tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42904766706913534142024-03-06T04:04:24.667-08:00The Trap of Solid GoldCelebrating the works of John D MacDonaldSteve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.comBlogger451125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-80925335273626069052022-05-08T23:00:00.001-07:002022-05-08T23:00:00.209-07:00King of the Paperbacks<p><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJCkwz-xcJ3-hlupbOsuC_UNkgs3qP0TMKwce9yw8MsjVxNoQe9cZJL3eKJYkz18l7_bCTdm_l0s-wssr2he64v82LJLi87AaW_7-8MfEuXfG6TwL_70oq9P3JApz8Aunz8b5619T1paFiMFczQw4Q1PlSIVY-8WqJek9iPBxnjJ0iBvACiLeDf91/s2806/photojdm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2806" data-original-width="1836" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJCkwz-xcJ3-hlupbOsuC_UNkgs3qP0TMKwce9yw8MsjVxNoQe9cZJL3eKJYkz18l7_bCTdm_l0s-wssr2he64v82LJLi87AaW_7-8MfEuXfG6TwL_70oq9P3JApz8Aunz8b5619T1paFiMFczQw4Q1PlSIVY-8WqJek9iPBxnjJ0iBvACiLeDf91/s320/photojdm.jpg" width="209" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;">The following brief profile of John D MacDonald was published in the Sunday newspaper supplement of the Bradenton <i>Herald</i> on March 31, 1974 and was ironically titled “John D MacDonald: King of the Paperbacks”. Ironic because just a few months earlier the author had published <i>The Turquoise Lament</i> in hardcover and would forever after (excepting a couple of short story anthologies) appear in that medium. There’s nothing new here, and although author Sally Remaley makes it appear as if she met with the author, given the short length of this piece it’s doubtful she did.</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-20c800c3-7fff-ea6a-a3cd-13a1d95657cc"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Reigning King of the Paperbacks... that's famous Sarasota author John D. MacDonald, who justifiably qualifies as that prestigious potentate and is a favorite with readers all over this country and many others.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">For the undisputed ruler of Paperback Land, the prolific MacDonald, has authored pocket novels now in the hands (as well as pockets) of millions of devoted and dedicated subjects.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald, who lives the good life (when not slaving over his ever-hot typewriter, and he even enjoys that to the hilt) at his oceanside home, has a whole library of his brainchildren now in paperback print and there are always more "in the offing."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">But don't ever belittle the paperback route to fame. John D. MacDonald deliberately and sagely, as it proved, chose the paperback realm over the sometimes considered more "snooty" side of the novel-writing business ... at which John D., as he is familiarly known, is an expert.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">The Sarasota writer realized he could attain what he wanted most ... a big readership ... by means of the lowly and inexpensive pocket book medium,</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">He was smart enough to see what many other authors could not, or would not, see. The pocketbook method would bring his novels the greatest circulation, and the quickest.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">It worked just as he had anticipated. Mention his name in Timbuctoo, in Trinidad, or in Paducah ... almost everyone knows who John D. MacDonald, "daddy'' of the famous Travis McGee, is.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">In fact, it's almost impossible to find someone who doesn't know that John D. MacDonald is literally King of the Paperbacks. Drop in at any news stand and you'll see rows and rows of John D.'s fast-moving adventure titles, with colors in the names to help you remember which ones you've already purchased.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">(John D. was the first person to use the color-key idea in publishing.)</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">And book store owners will tell you that many readers avidly collect John D.'s books. They don't take up much space, and they're inexpensive. Some readers couldn't afford to collect hardcover books, and wouldn't have room for the larger size in their homes."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald came home from service and read some of the current stories, decided he could write better fiction. He kept saying, “That's lousy writing. I could do better than that.''</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">One day his wife said, "So why don't you?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Always one to accept a challenge, MacDonald couldn't let that one pass. He hauled out his typewriter and got busy. Editors agreed his stuff was better than they had been receiving. They bought some 500 short stories and articles from him up to 1950.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Then John D. decided to try the paperback field. It turned out to be the best decision he ever made.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">He is completely in tune with paperback readers and has often remarked that "If the objective of writing is to acquire an audience, I can't think of a better place to find it."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald is also intrigued with paperback writing because of a category which he has developed to the fullest and which he sometimes terms the "why-did-it?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Most of MacDonald's pocketbook novels are in fact this interesting type of story, in which MacDonald has become a master craftsman.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">There is a difference between it and the "who-done-it." He explains it this way: "The thing I prefer about the 'why-did-it' is that the writer, instead of creating or solving problems, tries to establish why this particular chain of events came about."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald thoroughly enjoys what he's doing, for paperbacks have brought him a lovely secluded home and the opportunity to live the way he wants to live, to write what and how and when he wishes, and to enjoy his favorite hobbies, which include fishing and photography</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">He also likes to travel, especially all over southern and central Florida, scouting for the backgrounds he uses for his own novels while simultaneously becoming more and more knowledgeable as an environmentalist ... a subject dear to his heart.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald has a quick, brilliant mind, and talks fluently on a great many subjects ... a handy quality for a writer ... and he admits to having an excellent memory, although adding, I'm not blessed with what is known as 'total recall'."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald has a keen interest in his home community and in people. And he notes, getting back to his paperbacks, "One reason they go over so well may be that people are existing in a throwaway culture and want light, fast-moving, humorous reading. They can buy these books at low cost, then toss them away after they read them, if they want to."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">The exciting thing is that very few readers toss out John D. MacDonald's paperback novels. Knock on any door, walk in, and you're likely to see some of John D's books on the shelf.</span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-12355098849854901422022-04-10T23:00:00.001-07:002022-04-10T23:00:00.212-07:00He Comes to Us One by One and Asks Us Who We Are<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBFCByZAHfVhK6C-kKwCxB_YHF4t8UVKmC49vpf2u8uP2mgoWF5bIGdoPrYWm_PAGUAArQ_d7ogxNKBVJHpxw3UeMsADWXpBy-JSCw1PwQzchdMDw5WTKBGR6LnDfpny4xBOLNFELre589Kr4pRVNTXOIBEOiB5BqGgxzEPXdp8H3_3XRdhsQC7bdZ/s1600/kurt_vonnegut_by_marty_reichenthal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1078" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBFCByZAHfVhK6C-kKwCxB_YHF4t8UVKmC49vpf2u8uP2mgoWF5bIGdoPrYWm_PAGUAArQ_d7ogxNKBVJHpxw3UeMsADWXpBy-JSCw1PwQzchdMDw5WTKBGR6LnDfpny4xBOLNFELre589Kr4pRVNTXOIBEOiB5BqGgxzEPXdp8H3_3XRdhsQC7bdZ/s320/kurt_vonnegut_by_marty_reichenthal.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>Back when I first discovered the writings of John D MacDonald in late 1975, I took note of the fact that one of my then-favorite authors Kurt Vonnegut, Jr was a JDM fan, and his blurbs were included in several editions of the books. The inside book flap of MacDonald’s first hardcover McGee (<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Turquoise</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) contained a quote, and the subsequent entry in the canon (</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lemon</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) included what would become one of the most repeated lines extolling JDM and his works: “The works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2a855feb-7fff-7459-583b-c7b6ab5a288a"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The quotes from both books came from a piece Vonnegut wrote in 1973 for the July 15th edition of the Chicago </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tribune</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Book World</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> supplement. It appeared as part of a major celebration of JDM, including a long essay by MacDonald champion Clarence Petersen, a checklist of all of the author’s published books, and a review of the just-released </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Scarlet Ruse</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is the complete Vonnegut article, titled, “He Comes to Us One by One and Asks Us Who We Are.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John D. MacDonald and I have had the same literary agent for more than 20 years. He is Max Wilkinson, a cultivated man who has been described as a lovechild of Robert E. Lee and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I talked to Max one day about the deeper reasons for the popularity of John's books—as opposed to the surface of sex and gunpowder John puts on most of his tales. I will not try to reconstruct Max's elegant sentences, but two of his key nouns were </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">encyclopedia</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">archaeology</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Max said in effect that John did more research for his books than any other fiction writer, was crazy about reliable information. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Slam the Big Door</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, for instance, ends in a head-on collision between two automobiles, a disaster most writers would describe without leaving home. But John had a long look at the accident files of the Florida State Police, at the photographs especially, and he went to Cornell University, too. Cornell was doing research on wrecks. John then wrote the most harrowing wreck in all of literature, a sort of Beethoven's Fifth for coroners and safety engineers. John's wreck has been reprinted in its entirety, incidentally, in a booklet on good and bad driving habits put out by the Army Quartermaster Corps.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Another agent friend of John's and mine, Knox Burger, had to go to a hospital one time for minor first aid, and John came along for company. John passed the time chatting with hospital employees in the corridor, finding out what their workdays were like. He was especially fascinated by a floor-sweeper, Knox recalls. That sweeper will surely appear in a MacDonald novel sooner or later, and he will just as surely behave as real hospital floor-sweepers do. Some character may even die or be detected as a murderer because he doesn't know what John bothered to find out: what real hospital floor-sweepers, hour by hour, really do.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">This is beautiful.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John's latest book, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Scarlet Ruse</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, tells us, among other things, what the stamp-collecting business is really like-how much money can be made by collectors; how negotiable stamps are; how common fakes are, and how the faking is done; how children are encouraged to become stamp collectors in the hopes they will become big-time speculators when they grow up. And so on. It justifies once again Max Wilkinson's feeling that John's collected works constitute a delightful, un-indexed encyclopedia, an encyclopedia jazzed up by fictional characters who care desperately about the information therein.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It also justifies the use by Max of the word </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">archaeology</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Max was speaking of diggers a thousand years from now. His guess was that those archaeologists would be like our own, hungry for the feel and smell and sound and taste and sight and muscle tone of human beings in the long ago. And the itches. And the tedious duties, and so on. A fairly lucky digger would find a Britannica. But the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Most of us lead narrow, queerly specialized lives. We play intricate games for a living, usually with rules which have never been recorded. John comes to us one-by-one with his keen and owlish curiosity, asks us what the rules are. Then he builds a crime and punishment story around those rules, and our livelihoods are immortalized.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I haven't said anything about how </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">much</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> John writes. Not only does he get his facts right, but he is probably the most prolific writer alive, now that Simenon has thrown in the towel. In his first four months of free-lancing, John says in his autobiographical </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">House Guests</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, he wrote eight hundred thousand words-late in 1945. Some freedom! Some lance!