But the author didn’t follow up Lemon with another Travis McGee adventure; he instead ventured forth with a standalone, his first since 1967’s The Last One Left. It would be his longest-ever novel, one sparked by his recent battle with a local land developer, and Lippincott pulled out all the stops. They planned on an initial run of 50,000 copies, with the novel included as a selection of The Book of the Month Club. And the author was required to do one of the things he hated most: help publicize the book, giving interviews to sundry newspapers and magazines throughout the country.
That novel was, of course, Condominium and it hit the bookstands in March of 1977. It had great success, lasting 27 weeks on the Times’ Best Seller List. A year later the paperback version was also a bestseller. One month prior to its initial publication, on February 20, the following article appeared in Florida Accent, the Sunday newspaper supplement to The Tampa Tribune. Written by reporter Rick Barry it trods familiar ground and contains a couple of glaring errors, but is worth reading for the few small surprises these kinds of interviews usually contain.
John D MacDonald: Travis McGee Does His Swashbuckling
By Rick Barry
It crouches at his right elbow, idle for a moment perhaps, but somehow suggesting the frenzy which could be unleashed by its master if the time were right.
They say his fingers fly about the thing, and its little silver ball whirls and snaps at the paper like a bionic woodpecker: The Incredible Sapphire Selectric. IBM Runs Amok.
Its handler is John Dann MacDonald, John D., graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Harvard's Graduate School of Business, author, societal analyst and "critic, semi-recluse and — with that typewriter – progenitor of Travis McGee, a name perhaps better known than his own.
True, that may change with the projected popular success of his latest novel, Condominium. But if it does, little change is expected in McDonald himself, a man who tenaciously homesteads his private niche, a literary hermit crab who emerges from his protective shell only when its necessity becomes painfully evident.
He lives in a square cypress beachfront house on stilts. Large panes of clear glass admit great trapezoids of sunlight and permit expansive appreciation of a lagoon and the Gulf of Mexico, and their all-but-uncivilized shorelines. Its angular tin roof suggests a Marblehead fisherman's cottage, but that of a very successful fisherman. It's "only" 50 feet by 50 feet square, he says, but has a 16-foot wide veranda extending around all four sides making it appear much larger.
It has a spacious living room with a panoramic view of sand, sea and sky, an ample kitchen, a loft-study where the typewriter is caged – and one bedroom. Why? Because "if you live in Florida and have more than one bedroom, you get company." Oh. Yeah. Stupid question.
He and Dorothy, his artist wife of 40 years, live there.
With MacDonald's background in organization charts and balance sheets, it is hard to correlate that training and apparent early interest with the creative person he's become. But it's a transition he explains simply.
"I was a failure in business," he says, without a modulating smile or visible regret. "I just did miserably in the two or three different businesses I tried."
He wrote - and his wife sold - the very first short story he ever wrote, during his last months in the service. It brought in $25.
When he was discharged in 1946, MacDonald spent four months hammering out at "least 800,000" words. None of it sold. But after another month he sold his second story, for $40. And by December of that year, his writing had earned him a respectable $6,000. He was 30, and a full time writer by profession.
Some 30 years, 500 articles and short stories, two books of non-fiction and 64 novels later, he is still a professional writer and works nearly as hard now as he did then.
Today, MacDonald is confident of his skills and sure of his place in the literary world. He says he "knows his limitations" and deems that achievement perhaps the essential bit of awareness for any successful writer.
MacDonald long ago traded pomposity and pretense for success. He even looks like those pictures of himself on the back cover of all those Fawcett paperbacks. They're not retouched graduation photos at all. There is snowy hair, the receding hairline, the utilitarian black-frame eyeglasses and blue work shirt. Jimmy Carter would be proud. MacDonald is bigger, probably about six-two, and somewhat burlier than those glossy likenesses hint. And except for his hair color, he looks much younger than his readily admitted 60 years. He is relatively untanned, but possesses a rosy, long-walks-on-the beach complexion. He does not smoke; he quit some years ago. He appears somewhat nervous during an interview with Accent.
If Condominium is his big shot at making John D MacDonald a household name, it has been Travis McGee who has freed him and his wife to take off for Mexico, a remote New York state lake or a Caribbean island almost at will, and helped them to buy that secluded gulf front lot and build that home to his wife's design.
Private detective McGee is a durable sort of guy, surviving well those 16 forays into the netherworld of violence, crime and intricate corporate subterfuge, stooping only occasionally to mimic the methods of his adversaries.
His foes are rarely his own. His quest for the return of cash or something else of value is typically on behalf of a beautiful and vulnerable woman – he is no stalwart of women's liberation - and involves a healthy slice of the loot.
The physical and sexual prowess that marked McGee's advantage over men and women respectively in the earlier novels is ebbing, but his wits and greater dedication to planning and caution have assured him (and his creator) extended years of success in his self-styled "salvage" business.
As it is, "McGee ages about one year to our three," MacDonald says of his hero. "There was one clue printed that could pretty well pinpoint his age (McGee was in the Korean conflict). I won't make that error again."
Second banana to McGee is Meyer, his paunchy, retired economist friend, who lives aboard another boat at Bahia Mar, a real Fort Lauderdale marina (where, incidentally, tourists have appeared asking to see the houseboat McGee won in a poker game, "The Busted Flush'') and with whom MacDonald admits "I probably have more in common" than McGee. Meyer is a rock of logic and a foil for MacDonald's own economic theories.
