (Cavalier, March 1953), and, supposedly “That Old Grey Train,” which was said to have appeared in the March 1947 issue of Super Sports, a Columbia title with a very spotty publication history. (More on that later.) In 2015, years after Walter Shine had passed away, I discovered another title, “The Gentle Killer,” which was published in the November 1948 issue of All Sports.

There were also a few entries on the official list that were deemed as questionable, most notably “A Handful of Death”.

It was published in the June 1946 issue of Street and Smith’s Doc Savage, the first of many JDM stories that would appear there. It was included in the Master Checklist, but MacDonald himself could not locate a copy of his original manuscript (which was unusual for him) and he had received no tear sheets from the publisher. More unusual than that, the story was published under one of his “house names,” Peter Reed, a practice usually reserved for the occasion when an author had two or more stories in the same issue of a magazine. There was no other JDM story in the June issue, and it simply made no sense that the author’s very first story published for Street and Smith would appear under a pseudonym. Still, Shine included it in his Bibliography.

I recently re-read the story and am confident enough to state that it does not appear to be a John D MacDonald story. The story takes place in a mid-western Feed and Grain mill and its protagonist -- a Bluebeard by the name of Emil Kranz and who goes by the title Count Emmanuel -- is unlike any other I’ve encountered in JDM’s fiction. Most of the author’s early work had settings in Ceylon or India, or a New York-like city, not in an obscure small town where MacDonald had never visited. Most damning is the style: quite obviously not MacDonald’s, which was characteristic even in his very early stories. I think it’s high time to remove this title from the official list, and I will be doing that with my own version of that list shortly.

That’s one less short story of a count that was, at times, said to be over 600 titles but which, in reality (if you exclude magazine versions of his published novels) comes in short of 400. But it may be replaced by another title, one I can’t at this time verify but which seems like a good candidate for one of those five remaining “missing” stories.

Adventure: April 1953

A while back a copy of the April 1953 issue of Adventure showed up on eBay, claiming to contain a John D MacDonald story titled “The Sinner of the Saints”. This title does not appear in either of the JDM bibliographies and I myself had never heard of it. The seller was asking $65 for the issue, far more that I was willing to spend on a story that may have been nothing more that a reprint of an older story under a new title. Still, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it could have been a sports story (if “the Saints” of the title was a sports team) and one of those missing stories -- one MacDonald titled “Big League Busher” and was sold to Popular Publications (at that time the publisher of Adventure) in 1951. The issue is still for sale, now priced at $71.50, but I’m still unwilling to pay that kind of money, even to answer a question I’ve been asking for years. Perhaps one day…

Finally, back to “That Old Grey Train”. It was one of the original ten, but soon after the Bibliography was published Shine claimed that it has been located in the March 1947 issue of Super Sports. There is a file for it in the JDM Collection at the University of Florida, but it contains no tear sheets or publication information. Most curious of all is the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a March 1947 issue of Super Sports.

The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (2000) is considered to be the bible of pulp magazine publication history, and it lists no issue of Super Sports between September 1946 and June 1947. That was later to be proven incorrect when a February 1947 issue showed up, counted as Volume 6, Number 1. I recently purchased cheap copies of both the February and June issues and can confirm that the June issue is counted as Volume 6, Number 2, making a March issue impossible. I also own the September and December issues of that year, and they are Number 3 and Number 4 respectively. The only issue out of these four that contains a John D MacDonald story is the December issue, which has “Big John Fights Again”. So “That Old Grey Train” wasn’t published, right? Not so fast: the title page of “Big John Fights Again” contains the blurb: “Author of “That Old Grey Train”.

So we are left with a mystery. Either Columbia’s numbering of its Super Sports issues was in error (unlikely), the story was sold but never published (perhaps unknown to whoever wrote that blurb), or it appeared in Columbia’s other sports title of 1947, Sports Fiction. If that last possibility is correct it would have had to have been published in that title’s June or September issue. No listing of the contents of either issue is available online.

An ongoing mystery, and I'll leave it on the list for now.

UPDATE (September 27, 2020):

I have confirmed that "The Sinner of the Saints" is indeed "Big League Busher". I obtained a copy of JDM's manuscript and it is a baseball story and the protagonist plays for a team called The Saints.