</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Volcanic productivity like that can be a symptom of many things, not all of them attractive. In John's case, however, it is an expression of enthusiasm for life, something else Max might have mentioned. John depicts us as attractive enthusiasts for our often fairly ridiculous games. He likes us. So guess what? We're only human, so fair is fair. So we like John.</span></span></p></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-20018272902371633552022-03-06T23:00:00.001-08:002022-03-06T23:00:00.215-08:00Some Further Adventures of MacDonald in Auctionland<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKj7iYGxiKrxAk04kidW3PePJJy0s84s2aVGk5ojHE_P5Vn3mrtVWTdI8fup469IajUGLPnmNE4tgIlX0Pq8cTqe8RQ5vVcl27Z5vdCet8QV2jjMlgobbKZQU5yVHoNeVspGq-cgTCR_7OfUe9LXqWjCtzJd6zpAflZSKunE3gnVDwgoDd9tn8qCdC=s2076" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2076" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKj7iYGxiKrxAk04kidW3PePJJy0s84s2aVGk5ojHE_P5Vn3mrtVWTdI8fup469IajUGLPnmNE4tgIlX0Pq8cTqe8RQ5vVcl27Z5vdCet8QV2jjMlgobbKZQU5yVHoNeVspGq-cgTCR_7OfUe9LXqWjCtzJd6zpAflZSKunE3gnVDwgoDd9tn8qCdC=s320" width="185" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">John D MacDonald’s fourteenth Travis McGee novel <i>The Scarlet Ruse</i> was published in January 1973 and was the last paperback original in the series. Its plot revolves around stamp collecting and a dealer who is swindled out of a valuable collection in his keeping. On October 28 of that year the following article appeared on the stamp collecting page of the Chicago <i>Tribune</i> and was written by the paper’s Helmuth Conrad. It’s instructive in detailing how long a novel could gestate in JDM’s imagination before coming to fruition, as well as illuminating the sheer volume of research the author did on any chosen subject matter. The piece was syndicated and was picked up by several other newspapers in the country, including the Miami <i>Herald</i>. It was titled (in the <i>Tribune</i>, at least) “Some Further Adventures of MacDonald in Auctionland."</span></span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-a991cc66-7fff-7b93-c101-5592fe338aad"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not long ago, I urged everybody to rush out and buy <i>The Scarlet Ruse</i>, a new mystery novel which draws heavily on stamp speculation for its plot and is authentic down to the tiniest detail.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">
Afterward, I wrote to its author, John D. MacDonald. and asked him for background on how he put the book together. He was more than gracious and sent me a 700-word reply which I will condense as best I can.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt;">
About five years ago, MacDonald spotted a newspaper article on stamp investing, and that was the genesis of the </span><i style="font-size: 11pt;">Ruse</i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> plot. "My first step (while working on other books, of course) was to read all the reference works I could find, and to subscribe to the periodicals in the field,” he said. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Next, I reviewed some 10 years of auction catalogs, comparing the prices realized with the catalog values in Scott, Minkus, Gibbons, etc. Then I talked to dealers and collectors."</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"My next step was to subscribe to the auction catalogs of Siegel, Harmer, HarmerRooke, Wolffers, Apfelbaum, Schiff, Mozian, Robson Lowe, and Stanley Gibbons, and to write down imaginary bids on items being sold.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"After all the study and experimentation, I began placing bids and acquiring lots and putting them in the safe deposit box, after authentication by the Philatelic Foundation."</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">MacDonald bought fine to extremely fine copies of classics issued by the United States, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and Barbados.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now that <i>Ruse</i> has been published, he is beginning to sell off his holdings. “On some items, such as a superb, never hinged block of U.S. Scott 40, I expected to receive, after auction commission, about 175 per cent of the purchase price. I would doubtless do better if I kept the items longer."</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A byproduct of MacDonald's meticulous research is that he is again hooked on collecting for fun, a hobby he gave up at the age of 14.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"And I am now toying with the idea of doing a nonfiction account of my specific and detailed adventures in auctionland," MacDonald said.</span></p></span></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-71976360541864539902021-11-28T23:00:00.002-08:002021-11-28T23:00:00.191-08:00New Hero Debuts in 2 Paperbacks<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRnZ7m7-cLM9i7fUUFWlWOFv4LvPaO-EHiysbVe_m2ETNOAiWjGTti0cD58B3SMb_7rnZNEiYz-__E6h3-clWIrt1JLoJc6a7xBdGit6BMMr1wDxZiluj2I5DvVFAz93UIe-cI8SaNbuU/s2048/The+Deep+Blue+Good-By.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1217" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRnZ7m7-cLM9i7fUUFWlWOFv4LvPaO-EHiysbVe_m2ETNOAiWjGTti0cD58B3SMb_7rnZNEiYz-__E6h3-clWIrt1JLoJc6a7xBdGit6BMMr1wDxZiluj2I5DvVFAz93UIe-cI8SaNbuU/s320/The+Deep+Blue+Good-By.jpg" width="190" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The following book review was published in the May 31, 1964 edition of the Winnona [Minnesota] <i>Daily News</i>, the month and year that Travis McGee was introduced to the world in the first two novels of what would become a series. It was written by local columnist John R Breitlow, a man who obviously knew his JDM. It’s always interesting to read something regarding MacDonald from the pen of someone whose exposure to the author preceded the appearance of McGee, and Breitlow seems to know what he is talking about. Unfortunately he ends the piece with that tired old cant about MacDonald having much too much talent to be writing such tripe.</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-4f404778-7fff-a1c0-cf8d-f99c4b7ecad1"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>New Hero Debuts in 2 Paperbacks</b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By JOHN R. BREITLOW</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>THE DEEP BLUE GOODBYE and NIGHTMARE IN PINK, by John D. MacDonald. Gold Medal Books, 144 pages each, 40 cents each.</i> </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The world of John D. MacDonald is a limited but fascinating one. Located mainly on the east coast with Florida as its base of operations, it contains large numbers of motels, modern offices and high-rise apartments, plus a proponderance of expensive boats. It is peopled by very worldly individuals, being mainly virile heroes, sinister villains, and attractive heroines with a tendency to meet a violent end.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Few of MacDonald's works begin life in hard cover, but they are found in profusion on thousands of paperback stands. Although their specific ingredients vary in fascination and timely detail, their general pattern has a constancy not unlike the great "Chateau - bottled wines” of Bordeaux.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A literary connoisseur might object to such a comparison on the qualitative level with considerable justice, yet the comparison is apt. MacDonald fans who regularly invest small sums at the newsstands of bus depots, drug stores and hotel lobbies, know exactly what they are getting and tend to like it just that way, to judge from the volume of sales and regular appearance of new titles.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the years, there has been such a similarity in John D. MacDonald's heroes that he has now taken the logical step which will save him inventing a new name and background every three months - he has inaugurated a series, having settled upon the name and character of Travis McGee.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyone who has read more than two MacDonald books has already met McGee. He lives on a lavish houseboat which he won in a poker game. He makes a precarious living by robbing thieves for a 50 per cent commission in an aura of slightly tarnished knight - errantry. Experienced with fishpole, fists and charm, Travis McGee is generally admired by women and respected by men. Some might call him a bum and others might label him the product of his age. Both would be correct.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">John D. MacDonald introduces Travis McGee to the paperback world in two volumes which appeared on newsstands almost simultaneously: <i>The Deep Blue Good-by</i> and <i>Nightmare in Pink</i>. While usually strong on titles, MacDonald appears this time to have submitted to a publisher's whim. The only apparent reason for these colorful allusions is to justify the books' front covers, tinted to match the otherwise obscure titles.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The Deep Blue Good-by</i> finds McGee helping two pleasantly - formed highly dissimilar females who have suffered damage to both purse and pride at the hands of one Junior Allen, a sinister character with muscle, sex appeal, a large cruiser, and the hidden charm of an angered perverted cobra. The loot involves some precious stones smuggled out of the Orient in the Second World War.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This particular crusade confronts Sir T. McGee with a successful New York contractor, a Texas playboy heading for destruction, and a motley gathering of young people whose quest for kicks lands them in troubled West Indian waters. (MacDonald's opinion of the adolescent generation is even lower than they warrant, if that is possible.) Also up for consideration is the author's rather philosophical treatment of what might be called the “Bunny Syndrome," rather harsh but not unfriendly view of the modern playgirl.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjseEIV2x-OAZLWaw132XxzrEsH9p13zsrkCiUIL1Hr_p8g9Zoc0QFNehhgvBYejWtiFN7hNusVXg-8ynnaw2tnFdWhQQpS-vfegN1OfqHfih_PVw1kqm7v7SHYrc-OP9jKi2nvT3qaHdk/s2048/206602572_fb83a6f7d0_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1182" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjseEIV2x-OAZLWaw132XxzrEsH9p13zsrkCiUIL1Hr_p8g9Zoc0QFNehhgvBYejWtiFN7hNusVXg-8ynnaw2tnFdWhQQpS-vfegN1OfqHfih_PVw1kqm7v7SHYrc-OP9jKi2nvT3qaHdk/s320/206602572_fb83a6f7d0_o.jpg" width="185" /></a></i></div><i>Nightmare in Pink</i>, the second of the Travis McGee series, removes the kindly boat bum from his marina and sends him to New York to help the younger sister of a permanently disabled Korean War buddy. McGee falls for the girl (MacDonald is rarely above allowing his heroes to tamper with his heroines) but for reasons unclear they decide to go separate ways.</span></span><p></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Nightmare in Pink</i> actually has some frightening aspects to its plot, which involves the use of neurological drugs and surgery to control some large family fortunes and eliminate anyone who stumbles onto the scheme. McGee himself barely avoids this fate and in making his escape from a "Rest Home" of fiendish design, inserts a schizoid drug into the staff coffee maker. The results would be funny, if the clinical detail wasn't quite so realistic.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These columns have previously lamented the fact that John D. MacDonald obviously chooses to grind out this sort of thing when he could be doing something better. We consider him a good writer, and wish he would hurry and make enough money from his paperback empire so that he could quit being a hack. Until that time, we will, like Ian Fleming proclaims on the cover of one of the first Travis McGee books, automatically read everything John D. MacDonald writes. Everyone, it would seem, has his weaknesses.</span></p></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-1374395026701785742021-08-29T23:00:00.080-07:002021-08-29T23:00:00.245-07:00Travis McGee, Boatman<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrBrdibDZif5I5z2hOtxmULSSFvkT1HrEeE4EAi7KarqSfhwezOiotsXbN0xZnHUKCKMAl4IyaL0F7aDbGr5qGKxmBxh-pFmem3-bx2-a3d9BzP6a3wnCSwzG_b9D666OwDkYKrVS5IM/s2048/Rudder+1975-08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1569" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrBrdibDZif5I5z2hOtxmULSSFvkT1HrEeE4EAi7KarqSfhwezOiotsXbN0xZnHUKCKMAl4IyaL0F7aDbGr5qGKxmBxh-pFmem3-bx2-a3d9BzP6a3wnCSwzG_b9D666OwDkYKrVS5IM/s320/Rudder+1975-08.jpg" width="245" /></a></div><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">It might be surprising for a John D MacDonald fan to learn that Travis McGee’s 52-foot houseboat, <i>The Busted Flush</i> -- which plays such a prominent role in so many of the 21 novels starring the author’s series character -- has only been depicted by cover artists a handful of times. It was certainly surprising for me as I was researching this piece: I could have sworn I’d seen it more often. By my count I can find only four illustrations of the <i>Flush</i> on any of the various editions published in the United States prior to 1988, and I don’t think there have been any after that. All of the illustrations were inked by the great Robert McGuinness.</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-fe6dea12-7fff-9472-6776-a0beb2504cd5"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The houseboat’s first appearance took place with the first paperback edition of <i>The Turquoise Lament</i> in July 1974. It showed a well-groomed Travis McGee standing on a dock with the <i>Flush</i> taking up nearly every inch of the background. Now I’m no boat person but even I, at the time, could tell that this depiction of a 52’ boat was way too small to be the <i>Flush</i>. A few years later MacDonald’s bibliographer Walter Shine voiced the same sentiment in his <i>JDM Bibliophile</i> column:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"We nominate as the worst artistic depiction of any story the monstrosity of a houseboat which decorated the paperback editions of Turquoise and the second edition of Scarlet. That spindly little 28' no 'count boat no more resembles the 52' custom-built ‘decadently luxurious’ <i>Busted Flush</i> than Walter Shine resembles Travis D. McGee.