Travis McGee novels are not really all that similar one to the other, although the casual reader might assume so and argue the point. But there is a skeletal similarity and one persistent formula.
The scene typically opens aboard the "Flush" and ends there, with the "salvage" forays made in the houseboat, its launch, or in his properly aged and unlikely hybrid Rolls Royce-pickup truck. And there are always a "good number of new characters and a comfortable leavening of old friends," as MacDonald puts it.
That commonality supports well MacDonald's attack plan when it comes to taking finger to typewriter key: "I know where I'll begin. I know where I'm going. What comes in between is uncharted territory."
He says he attempts to make one of every three pages a keeper the first time he writes it. He may have to rewrite the second two to four times. And the third may undergo five to 12 rewrites.
Then there's the formula:
Take one middle-aged roughneck named Travis McGee, endow him with a keen mind, a soft heart and an overwhelming sense of moral outrage. Bind him hand and foot and place him astride a Trojan horse filled with nitroglycerine in the middle of a minefield during a hailstorm.
Then, discourse for eight to 10 pages on the kind of person who would strip mine a national park or drop 10 tons of some persistent pesticide on courting ladybugs in a pelican rookery. Move on an easy, ambling pace as McGee contemplates all this. Wrap it all in a flavorful turn of phrase but state the message emphatically.
Only then do you detonate the minefield, save the battered but repairable McGee who has by now located the loot and returned to collect his salvage fee from the raven-haired beauty in the diaphanous peignoir.
And therein lies a large difference between MacDonald's McGee and other series heroes. They all tend to be successful in dark alleys and double beds. But MacDonald sprinkles his tales with excursions into the world of self-perpetuating governmental bureaucracies, the complex machinations of big business and organized crime, polluting industries, their lobbyists and the elected officials they corrupt.
He's taken obvious slams at bigtime polluters, by name, and gotten away with it, so well documented are his facts and those first-person monographs are so much an integral part of the "why" and "how" of it all, that it goes down quite easily.
But if some of his readers, and he gets a lot of mail, want to know "why in hell he can't just get on with the story," an equal or larger number would turn up their noses at such fiction were that "redeeming" and well-researched social comment absent.
And for Floridians, the setting of at least part of each novel is in some sense as familiar as the inevitable presence of a color in the title.
Oh yes. The forthcoming McGee title would have been in the color ginger, had MacDonald not learned during a recent trip to London that the English associate it with homosexuality. He has a large number of loyal readers there and such an association would be anathema to McGee.
MacDonald makes no esoteric justification for his color-titles, saying it just became a means of identifying McGees from the others. "I just write the book, write the title, then go back into the text and try and find someplace to insert the color where it won't distract from the narrative." So much for someone's doctoral thesis.
(Actually, more than one contemporary literature student has taken MacDonald serious enough to address a thesis to his fiction. And a California couple periodically publishes a newsletter for MacDonald fans, The JDM Bibliophile. (Fanatics may join the mailing list by writing Len and June Moffat, P.O. Box 4465, Downey, Cal. 90241. Mail sent to McGee's slip at Bahia Mar will be forwarded to MacDonald. Really.)
Other tips for addicts: Look for McGee to give up his long-time favorite gin, Plymouth. (It's bottled in this country now and has reportedly lost its special qualities of "crisp" dryness) and perhaps switch to MacDonald's new favorite, Boodle's, although the author more regularly drinks vodka these days.
But don't hold your breath for number 17. MacDonald reports he is somewhat bogged down on it, somewhere near the 60 percent completion mark. It's something about the distraction resulting from the possibility that Condominium might be a very major popular success, he says. It could also be related to MacDonald's agreeing to take on minimal promotion chores for this one.
"I always feel uneasy when they first come out," he says. "It's usually quite a while until I get over it and get some perspective on them."
He really needn't be, with 41 paperbacks still in print and statistical surveys showing newsstand paperback audiences change every 12 months.
McGee could retire to a commune in Baltimore and raise chinchillas and it would barely crack the smile on the face of MacDonald's banker.
As his agent puts it: "As long as John keeps writing, a whole lot of people are going to keep on eating."
Pass the caviar, please.
I'm a late bloomer to MacDonald's work. Reading the article makes me long for the time where I could send him (or Travis) a letter. A reply correspondence from JDM would have been an all time high.
ReplyDeleteI lived an hour from him as a kid. I discovered him about a year before he died. I too wish I had dropped him a line.
DeleteInteresting article. Would love to read your thoughts on Condominium sometime - I have it sitting in my to read pile, I've only read it once before 20 years ago or so and remember being a little disappointed by it. Perhaps I'll enjoy it more this time around.
ReplyDeleteI read Condominium when it was first published and thought it was wonderful. At the time I was still going through all the JDM novels for the first time. I re-read it last year and found it, as you say, disappointing. It seemed flat and somewhat lifeless. Perhaps I'll get around to writing something about it one day.
DeleteI cheated and listened to Condominium recently on Audible; I also own the hard copy. I found it interesting that JDM mentions the term Googol which he defines (on p24 of my copy) as "the figure one followed by one hundred zeros."
DeleteRight! So many prescient statements.
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