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"Insult to injury, the Grand Rapids Special-looking furniture shown on the sundeck in Turquoise is indoor furniture, no more suitable to the <i>Flush</i> than a quart of Plymouth gin is to a nursing mother's breakfast.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiln_US4ECkqgS5dylNKeYhoDoHczWzv6TLDp0uhIO8BIdhw-5wM77-ivm4faE1XUAw7ZVMHZW6lfTQO2iMkd9jFTqea_qw0-TwVyy0JEFBQjupVLlaBbXMmabj4GzX-CVpDxKZ7SH81tI/s985/turquoise-lament-the-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="985" data-original-width="589" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiln_US4ECkqgS5dylNKeYhoDoHczWzv6TLDp0uhIO8BIdhw-5wM77-ivm4faE1XUAw7ZVMHZW6lfTQO2iMkd9jFTqea_qw0-TwVyy0JEFBQjupVLlaBbXMmabj4GzX-CVpDxKZ7SH81tI/s320/turquoise-lament-the-1.jpg" width="191" /></a></span></div><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"Worst still, there appears no place where there could be ‘topside controls.’"</span></span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Walter states, this same version of the <i>Flush</i> was reused for a revised paperback edition of <i>The Scarlet Ruse</i>, hitting the stands in May of 1975. Again, an overly short houseboat with no topside controls.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first paperback edition of <i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i>, published in September 1975, features an image of the <i>Flush</i> seen from the front, and there does appear to be -- a place for at least -- topside controls and an upper deck canopy. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, in June of 1976 Fawcett republished <i>Bright Orange for the Shroud</i> (its 19th printing) with what MIGHT be an image of the <i>Flush</i>, along with two other crafts alongside it. Being no expert on watercraft I can only say that none of them appear to be houseboats.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1975 an article appeared in the boating magazine <i>Rudder</i> written by esteemed journalist and editor of Sail Magazine, Martin A Luray, detailing John D MacDonald’s exacting expertise in all things boating, and including several passages from the McGee novels to prove it. MacDonald was interviewed for the piece and he revealed a few things I had not known about why he chose Bahia Mar as the port for the <i>Busted Flush</i>. Also included was an insert containing specifications for the houseboat (nowhere near as complete as Walter Shine’s multipage details in his 1987 monograph <i>Special Confidential Report -- Subject: Travis McGee</i>) along with an illustration of what the real <i>Busted Flush</i> probably looked like, “established through investigation to be the original design of the boat.” Given the author of the article and the magazine it appeared in, I’ll have to assume that this is the most accurate image of the <i>Flush</i> ever published -- or, at least, that I’ve ever seen.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #050505; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm8BIyVj1iZ70N0bsudT7ErjilWnf83VKNRHJRvsSnXVZyrRLLXSlMqJJ_tBCT_Lque9mJV5fzZ_XPFvff_V_QJgRc8PlAYDg8F2NxgRexwHdHUL1taHuIe88Om6ouoEdLaCRb6FPItPY/s2048/0727-scarlet-ruse-the-1871-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm8BIyVj1iZ70N0bsudT7ErjilWnf83VKNRHJRvsSnXVZyrRLLXSlMqJJ_tBCT_Lque9mJV5fzZ_XPFvff_V_QJgRc8PlAYDg8F2NxgRexwHdHUL1taHuIe88Om6ouoEdLaCRb6FPItPY/s320/0727-scarlet-ruse-the-1871-1.jpg" width="194" /></a></div>I’ve transcribed the entire article below and included an image of the insert with the illustration afterward. To view a full screen version simply give it a mouse click.<p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Travis McGee, Boatman</span></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span style="color: #2b00fe;">By Martin Luray</span></b></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Elsewhere in this issue is an article on liveaboards - a deeply researched intensive piece with extensive quotes from a number of boating folk who have given up life ashore for life afloat. Nowhere is mentioned, however, probably one of the most famous liveaboards of them all — a 6'4" ruggedly handsome private investigator cum "salvage expert" named Travis McGee whose home is <i>The Busted Flush</i>, a “barge-type houseboat' usually berthed in slip F-18 at Ft. Lauderdale's Bahia Mar.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee was hard to reach primarily because he doesn't exist and neither does <i>The Busted Flush</i> (or slip F-18 for that matter). He is the figment of author John D. MacDonald, who has written about McGee in 16 novels (the latest, <i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i> will be published in paperback by Fawcett next month) and has given his seagoing character an expertise about boats and boating that makes him totally appealing to marine buffs who also dig well-plotted detective stories that have some ring of truth. In the McGee books, all of the nomenclature is always correct. McGee describes himself as a “boat bum,” but he is [a] good seaman, expert boathandler, able at maintenance and repair of boats and engines. He has a fine eye for good lines - appreciative of beautiful vessels as well as the lovely soul-damaged women that recuperate from time to time aboard <i>The Busted Flush</i> as it voyages to the Keys or the Bahamas. What fantasy for you and I as we sail through the fog and murky depths of Long Island Sound.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The origins of <i>The Busted Flush</i> are not too obscure; it was won from a "Palm Beach sybarite" in a poker game, described briefly in the first Travis McGee epic, <i>The Deep Blue Goodbye</i> (1964) and later enlarged upon in <i>The Quick Red Fox</i>:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"I had won the craft in a long poker siege in Palm Beach. The man wanted another advance to stay in the game, this last time putting up his Brazilian mistress as collateral, under the plausible assumption that she went with the boat, but his friends saved me the delicate problem of refusal by leading him gently away from the game”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McGee is not always at slip F-18. Sometimes he is away from boating altogether in places like Chicago and Hollywood and even Speculator, N.Y. (<i>The Quick Red Fox</i>). Sometimes he is close to the sea with adventures in Hawaii, the South Pacific and the Caribbean. But his knowledge of boating shows up when he is aboard <i>The Busted Flush</i> and has her moving somewhere as in <i>Bright Orange for the Shroud</i> (1965), where much of the action takes place in Florida waters.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcWqqSQ92NpWLIwr4BCONY3-dLaqGMOaFzlgl64qYPPO0l9iBdTFIMi5uBFPt8c5z_bD_fyZhy-bNfxpgui9Llc2hArZaOVO4e57KLj6FTOIKFxZtQLnIH_sp0Hdc1b744Ar6u71AT8zw/s2048/dreadful-lemon-sky-the-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1198" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcWqqSQ92NpWLIwr4BCONY3-dLaqGMOaFzlgl64qYPPO0l9iBdTFIMi5uBFPt8c5z_bD_fyZhy-bNfxpgui9Llc2hArZaOVO4e57KLj6FTOIKFxZtQLnIH_sp0Hdc1b744Ar6u71AT8zw/s320/dreadful-lemon-sky-the-1.jpg" width="187" /></a></span></div><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee on anchoring:</span><p></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"In the night I was awakened by the creak of the lines as <i>The Flush</i> was trying to go around on the tide change, swinging further each time until pushed by the breeze. I always rig two bow hooks in such a way that she shifts her weight from hook to hook when she changes end for end."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee gets his lines checked and then reflects on the ways of the seagoing world. "There are a lot of dead sailors who took things for granted. On a boat things go bad in sets of threes. When you pull a hook and then go hustle to get the wheels turning something will short out on you so that you go drifting, dead in the water. And that is the time when, without lights you drift right out into the ship channel, see running lights a city block apart coming down at you, run to get your big flashlight, fumble it and drop it over the side. A boat is something that never had just one thing wrong with it?”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee, of course, often singlehands The Flush, but on this trip he has two others on board to help him put the boat to bed for the night - this after a long expository blast about the destruction of the Everglades by human folly.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"I studied the chart and picked a spot. I went beyond Marco Pass to a wide pass named Hurricane Pass. The channel was easy to read from the topside controls. <i>The Flush</i> draws four feet and is heavily skegged to protect the shafts and wheels. It was low tide... the pass is so wide Roy Cannon (Island) has a sand beach. I edged north a little to get the protection of the headland which forms the north edge of the pass. At dead slow I ran the bow into the beach sand... we put out all four anchors, the two bow ones well up on the beach, wedged into the skeletal whiteness of mangrove killed by the sand which had built up. I carried the stern hooks out into the water neckdeep, wedged them in, stomped them firm. She would rest well there, lifting free with the incoming tide, settling back at the low.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">One imagines even McGee, strong as he is, being totally bushed from carrying those two Danforths into water neck-deep. But never mind, McGee survives potential hernia and shows us later how good he is at docking The Flush:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"When I balanced forward motion and downstream current, Arthur jumped to the dock with a line and I waved him on to the piling I wanted. With it fast, I cut off the engines and the flow swung the stern in. I put on a stern line and spring line. Chook asked about fenders and I saw that the rub rail would rest well against the pilings and I told her not to bother.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">So much for Travis McGee the navigator and boathandler. There is also McGee the maintenance and repair expert who supervises the rebuilding of the upper deck of <i>The Busted Flush</i> when it is torn apart by a bomb in <i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i>. And he is a good hand at fixing an automatic bilge pump, as he does aboard his friend Meyer's "aging cruiser <i>John Maynard Keynes</i>.” (<i>A Tan and Sandy Silence</i>, 1971):</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9HkBhITdwHwq5HBRJ45r592hJ0ajSNhr44JsFRw0KIJe_ZcU2LQxjHMZESBsIyqbXKV0gJ7RxksGmqwX7f8iDEYUfvlMZjk4g62t8yCgtLXMhcjY5gn7lWOPkYHtHy8YtZ69FcUti-S8/s484/0173-bright-orange-for-the-shroud-1812.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="285" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9HkBhITdwHwq5HBRJ45r592hJ0ajSNhr44JsFRw0KIJe_ZcU2LQxjHMZESBsIyqbXKV0gJ7RxksGmqwX7f8iDEYUfvlMZjk4g62t8yCgtLXMhcjY5gn7lWOPkYHtHy8YtZ69FcUti-S8/s320/0173-bright-orange-for-the-shroud-1812.jpg" width="188" /></a></span></div><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"I got it apart again. I spun the little impeller blade and suddenly realized that maybe it turned too freely. Found the set screw would take a full turn. Tightened it back down onto the shaft. Reassembled the crummy little monster, bolted it down underwater, heaved myself out (of the bilge), sat on the edge of the hatch and had Meyer flip the switch. It started to make a nice steady wheeeeeeng, gouting dirty bilge water into the Bahia Mar yacht basin.”</span><p></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">When the pump turns itself off, Meyer says "Thank you very much and hooray."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">As it turns out, John D. MacDonald, who I visited in Florida last spring, is no landlubber as a major national magazine mistakenly noted recently. He is a bona fide boatman who has cruised much of Florida's inland and coastal waters, the Caribbean and the Pacific. True, he owns no boat at the present, but the speedy <i>Muñequita</i> which appears in one of his books is based on the T-Craft I/O that was his waterborne vehicle for a number of years.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald and his wife Dorothy live on an island near Sarasota. One imagines living on a key as the ideal life of solitude for a writer, the isolated house among the mangroves, a lonely beach on which to walk and ponder. It is not like that. The island on which the MacDonalds live has slowly been taken over by developers, which accounts for McGee's wrath against real estate types and MacDonald's involvement with the local Save Our Bays movement. If there is any peace on the island, it is in the quiet cul de sac off the main highway where the MacDonald home, a large contemporary structure stands on 12 foot pilings. Oriented toward the Gulf on the west and toward another string of keys to the north, it is a house to be envious of, a proper place for a writer concerned with seagoing matters, comfortable, substantial, open to its environment. Every part of the house, in fact, is open-living room, kitchen, bedrooms on a balcony, library with a collection of current eclectic titles. Everything, that is, except MacDonald's work room which is partitioned off at one end of the house and contains his work tables, files and a research library.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">At 58, with some 66 titles behind him (50 besides the Travis McGee series), MacDonald seems a person with deep feelings about the way we live which, as he says, he finds difficult to relate verbally. Like all good writers, his communicativeness is expressed in his books. A tall man with a gentle, meandering way of talking, yet known to be very firm about his principles, he is not a tough guy, or out to prove some sort of machismo like certain other detective story writers. He impresses simply as a creator of fiction in which his beliefs and whatever fantasies he may have about how we can slow down our destruction are channeled through Travis McGee.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">We did a lot of chatting and when the talk got around to McGee, he said that the character came out of the marine environment in which he had lived between 1949 and 1964 when the first McGee book, <i>The Deep Blue Goodbye</i> appeared. Over the years he has done so much cruising to the Bahamas and Key West and Florida and Biscayne Bays that McGee's travels aboard <i>The Busted Flush</i> were reconstructed from memory with occasional help from charts. Instead of buying them, he'd leaf through them at one of the local chandleries.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">About the choice of Bahia Mar as McGee's home port, MacDonald said, "We knew Bahia Mar from having stayed at Pier 66. We used to stay there when the weather was too bad to go across to the Bahamas. But Pier 66 was too glossy for McGee, he was better suited to be across the way among the liveaboards at Bahia Mar. His boat was based on one of those seagoing barges I used to see along the East Coast. I was trying to think in terms of having a place he could live on and move at the same time. Nothing static like Nero Wolfe and his orchids”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald is not a peevish man, but he has his not-too-carefully-hidden angers. The filling-in of Florida's natural estuaries. Poorly-built plastic boats. Lowering the state's water table through excessive building. Stripping the soil for potash which uses up enormous amounts of water (86 million gallons a day by one firm) not all of which is returned to the earth. REIT's -- Real Estate Investment Trusts, a condominium development system peculiar to Florida. A large national company's plant in Bradenton which puts "untold quantities of virulent, poisonous crud into the atmosphere.” Instinctively, one has to be on his side.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">As I was about to leave, MacDonald pointed out a family of porpoises playing in the pass between his island and the next key. They tumbled over and over and suddenly a small one, a baby shot straight up, at least six feet above the surface. It was a rare moment. I reflected that if I waited long enough I would see them again-probably off the starboard bow of <i>The Busted Flush</i> as, with Trav at the helm, she heads for another rendezvous with the corrupt world of the non-boatman.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwiNKsJ2JCUUWOjxq2tfsZwZ0koISHomu4u37mJ9Zgqz5RaaH4SavA2U3Kdah_r8O0P6w8HP6uKSWCEII_5kLPJb69hdUUEBVlCSXdc8F52GePyiWIRJVztwXDtAel-AIrs_5OK_Z5h68/s2048/Insert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1485" data-original-width="2048" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwiNKsJ2JCUUWOjxq2tfsZwZ0koISHomu4u37mJ9Zgqz5RaaH4SavA2U3Kdah_r8O0P6w8HP6uKSWCEII_5kLPJb69hdUUEBVlCSXdc8F52GePyiWIRJVztwXDtAel-AIrs_5OK_Z5h68/w400-h290/Insert.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p></p>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-44222806275506573772021-07-11T23:00:00.005-07:002021-07-11T23:00:00.176-07:00What IS Talent?<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFWTL3EJYOQDxyGSF9xSX4xXOKquuXec5QHM2mNx05hJKzOMt3-2pe_yN1InAgrX8Zo3C_y7r2foGQmCjItqClMv7veMB1Lal3E0LWV53pEQaliwPUxeeptffJiHSMEXBG7t5gmPzAtiE/s1614/Writers+Digest++1953-10++sim+writers-digest+V33+%252333+%25281953%2529+-+Page+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1614" data-original-width="1083" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFWTL3EJYOQDxyGSF9xSX4xXOKquuXec5QHM2mNx05hJKzOMt3-2pe_yN1InAgrX8Zo3C_y7r2foGQmCjItqClMv7veMB1Lal3E0LWV53pEQaliwPUxeeptffJiHSMEXBG7t5gmPzAtiE/s320/Writers+Digest++1953-10++sim+writers-digest+V33+%252333+%25281953%2529+-+Page+1.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;">In addition to the voluminous amounts of fiction written over his forty year career, John D MacDonald was a frequent contributor to the various writers’ magazines of his time. As early as 1950 he began submitting articles to prozines such as <i>Writer’s Digest, The Writer, Publishers’ Weekly, Author’s Guild Bulletin</i>, and even to fanzines such as <i>Masque</i> and <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2020/02/john-d-macdonald-vs-doc-savage.html" target="_blank">Bronze Shadows</a></i>. And, of course, to the fanzine dedicated to his own writing, the <i>JDM Bibliophile</i>. He consistently harped on a few recurring themes that he found had formed the bedrock of his own late-in-life decision to be a writer, revealed here in two quotes reprinted by Walter Shine in his <i>Bibliography</i>:</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-19ff20c0-7fff-3c76-e4c6-69b91b5eca76"><span style="font-family: arial;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“If you’re not an omnivorous reader, forget about being a writer.” -- 11 March 1959</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“I will tell you what I tell everybody who wants to write -- I tell them -- forget it. There are a thousand easier ways to make a living. You have to have the nerves of a gambler, and an ego the size of Mt. Washington, and enough energy to take you through about 500 seventy and eighty hour weeks in a row without a break, without getting sick or beat down. Forget it, you won’t make it.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“And this is <i>my</i> paradox. The ones who take that advice wouldn’t make it anyway.” -- Letter, 11 December 1965</span></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not included in the above are what he felt were the skills necessary for a writer to write <i>well</i>, to be able to communicate something more than just the words on the page. Above all he cited the need for an innate sense of awareness on the part of the person writing the words. This sentiment was the subject of this early article for <i>Writer’s Digest</i>, published in the magazine’s October 1953 issue under the title “What IS Talent?” It is written in the form of a letter to an imaginary would-be writer from a seasoned author who, after a mere eight years in the trade, had already spent over 20,000 hours in the trenches.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><b>What IS Talent?</b> </span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Dear Ben,</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">In your letter you asked me if I think you can write, if you should keep on writing. I must answer this basic question as honestly as I can, and not choose the far easier course of commenting on technical imperfections.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Your work does, of course, show many imperfections. As the author, you stride across your own sets, pointing to the characters and telling the reader what your characters are and what they are thinking. You intrude in your own stories. You show a tendency to use badly shopworn phrases: "hopelessly drunk," "dingy hotel room," "studied casualness." Those are a few I selected at random. They are usually the result of pairing words in a relationship so familiar that it has lost meaning, no matter how bright and new it was when first coined. You show a tendency to state your theme in your stories--to state the theme early in the story, and unmistakably, as though explaining to the reader what you are writing about. Theme should be implicit in the story, Ben. Not nailed down like a plank in a porch.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">But these are technical flaws. When you ask, “Should I keep on writing?" I cannot answer on the basis of these technical flaws because continued writing is the one thing that will eliminate them. And you have not been writing long.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Ben, I am filling the air with all this talk because it has helped me delay saying what I must say to you. Give it up, Ben. You can painfully and eventually acquire a certain competence. But you will never be a fiction writer. Never.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I say no to you, Ben, because you have not written much or long. The loss is not great. There are many I could not tell this to because they have gone too far. They have contributed too much to a barren cause. So much that it is emotionally more therapeutic for them to continue than to stop.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Now, having said you should stop, I must tell you why.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">What do I know about you? You are highly competitive, reasonably well educated, articulate, socially adjusted, happily married.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Why can't you write?</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Because you do not have the one basic tool of the writer, the painter, the creative musician, the sculptor. I call that tool <i>interrogative awareness</i>. As a novice writer without that, you are as handicapped as a color-blind artist.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Perhaps I can best explain it to you by telling you about the work of a young painter I met in Sarasota over a year ago. When I first looked at his work it was almost completely meaningless to me. Yet I knew he was sincere, that each painting he did expressed an interaction between him and his environment and was, in effect, a portion of his continuing comment on his known world.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I borrowed one painting. One day I began to find a few reference points between his known world and my own, and those reference points served as clues, much in the way archeologists untangle an unknown language starting with a few known symbols. Then it began to come clear to me what he was attempting, and what he saw, and I had that familiar and exciting sensation of having my mind twisted, and stretched, and wrenched into an outlook I had not previously had. It was an emotional experience for me. Sharing his eyes for a time, I was able to see my </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">own known world in a slightly different light. He had, through his vision, added a new dimension to my vision.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">To oversimplify a bit, what he had done, in the iconoclasm of all good creative art, was disregard everything he had been told to believe. And he had started from the bedrock of his own senses and builded a world that, for a time, was beyond my interpretive ability. But once I could see what he was doing, then something was done to and for me.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Now let us take something different in degree, not in kind. Take a single phrase from Raymond Chandler. “Old men with faces like lost battles.” Do you see how, for a space of a few seconds, that phrase seems to stretch your mind? It is pleasure-giving.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">We say it is apt. We say it is original. Yes, but beyond that it is something that can be produced only through a continual questioning awareness of environment.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">You, Ben, by a completely cold and artificial process, can manufacture a striking phrase merely by juxtaposing two words in a grotesque relationship. But it would be a process. It would not be the result of your own awareness, because you are not truly aware.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">When I read your stories, I am given a view of a very trite and ordinary and pedestrian world. That is the world you accept. You do not question it. Your mind does not put things into relationships that are unique to you. You automatically select the very relationships between things and persons and ideas that would be selected by fifty million other Americans. And when I read, I get no pleasure out of averages. I want a new view of the world.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Your words do not make me feel good. They make me feel tired. Because they are invariably predictable. And that, perhaps, is why we talk of the element of surprise in art. There is no individual stamp on your work because of this basic lack of interrogative awareness. There is no sentence there which could not have come out of any freshman English course. You are grammatical. You spell correctly. But there are no images to please me.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">You are not aware.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I will tell you what my own awareness means to me throughout every day. It is something continually going on in my head. And I am certain it is not going on in yours. I am not "better” than you are. This is not "better" or "worse" or "smarter” or "dumber.” I'm just different. Because I function this way, I can write. And because you don't, I don't think you can. I wish what goes on in my head were more wild and wonderful. I would be a better writer for it, a better artist. The limitation in the art is generally a limitation in awareness.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It is getting cool these evenings. I chop down a birch stub. The base is solid. The top is so far gone I can crumble it in my hands. Woodpeckers have made many holes. It stood high. I hold the piece they were on. Their country, now down on my level. And then there is a kind of undefined excitement in my mind. I call it awareness. An excitement this time with an undertone of regret. As if in bringing the stub down I also brought them down, the sharp-billed ones with ice-tong feet and clown topknots. I am sorting out sensual relationships in an illogical way, as though I brought down all the afternoon hours when the bills hammered deep after moist grubs in the rotten wood. A shifting of relationships and then that excitement is gone, and, somehow, somewhere, I have hoarded that moment and those excitements, and one day when I am unsuspecting, some portion of them will come out of my mind, go onto paper, and fit what I am saying in a way that is satisfying to me.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I finish chopping fireplace lengths. I put the ax in the pump house. A small regret. It is more satisfying to leave it in the block, canted, the blade deep. There is a look about used tools. They have the look of hands. And then new relationships begin. The way the rotten stub had the feel of birds. Tools the look of hands. And something in all of this is ominous. I cannot isolate it. It has a smell of death. I look at the dark pines for a moment. There is no wind. Everything for a few seconds has a death-stink. Then it is gone. Stored away. Usable, though never consciously.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">These relationships, these games that are often childish, often frightening, frequently painful, frequently gay and ludicrous, are not things that I <i>cause</i> to happen. That I <i>will</i> should happen. They have always been going on with me. The sense of excitement that comes with them seems to pin them on the back wall of memory, ready for total recall when some creative sense says they are needed here and now, at this precise point.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I am in a room with people and at some time in the evening I become, in turn, each one of them, trying to look out of their eyes. Sometimes it is muddy. Sometimes it comes wonderfully clear, and suddenly I know more about them.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">This may sound to you as though I am a bit mad.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">What I want to impress on you is that it goes on <i>all</i> the time. There is no rest from it. I cannot halt this continual drench of impressions. I would not want to. It makes me feel alive, but I wish I could slow it down because it seems to be making life go by too fast.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Now what does all this do for my writing? I have just stopped and made a computation. I have spent at least twenty thousand hours at my trade. I have achieved freedom from conscious thought about "how" I am achieving an effect in my writing and am able to concentrate instead upon the effect achieved. And, as I think of effect, out of this hidden warehouse of awareness come all the unexpected phrasings that seem right to me, that feel right in the moment of putting them down, that read right when I read them later.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">And because they have come from this private warehouse, they are definitely and indisputably mine and reflect my own relationship to my environment - not an average relationship. When everything is going right, the words will dance.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Believe me, it can go very wrong. There are days when I am dulled. When nothing comes but tritenesses. A full week and at the end of it I must tear up everything because it is dull and awful. But I know that through awareness I am constantly replenishing myself, and soon things will flow again, the arrangements will be felicitous, the well will be full.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Ben, this is the thing you do not have. And without it, I am afraid that you will hurl yourself too often and too desperately against an unyielding wall. You are sober and logical and intelligent. But there are no fantasies and excitements in your mind. You accept the somber relationships you see. You look out of your eyes at a grey and blurred world. I cannot tell you how to create awareness of all the flooding torrent of life around you. There is no logic or pattern to awareness. It is the logic of the self-mutilation of a Van Gogh.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Can you truthfully say there is in you a compulsion to express yourself in a creative field, Ben? I think, rather, you have sold yourself on the image of Ben as a successful and famous author. And, in your competitiveness, you think you can attain this end through application and determination. I tell you regretfully, and with all humility, that you cannot.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Sincerely,</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">John D. MacDonald.</span></span></p></span></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-39399682459927552612021-05-09T23:00:00.001-07:002021-05-09T23:00:00.203-07:00McGee and MacDonald... a Colorful Team<p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSwh6vfjv9LkXkxatxbwVa9dZAAZjCOMWPCkRznjYke1j1qY9d5phzG0jyabQRcPOLtycMpilZE-A4SpKFsiJHtrHUBApHz9lzo3DoeYO9znnoc0rRNoEogyI3YMD2-l37Ar_e6bndjZA/s1707/0008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1707" data-original-width="1037" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSwh6vfjv9LkXkxatxbwVa9dZAAZjCOMWPCkRznjYke1j1qY9d5phzG0jyabQRcPOLtycMpilZE-A4SpKFsiJHtrHUBApHz9lzo3DoeYO9znnoc0rRNoEogyI3YMD2-l37Ar_e6bndjZA/s320/0008.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;">The following newspaper article appeared in the July 15, 1973 issue of the <span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Minneapolis <i>Tribune</i> as John D MacDonald was passing through town during his press junket following the publication of </span></span><i style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Scarlet Ruse</i><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the last Travis McGee novel to debut in paperback. Much here is old hat, but there are a few things I've never read elsewhere, concerning Ross McDonald, used books, and what has to be a bit of malarkey about building a motorcycle.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><b>McGee and MacDonald... a Colorful Team</b> </span></p><p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">By Susan R. Welch</span></span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-1ae68a5c-7fff-33a7-c0bc-9ba3e7436732"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Travis McGee is a fictional detective. He is a mildmannered Florida houseboater who does his "salvage" work only when he needs the money, is a social commentator, is clever rather than violent, is kind to friends and animals, and respects women. He isn't the Wolf Man in sheep's clothing and he isn't a sexual basket case.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Lacking as he does the charm of untrammeled sadomasochism, John D. MacDonald's hero could hardly be expected to capture the public imagination, but the 14 mysteries in the Travis McGee series have sold five million copies in paperback originals and are more popular than ever.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Including the McGee series, which he started in 1964, MacDonald has written 64 books, 46 million copies of which have been sold by Fawcett alone. He was in Minneapolis last week to promote <i>The Scarlet Ruse</i>, the latest McGee thriller, and his fans are so rabid that it was difficult to quickly obtain a copy of the book.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Getting a Travis McGee past the security guard at the <i>Tribune</i> front desk was a major strategical problem. He wanted to steal it.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Minneapolis booksellers, delighted to hear of MacDonald's arrival, were even more delighted by the recent "arrival" of McGee and <i>The Scarlet Ruse</i>.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"What does the name John D. MacDonald mean to me?' exclaimed Dave Moore of Shinders. "Money! The man's a phenomenon. Our entire stock of <i>The Scarlet Ruse</i> sold out in three weeks. It'll be the best seller of the year."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"Bookstores wouldn't exist If it weren't for authors like him," said Kay Sexton of B. Dalton, Bookseller.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">The 56-year-old MacDonald is tall, well-built and well tailored. His face is flushed pink from the Sarasota sun -- like McGee, he lives in Florida -- and he generates congeniality, courtesy, charm, and a desire to be charmed himself.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald, a Harvard Business School graduate, says there's no parallel in lifestyle between himself and Travis McGee: "He's more gregarious than I am. I work from 9 to 6, and feed my duck and my goose. I'm also building a motorcycle. I need to be near my dish. Rattle my dish and I'll be there."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"The philosophies in my books are like trial balloons. Travis is more positive than I am -- I'm more anxiety-prone, more apt to doubt my own judgments. But one belief Travis and I do share is that the original sin is being a predator -- using and abusing other people, hurting them gratuitously."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Although he believes that fiction gets closer than anything else to the truth about existence, his aim in his writings is to provide entertainment</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"As Sam Goldwyn used to say, if you want to send a message, call Western Union. If some people are able to use my books as band aids for their own personal loneliness or private grief, that's great. I just don't want to start taking myself too seriously. If I did that, I might end up eating the poison apple."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Ross MacDonald, another noted mystery writer, who was hailed as an unrecognized genius by Eudora Welty in The New York <i>Times</i> last year, was given a poison apple, in John D. MacDonald's opinion.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"It's really one of those faddy things. He was given a great shining gift of critical acclaim by the literary establishment. This is okay if you're relatively indifferent to such things, but he swallowed the bait completely. He's got someone following him around now, writing down everything he does this is the great writer at work, and so on.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"No author should ever publicly review books. There's too much of an opportunity for petty jealousies, extravagant praise. Criticism should be left to professional critics."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Every Travis McGee title features a different color, a device MacDonald uses to prevent faithful readers from buying the same book twice. He has fun making up the titles and will sometimes go back after finishing a book and insert a sequence that will make the title plausible.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Will he ever kill off Travis McGee?</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"Every time I get angry with Fawcett (his publisher) I threaten to write <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/06/black-border-for-mcgee.html" target="_blank">Black Border for McGee</a></i> in which McGee dies." MacDonald chuckled.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"But, seriously, doing a series is like being in a potato-sack race. You're stuck with one character's viewpoint and the scope of characterization is narrowed. Eventually I'll get to the point where I have no place to take Travis where he hasn't already been.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"Or else I'll run out of colors -- be down to puce or daffodil."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">As paperback king, MacDonald can be mischievous when "cheap" readers buy his books in used editions:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"I've been known to wander into bookstores where they sell used paperbacks and carefully, very carefully, tear out the last two pages of a MacDonald novel and slip them into my pocket. Then I'll put the book back on the shelf.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"I also have a friend who writes 'Oh, my God, where did I get this terrible disease' on page 100 of one of my books. Then he sells it as a used paperback. Can you imagine the expression on the face of a reader when he comes to that page?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">What does it feel like to be one of the country's bestselling novelists?</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"My life is satisfying," MacDonald said. "But you know, lots of times I feel unreal. It's a schizophrenic thing. There's a California couple that puts out a magazine just about me. Sometimes I pick it up myself and it's almost as if I'm trying to find out what John D. MacDonald is really like.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"Then I say to myself, you're okay. You're doing what you want to do. But how can I really be certain in a world where nobody can prove that anything is worth doing?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><i>Susan R. Welch is a member of the Research Department staff at the Minneapolis Tribune.</i></span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><br /></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-20867014634815933572021-05-07T23:00:00.001-07:002021-05-07T23:00:00.231-07:00Housekeeping<p> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I want to let readers of this blog know about a couple of upcoming changes to The Trap of Solid Gold. These are the result of changes being made by Google, which runs Blogspot, the platform I use here.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-8483c27b-7fff-0c4d-ab5f-ac811522899c"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For those of you who follow the blog by email using the widget installed in the right hand column, please be aware that this service is being ended by Google in July. As far as I can tell they are offering no replacement for this, although I have been made aware of third-party apps that can be used. I have no idea how many readers use this service so I can’t really see the extent of the effect. If I do decide to use another service I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, you can always use an RSS reader such as Blogger, which is what I use to follow the various blogs I subscribe to.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then, beginning in September Google is ending their classic sites free web page service, used to display my various lists of JDM books and stories linked in the right hand column. They have offered a tool to migrate the info onto their new service and I have attempted to do this with my pages (Books by John D MacDonald, Short Stories by John D MacDonald, Fiction in Magazines and Newspapers by John D MacDonald and Science Fiction and Fantasy by John D MacDonald). I think the process worked on all but Short Stories by John D MacDonald, and I am too technically challenged to figure out what happened. The links still take you to the classic pages, and I assume they will still work to link to the new pages, but it may be a while before I figure out what happened with that one page.</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-42571848220405049452021-03-14T23:00:00.003-07:002021-03-14T23:00:06.790-07:00‘Condominium’: MacDonald’s Dreadful Lemon Skyline<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvBoxQtt7ylVO7osFcNHWabEsIsU59ZJZgUIFGoy4ADzPkq0TeCvU4cD-sWqp769QULrYQtJ51fMyRs2QgNl5jO2MSZypFWhKstlONUfvK9oHxlfqAkfyAhA_3pJsnVuFP9oigRuQ7k9I/s2048/0013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1705" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvBoxQtt7ylVO7osFcNHWabEsIsU59ZJZgUIFGoy4ADzPkq0TeCvU4cD-sWqp769QULrYQtJ51fMyRs2QgNl5jO2MSZypFWhKstlONUfvK9oHxlfqAkfyAhA_3pJsnVuFP9oigRuQ7k9I/s320/0013.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Book critic Jonathan Yardley enjoyed a long, fruitful and influential career, working at a variety of different newspapers from 1964 to 2014. These included the Miami <i>Herald</i>, the Washington <i>Star</i>, and the Washington <i>Post</i>, where I read his work every Sunday in the paper’s <i>Book World</i> supplement. In 2003 he began a once-a-month column in the <i>Post</i> titled “Second Reading,” where he reconsidered books from the past and wrote about obscure novels that should have been treated better in their day. That column introduced me to more great writing than all of the English classes I ever took in high school or college.</span></span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2134cc92-7fff-c6b6-6767-9521d43dcd4c"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Yardley was also a great champion of the writing of John D MacDonald, beginning when he was the book editor of the Miami <i>Herald</i> and on into his time at the <i>Star</i> and the <i>Post</i>. His articles on JDM were relatively long, well thought out, and displayed more than a passing knowledge of the writer’s work. Back when I started this blog in 2009 the first link I ever included in my “JDM on the Internet” section over in the right hand column was his JDM piece from the Second Reading series titled “John D MacDonald’s Lush Landscape of Crime”. I also included a quote from it at the top of the column, a near-perfect summation of MacDonald’s qualities as a writer.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">That piece contains several quotes from the article transcribed below, Yardley’s first about JDM, written right before <i>Condominium</i> was published in 1977. “‘Condominium’: MacDonald’s Dreadful Lemon Skyline” was published in the Miami <i>Herald</i>’s Sunday supplement <i>Tropic</i> on March 6, 1977. It contains one glaring error (<i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i> was not the first McGee to have its debut in hardcover) but otherwise displays a better-than-usual job of journalistic research for someone who had never read MacDonald before.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><b>Condominium: MacDonald’s Dreadful Lemon Skyline</b></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">By Jonathan Yardley</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><i>After three decades of using Florida as a backdrop of his detective novels, John D MacDonald is taking a hard look at the state's "geriatric ghettos" and environmental destruction in his book </i>Condominium<i>.</i></span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Back in 1953, in an otherwise forgettable little novel called <i>Dead Low Tide</i>, John D. MacDonald devoted a few paragraphs to the willy-nilly growth along Florida's West Coast - in particular, growth by riparian rights. With characteristic understatement he described that as "turning water into land and putting houses on it.” He also described the nightmare that haunted some residents' dreams:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"And you pray, every night, that the big one doesn't come this year. A big one stomped and churned around Cedar Key a couple of years back, and took a mild pass at Clearwater and huffed itself out. One year it is going to show up, walking out of the Gulf and up the coast, like a big red top walking across the schoolyard. And the wind isn't going to mess things up too much, because people have learned what to do about the wind. But that water is going to have real fun with the made land, with the sea walls and packed shells and the thin topsoil. It's going to be like taking a good kick at an anthill, and then the local segment of that peculiar aberration called the human race is going to pick itself up, whistle for the dredges, and start it all over again."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">That "big one" crashed around in MacDonald's mind for nearly a quarter-century. This year it hits land, in a genuine blockbuster of a novel called <i>Condominium</i>. It's a huge book, and it seems a lead-pipe cinch to be a huge popular success. Its publisher, Lippincott, has printed a first edition of 50,000 copies and has committed itself to a publicity and advertising budget of $75,000. More importantly, it is a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club - which means that it will be offered, on a hard-to-refuse basis, to the club's more than one million members.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald has written millions of words and sold millions of books during his three decades as a professional writer, but <i>Condominium</i> is going to be a "breakthrough" novel for him anyway. It is going to get him out of the mystery and suspense territory he has occupied so profitably -- notably with his 16 Travis McGee novels -- and into the far broader field of popular fiction. It seems a better-than-even-money bet to get to the top of the bestseller lists, and it will be a socko-boffo disaster movie if MacDonald's agent sells it to Hollywood on the stiff terms he is asking.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Of somewhat more parochial interest, <i>Condominium</i> also is going to establish MacDonald as the pre-eminent “Florida novelist.” Some, casting a jaundiced eye over the competition, would say that's not much of an honor, but that's not the point. <i>Condominium</i> is the culmination of an astonishingly productive writing career in which Florida -- its land and water, its residents and drifters, its businesses legitimate and illegitimate -- has been a central concern. Since he moved to the state in 1949, MacDonald has been observing and writing about the state's affairs more penetratingly than any other writer of fiction; in <i>Condominium</i> he simply brings it all together.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">The novel is about just what its title promises; it's called <i>Condominium</i> rather than the snappier <i>Condo</i> because, as MacDonald puts it, the abbreviation "doesn't travel well outside Florida.” The highrise in question is Golden Sands, on a Gulf Coast strip of sand called Fiddler Key - it could be Sanibel, or Longboat Key, or Siesta Key, where MacDonald lives, or almost anywhere in Florida:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">“Golden Sands was an eight-story building. The parking garage, the entrance foyer and the manager's office and apartment were on the ground floor. The floor above that was called the first floor. There were seven apartments on each floor, and, because of penthouse patios, only five apartments on the top floor. Forty-seven, plus the manager's efficiency. It was a pale concrete building, one apartment thick, shaped like an angular boomerang. It stood on four cramped acres of land, its rear convexity backing up on an impenetrable jungle of water, oak, palmetto, mangrove and miscellaneous vines and bushes. Its concave front faced the constant noisy traffic on two-lane Beach Drive, and, at a greater distance, the space between two taller beachfront condominiums, and beyond them, the wide blue Gulf of Mexico."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">The novel is long, complex and densely populated; its cast of characters is by far the largest MacDonald has dealt with. From its ominous opening chapter to its climax when the "big one," Hurricane Ella, walks in off the Gulf, the novel introduces us to a wide variety of people and problems. Chief among the former are the residents of Golden Sands, most of them retired, and the fast-money types who have built the highrise on a shaky foundation in order to skim off the highest possible profit.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald is reluctant to concede that <i>Condominium</i> is an angry novel, even though corruption of several kinds is chief among its many concerns; he says only that it was inspired in part by "a certain amount of irritation with the social structure - a tax structure which discourages the debasement of the environment rather than protects it.” He prefers to describe it as "a story about the retired people” in which they are treated “as persons rather than symbols," and when he is asked to summarize the novel's themes he says:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">“The book is basically about the problems of the geriatric ghetto and also about how the disasters of nature tend either to enhance or solve the problems of mortals.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">In all likelihood <i>Condominium</i> is going to be seized on by certain readers not merely as an attack on shoddy, environmentally exploitative business practices but as a condemnation of Florida itself. It is true that MacDonald is among the state's tougher and more perceptive critics-in-residence, but his tough words are tempered by affection. “I've always recognized that Florida is a slightly tacky state," he says, and then adds: “...you love it in spite of itself.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">It was love at first sight, in fact, that got him here to begin with. By 1949, MacDonald had established himself firmly enough as a writer of suspense fiction so that he and his wife, Dorothy, could live off his income from it, and they began looking for a congenial place to settle down. “We thought maybe Taos would be a nice place," he says, “so when we went to drive out there we decided we'd drive around the edge of the country. We drove down as far as Vero Beach and came over across to Clearwater, and it was so clean and sparkling and bright, we said, 'Why not?' We stopped and found a place and rented it and put the kid in school.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcWea-Ugco1qvOe9DD5AefhwM7fQvXNz_M5WwY5Yd30bjTCHm_5QBIK-y3iUPMMcfOfBpOpXUlewd32wpzkqxaSZ08DAUD5s6DTwfuZ869YkG2HnucVNIkY4xcdFIx5-6JmWy1k3623gc/s1673/0015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1462" data-original-width="1673" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcWea-Ugco1qvOe9DD5AefhwM7fQvXNz_M5WwY5Yd30bjTCHm_5QBIK-y3iUPMMcfOfBpOpXUlewd32wpzkqxaSZ08DAUD5s6DTwfuZ869YkG2HnucVNIkY4xcdFIx5-6JmWy1k3623gc/s320/0015.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br />When their son was ready for junior high school the MacDonalds moved to Sarasota to take advantage of its school system, and seven years ago they built a magnificent waterfront house on Siesta Key that MacDonald describes as "an old-timey type house up on pilings with veranda around it and a tin roof.” They have been around long enough to remember the state as it was before the big population explosion began in the '50s. MacDonald recalls the natural pleasures of those days fondly - "It was nice to be able to go out to Midnight Pass and catch bluefish until your tackle was all torn up and your arm was falling off” – but he bristles at suggestions that the Tampa-Sarasota area was a sleepy cultural backwater. What he remembers is "a very, very sophisticated environment,” inhabited by people of intellect and urbanity.</span></span><p></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">One thing that is important to understand about MacDonald as a critic of Florida and its culture is that he is a delighted observer of the human comedy, no matter where it takes place. As a result, much of what in his work at first seems sarcasm is actually humor, written with obvious pleasure in the odd quirks and nuances of an odd world. Take, for example, this passage from a 1959 novel called <i>The Beach Girls</i>:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"The breeze died. The high white sun leaned its tropic weight on the gaudy vacation strip of Florida's East Coast, so that it lay sunstruck, lazy and humid and garish, like a long brown sweaty woman stretched out in sequins and costume jewelry. The sun baked the sand too hot for tourist feet. Slow swells slumped onto the listless Atlantic beach. The sun turned road tar to goo, overheated the filtered water in the big swimming pools of the rich and the algaed pools of the do-it-yourself clan, blazed on white roofs, strained air conditioners, turned parked cars into tin ovens, and blistered the unwary. A million empty roadside beer cans twinkled in the bright glare. The burning heat dropped a predictable number of people onto stone sidewalks, of which a predictable number died, drove the unstable into the jungly wastes of their madness, exposed the pink tongues of all the dogs in the area, redoubled the insect songs in every vacant lot, set the weather-bureau boys to checking the statistics of past performance, and sent a billion billion salty trickles to flowing on sin-darkened skins."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">As that suggests, MacDonald has a tendency to exaggerate -- sometimes for comic effect, as there, and at other times for dramatic effect, as in <i>Condominium</i>. His view of Florida's future borders on the apocalyptic, the novel makes clear, and he admits as much. “I've been questioning people lately," he says, “and it's very strange. You say, 'Do you have a feeling that something really horrible, something we can't even imagine, is going to happen?' and they say, 'Yes - and soon!' I think there's such a thing as visceral wisdom, animal wisdom, and I keep rechecking my own gut feelings, because I don't want to become a victim of the same paranoia."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald finds it ominous, for example, that from the veranda of his house “I think we've seen two really clear sunsets in the past year," and he talks despairingly about the air pollution drifting south from Polk County. He is pleased about the state's expanding environmental programs, but his pleasure is tinged with a rueful realism: “The population pressure increases geometrically whereas the state's effort to save things is a linear progression. You can never elicit wholehearted popular support for these programs because most of the population is too new to see the problems."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">So why does he stay here? Because he has roots, a house, and many good friends "who were friends before I became notorious, those 'who knew you when." And obviously he stays because, no matter how short his patience with it may become at times, Florida offers marvelous material for fiction — and MacDonald, more than any other novelist, is making use of it.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">That is especially true of the Travis McGee novels, most of which are set in the state. As millions of readers know by now, each novel has a different color in its title (to help readers distinguish among them), and many of the colors have a distinctly “Florida” tinge: lemon, blue, orange, yellow, tan, turquoise. McGee, the anti-heroic hero, is one of the more beguiling creations in suspense fiction, a good-humored skeptic with, like MacDonald himself, an inbred dislike for the apparatus and entanglements of mass society. This is how he characterizes himself in <i>The Deep Blue Good-By</i>, the first novel in the series:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"...I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">This determinedly free spirit operates out of a houseboat named the Busted Flush, which is moored at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale. He keeps a box filled with spare clothes and cosmetics for the pretty young things who often drop in, and if there's a combination of a pretty young thing and a hint of injustice, he's into action as a self-appointed avenging angel - usually at a price of 50 per cent of the recovered goods. His scrapes are fun, and often scary, but the real pleasure to be found in the McGee novels lies in MacDonald's comments on the Florida scene, as expressed through McGee. Here's one from <i>The Deep Blue Good-By</i>:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"It was one of those Florida houses I find unsympathetic, all block, tile, glass, terrazzo, aluminum. They have a surgical coldness. Each one seems to be merely some complex corridor arrangement, a going through place, an entrance built to some place of a better warmth and privacy that was never constructed. When you pause in these rooms, you have the feeling you are waiting. You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let go. You cannot mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are emptied after occupancy, they have the look of places where the blood has recently been washed away."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Here is one from <i>Darker Than Amber</i>:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"South of the City of Broward Beach, along A1A, is where the action is. The junk motels, bristling with neon, squat on the littered sand, spaced along the beach areas, interspersed with package stores, cocktail lounges, juice stands, auction parlors, laundromats, hair stylists, pizza drive-ins, discount houses, shell factories, real estate offices, tackle stores, sundries stores, little twenty-four-hour supermarkets, bowling alleys and faith healers."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">And here is one from <i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i>:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"...It was easy to read the shape and history of Bayside, Florida. There had been a little town on the bay shore, a few hundred people, a sleepy downtown with live oaks and Spanish moss. Then International Amalgamated Development had moved in, bought a couple of thousand acres, and put in shopping centers, townhouses, condominiums, and rental apartments, just south of town. Next had arrived Consolidated Construction Enterprises and done the same thing north of town. When downtown decayed, the town fathers widened the streets and cut down the shade trees in an attempt to look just like a shopping center. It didn't work. It never does. This was instant Florida, tacky and stifling and full of ugly and spurious energies. They had every chain food-service outfit known to man, interspersed with used-car lots and furniture stores.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i>, published in 1974, is the 16th of the McGee novels and in at least one respect the most important - it was the first to make its original appearance in hard covers rather than paperback. That didn't mean it was a better novel than the ones that went before (though certainly it's one of the best of the McGees), and it didn't mean that MacDonald had finally "arrived," but it did give a certain legitimacy to his work that, in the eyes of some readers, it had theretofore lacked. It meant that a book of his could be displayed in the bookstores right next to the ostensibly more "serious” works of fiction, and it meant that he would be given more widespread and thoughtful review attention.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">That novel and <i>Condominium</i> are, one could say, the triumphant attainments of a writing career that had curious and far from propitious beginnings. MacDonald, who was born in 1926, was steered to Harvard Business School by his father. After graduation he held a series of jobs and was fired from one after another for having “unpalatable opinions" about his employers; he was, as he recalls it, "a brash fellow, you might say.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">His break came, improbably enough, during World War II, when he was serving in India as a major in the Office of Strategic Services: </span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">“I was in the OSS and the mail was in one hundred per cent censorship. Our people suggested that we just avoid any nonsense -- don't say where you are, the climate, the food, anybody else around you by name, just don't tell about your present environment at all, if you are ailing just don't mention any diseases -- it makes a pretty tough letter. I wrote several of those, and then I wrote my wife a story in a letter. She was doing some typing for a guy who was trying to be a writer. She sent it off to Whit Burnett, who accepted it for <i>Story</i> magazine and paid me $25 for it.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">When MacDonald got the news he thought: “Wow! I can do one of those a day. That's $125 or $150 a week right there." It didn't work out quite that simply. MacDonald returned to civilian life in September 1945, and it was not until the end of 1946 that he had become self-sufficient. He estimates that he wrote some 800,000 words in that period, the overwhelming majority of which never saw print.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Perhaps that was just as well, for MacDonald acquired an objectivity about the words he writes that stands him in good stead. The final manuscript of <i>Condominium</i> contains approximately 168,000 words, but MacDonald says he actually wrote closer to 500,000. In his files he has fat sections of the book that were thrown out because they didn't fit or he simply didn't like them -- and if he has any regrets about what gives every appearance of wasted labor, he gives no signs of them.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">The sum of MacDonald's life's work has long since passed the point most writers can comprehend: more than 60 novels and 500 short stories in just over 30 years. Admittedly, most of the novels are short, but two a year is an awesome rate - all the more so when you add 17 short stories a year to that. He is able to produce so much because he is an intensely disciplined writer - a professional in the truest and most admirable sense of the word. He puts in a 40-hour week at his rented IBM Selectric typewriter in his spare and semi-isolated upstairs office, and he rarely runs into writer's block -- although, interestingly enough, he had a problem with that this winter. "My new McGee book is halfway done,” he says, “and I'm just stalled on it. <i>Condominium</i> seems to be going to do so well that I want this McGee book to be better than any of the others."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">As that remark makes plain, MacDonald takes great pride in his writing, in the books that he wants readers to think were "easy to write." But pride is one thing and hubris is another. MacDonald knows what he does is good but he has no illusions that it is great, and he is impatient with readers and critics who try to find more than is there in his work or any other suspense writer's:</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"It's kind of a mistake on the part of critics to give our work things like the front page of <i>The New York Times Book Review</i>. We're doing folk dances, and it's just as incorrect to make this type of work into something it isn't as it is to make too much of the <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> kind of thing. One is overvalued because the critic finds some elements of literacy in it, the other because he can't understand it.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald pays attention to what his competitors in the genre are doing; inasmuch as readers constantly confuse John D. MacDonald and Ross MacDonald, “I'm glad he writes so well.” He is more interested, however, in writers of ostensibly broader preoccupations - he mentions John Updike, Vance Bourjaily, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Williams - whose prose has “felicity, an element of aptness.” He reads widely, and he has sharp opinions: “I just cannot read people like Leon Uris and James Michener. When you've covered one line, you can guess the next one. I like people who know the nuances of words, who know how to stick the right one in the right place. Sometimes you can laugh out loud at an exceptionally good phrase. I find it harder and harder to find fiction to read, because I either read it with dismay at how good it is or disgust at how bad it is. I do like the guys like John Cheever that have a sense of story, because, goddam it, you want to know what happens to somebody. You don't want a lot of self-conscious little logjams thrown in your way.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">MacDonald tosses these and other opinions around right and left, but his manner is neither dogmatic nor arrogant. He is a self-confident person, comfortable with himself, and with his life. He talks easily, in a resonant voice, pausing often to think or to laugh. He is low-keyed and self-deprecating, and he is still sufficiently unaccustomed to his new eminence to take an infectious delight in it.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Back in January, as I was getting ready to end our interview, I noticed what gave every appearance of being a copy of <i>Condominium</i> on an endtable in his living room. I expressed puzzlement, because the bound copies were not then ready. With a touch of embarrassment, MacDonald admitted that he had received a copy of the dust jacket, and had wrapped it around another book “just to see what it looks like.” With a laugh, he removed the jacket and showed me what was inside. It was a copy of <i>Rich Man, Poor Man</i>.</span></span></p>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-46917576569854160992021-02-22T06:45:00.001-08:002021-02-22T06:45:44.811-08:00"Homecoming"<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkzBlyLFcJDUrgTvQqq-eTYoVTtqfwigrqF-gC47803Yov-Z5Rt7qc7eI5s-s_VcZ4URuIC5B45V1OfHxYMzK82f4Pfr44Ey-VzzJLJIdxU41I3pGbVTx6_eawpzOYmxNCQg-kD_-fjY/s550/knight_196404_v4_n6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="450" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkzBlyLFcJDUrgTvQqq-eTYoVTtqfwigrqF-gC47803Yov-Z5Rt7qc7eI5s-s_VcZ4URuIC5B45V1OfHxYMzK82f4Pfr44Ey-VzzJLJIdxU41I3pGbVTx6_eawpzOYmxNCQg-kD_-fjY/s320/knight_196404_v4_n6.jpg" /></a></span></span></div><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It was almost six years ago that I wrote a long piece on John D MacDonald’s 1958 novel <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2015/05/clemmie.html" target="_blank">Clemmie</a></i>, a non-crime paperback original that was third in a series of books that explored middle-class standards and social mores “in the jungle of the suburban backyard.” Like its two predecessor novels -- <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/02/cancel-all-our-vows.html" target="_blank">Cancel All Our Vows</a></i> and <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-deceivers.html" target="_blank">The Deceivers</a></i> -- <i>Clemmie</i>’s plot revolves around marital infidelity, here a suburban husband alone at home for the summer who falls for a younger woman. It’s one of MacDonald’s better efforts.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The end of that posting was taken up with a lengthy discussion on a 1964 short story titled “Homecoming”. I learned about this story while studying the finding guide for the University of Florida’s John D MacDonald Collection -- it was listed thusly: </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Clemmie (Author's title: "Homecoming") - </span><span style="color: blue; font-size: 11.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Knight</span><span style="color: blue; font-size: 11.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Article (tear sheets, 5 pages). Vol 4 Issue 6</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This was a complete mystery to me: I had never heard of any part of <i>Clemmie</i> being published in a magazine and there was no listing for “Homecoming” in Walter Shine’s <i>Bibliography/Biography</i>. I eventually obtained a copy of that issue of <i>Knight</i> -- a west coast men’s magazine -- and discovered that “Homecoming” was not credited to MacDonald but to one Richard Maxwell. But when I read the story it was clear to me that it definitely came from <i>Clemmie</i>, although altered throughout and, in places, in a decidedly different writing style. Here’s an example I cited, first a paragraph from “Homecoming”:</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">He could hear grunts and thuds, and the rhythmic meaty splat of fists on flesh… A wide, heavy young man had wedged a taller man into the angle formed by the brick walls. The taller man’s arms flopped and dangled. His face was a bloody smear. The shorter man stood in close, his head lowered, his shoulders rolling in an almost sexual rhythm as he slammed sickening, murderous blows into the tall man’s middle.. Mike stepped in and put his arms through the man’s elbows, bringing his hands up and locking the fingers... The beaten man sagged into the corner.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Compare this to the original passage in <i>Clemmie</i>:</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">He could hear grunts and thuds and, in remorseless rhythm, the meaty splat of fists on flesh. He moved gingerly toward the sound... A short, wide man had wedged a taller man into the angle formed by a fence and the side of the bar. The taller man's arms flopped and dangled. His face was a darkened smear. The short man worked on him with the rhythmic tenacity of someone chopping wood... Craig locked his arms through the man's elbows... The beaten man, no longer supported by the tempo of the blows, had sagged into the corner.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This fight scene, where protagonist Craig Fitz first meets Clemmie in the novel, is followed by a scene that is a reworking of the county fair outing where another fight (of sorts) occurs. “Homecoming” then ends abruptly with the couple leaving for Mexico.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">I didn’t know what to make of this. This was either JDM writing under a never-before-revealed pen name or it was an act of plagiarism by Maxwell, a writer who had a few other credits in men’s magazines of that era. The pen name possibility was not out of the question: this period of MacDonald’s career -- just as he was about to launch the Travis McGee series -- was a time of economic uncertainty for the author, described in his September 1964 essay for The Writer, “How to Live With a Hero”. Not only had the creation of a series hero been something he’d vowed never to do, the year before had seen him stooping to doing a novelization of a Judy Garland film, <i>I Could Go On Singing</i>. Perhaps rewriting a few scenes from an old novel under a pen name was needed to pay some bills.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">But the style of “Homecoming” was all wrong: flat, clumsy in places, and completely unnecessary unless JDM was trying to disguise his source. But I had no way of knowing.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Recently, however, I’ve gained access to the <i>Clemmie</i> file from the JDM Collection and can now report that “Homecoming” is most definitely an act of plagiarism. Here’s the story:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">“Homecoming” was published in the April 1964 issue of <i>Knight</i>, a periodical which began life in 1958 as <i>Sir Knight</i>. A glossy that featured nudity in much the same vein as most of its contemporaries, <i>Sir Knight</i> -- edited by Steve Madden and Richard L. Sargent for Sirkay Publishing -- also published fiction, but the authors’ names are unrecognizable and are probably pseudonyms. Of the names in the premiere issue, only one of seven ever appeared in a different magazine, and that was <i>Adam</i>, another men’s magazine probably published by the same outfit. <i>Sir Knight</i> lasted until 1962 or 1963, when it became simply <i>Knight</i>, increased its shelf size (10 ½ x 13) and began purchasing work from some name writers, including Henry Slesar, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan, Norman Spinrad, and even Tennessee Williams. But no-names still abounded, and Richard Maxwell had stories in many early issues of <i>Knight</i>.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">On April 15, 1964 a JDM fan living in Macon, Georgia wrote the author a one page letter and included “Homecoming,” torn from the magazine. It read:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Dear Mr. MacDonald,</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">For some time I have been one of your most eager readers... I became "hooked" on your stories six years ago when I read <i>Clemmie</i>. Since then I have read more than thirty of your books and have regretted that I couldn't find more.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Because of this interest I suppose it was predictable that the enclosed story, "Homecoming", sounded so familiar when I read it. I decided that the similarities between this story and <i>Clemmie</i> were too obvious to be coincidence. There was the same fight scene broken up in the same way, the same girl dressed in the basque shirt..., the same love scene in her apartment, and the same fight at the carnival. Aside from the plot, the dialogue and descriptions were so similar that they were clearly recognizable.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">It </span><span style="font-size: 15.3333px; white-space: pre-wrap;">occurred</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to me that "Homecoming" might be a story which you had written under a pen name. Now that I have compared the two in detail I don't think so. It seems to me that the portions of the story which were not related to <i>Clemmie</i> were written in a distinctly different style.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">I am sending you the clippings of this story because I know that you will be interested if you are not Richard Maxwell. If I'm wrong and the story is yours, please forgive my interference. In any event, I am extremely curious and would consider it a great favor if you would let me know.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The following week MacDonald received a second letter, this time from a fan in Van Nuys, California, alerting him to the same story. This reader had no doubt about the legality of “Homecoming”:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Last month I picked up a copy of <i>Knight Magazine</i>, a big magazine out here, and one of the stories is clearly pirated from your novel <i>Clemmie</i>. Hell, some of the scenes, especially the carnival scene are practically word for word. So, I figured you might want to see it. Maybe a thing like that wouldn't bother you, but, if it was me, I'd get so damned sore I'd want to sue everybody in sight. In any case, I tore out the sheets containing the story and am sending it along...</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Before receiving the second letter MacDonald forwarded the first to his editor at Fawcett, Knox Burger, along with this cover letter:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Dear Knox,</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">I am enclosing a letter just received from a [reader] in Macon, Georgia, with which he forwarded to me tear sheets of a story called "Homecoming" by one Richard Maxwell published in the April 1964 issue of <i>Knight</i>.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">It looks to me as if the gentleman is right. This does seem like a little more than the sincerest form of flattery.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">However, to get an independent opinion, could you please have one of your folks make the comparison test.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">How we proceed from there, if it is as flagrant as it seems to be, I would not know. The last time it happened it was with <i>Manhunt</i>, I believe, a rewrite of a story that was in <i>Cosmopolitan</i>, and a fellow named St. John or some such wrote us that he had been taken in by the plagiarist, and would buy no further from him, and regretted the incident.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">If you agree, that would be ample in this case too.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-69aRCqBnqJlH_CXAeQGwGs9LBBjWZzIRkfmSwl_YnMhxplH7jGO9yyL71WYGyhFUNNEZBMDMhfPKfi9ZdYrxyY88D_uQ-s9d39Ie7H5indWyvfeEQioU1d-p1A-qnAmhFPwvHgztttY/s2048/Homecoming.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1256" data-original-width="2048" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-69aRCqBnqJlH_CXAeQGwGs9LBBjWZzIRkfmSwl_YnMhxplH7jGO9yyL71WYGyhFUNNEZBMDMhfPKfi9ZdYrxyY88D_uQ-s9d39Ie7H5indWyvfeEQioU1d-p1A-qnAmhFPwvHgztttY/w400-h245/Homecoming.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />He also responded to the letter writers, and both responses contain some interesting detail of that period in the author’s career. To the Macon fan he wrote:</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">No, that was not mine and I am very grateful to you for sending it along.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">It certainly looks like a lot more than coincidence. To give the guy every benefit of the doubt, sometimes these things happen as a result of a photographic memory disguising itself as inspiration...</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">As long as you are an Eager Reader (God, how I cherish the clan!) I am taking advantage of you by inserting herein an advertisement. On your local stands by now should be the first two novels of my Travis McGee series titled <i>The Deep Blue Goodby</i> and <i>Nightmare in Pink</i>. There are more to follow, and we have high pitiful hopes for the success of the series. If you happen to like them, take note that we need every tub-thumper we can get.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">He included a different “advertisement” in his letter to the Van Nuys reader:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Last week somebody up in Georgia sent me that thing, and I sent it along to Knox Burger. I think it plagiarism. Here is perhaps a lousy rule of thumb for these things, but, if the guy could have maintained the "style" in the uncribbed portions, then it could have been a case of photographic memory at work, inadvertently lifting things that went along with his own persuasions. But it is so damned leaden in between the thieving I must assume he was aware of exactly how he was jazzing it up...</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">I am doing a long novel for Doubleday, and I am right in the middle of it, and it covers three highly improbable areas -- the automobile industry, the resort convention and the pro gold tour. I have a cast of thousands. I think they will have to put a detachable program in the front of the book. I hope DD will stick with my title, because it fits all three endeavors. <i>The Blood Game</i>. Thanks.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkN4OD4MeXor-sdS25ItBxuBsVgrwv2hpoYqmZ2Uoh5iG3VfwLtxGmr05R78jr2z0qgHVDnasLaTrvbPfa2hoIOgE5msZMO6BZA80qTqc8NZbrO2XHP_EfbtbLfLz1FKlemZEK0VFisWQ/s650/knox+burger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="650" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkN4OD4MeXor-sdS25ItBxuBsVgrwv2hpoYqmZ2Uoh5iG3VfwLtxGmr05R78jr2z0qgHVDnasLaTrvbPfa2hoIOgE5msZMO6BZA80qTqc8NZbrO2XHP_EfbtbLfLz1FKlemZEK0VFisWQ/s320/knox+burger.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Knox Burger</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The final letter in the file is one from Knox Burger to MacDonald’s agent Max Wilkinson. It is both amusing and revealing of just who Richard Maxwell may have been.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">I enclose tearsheets from the April issue of <i>Knight</i>, together with a copy of <i>Clemmie</i>. Author Richard Maxwell has cribbed MacDonald's story from pages 48 to 80, and tailored his plot and some of his actual prose into a short story.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">A tough letter to them asking payment in the amount they paid Maxwell would seem indicated; we have caused marks to be made showing actual correspondences between book and story. If you want, I'll stop in and see them or call them while I'm out there. They publish on Melrose Avenue, which has strip joints, awning wholesalers and high colonic irrigation parlors. It would be nice if you could find out who Maxwell is, and if it's his square monicker.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">I have just talked to Scott Meredith, who knows this operation, and tells me that the whole masthead is largely a bunch of pseudonyms, and the actual editor is Richard L. Sargent, apparently a real name; Meredith also suspects that Maxwell may be a pseudonym for Sargent, which is sort of a cute situation, isn't it?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Maybe you ought to send a carbon of the letter to the business manager. The magazine apparently stemmed from a printing operation.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Unfortunately there are no follow-up letters in the file, so I don’t know how or even if <i>Knight</i> responded. It’s telling, however, that according to FictionMags, there were no further stories by Richard Maxwell after April 1964, either in <i>Knight</i> or in <i>Adam</i>, both of whom continued publishing well into the 1970’s. (Granted, FictionMags’ publication histories for both magazines are quite spotty). So perhaps getting caught led to retiring the name Richard Maxwell. I wonder how many of his earlier stories were cribbed from others, perhaps including more MacDonald.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The correspondence also brings to mind two other mysteries surrounding JDM. First, the plagiarized story or stories that appeared in <i>Manhunt</i>. Talk of this incident has been going around for years, and writer Ed Gorman often wondered just who it was that had been guilty. I’ve never been able to find out, but now knowing that it was a <i>Cosmopolitan</i> story that was stolen narrows it down somewhat. Still, MacDonald wrote 17 stories for the magazine, so it’s going to take some work.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The other mystery revolves around <i>The Blood Game</i>, the “big” novel MacDonald spent years writing, from 1958 to 1972, only to have it remain unpublished. It’s not as if the author quit in the middle of it or was unable to come up with a version the publisher would accept. The JDM Collection’s finding guide reveals that the project went as far as having galleys produced, indicating that the publisher was ready to go ahead. But it never happened. Hopefully the answer is to be found in the Collection; I’ll need to do some more digging.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Letters quoted are courtesy of the John D. MacDonald Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.</i></span></span></p>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-90304819848123394562021-01-25T05:10:00.000-08:002021-01-25T05:10:05.052-08:00MacDonald Had a Pen<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV-7eFMtJ0y62XkVb7uS5UTMa3vRwQxoL7ba1dO8OlsD6W6kS3bFrS7BCvkgWHS6PKscdX-Bm6HRwl6bVCDk2UABEvAlYTa76OqPBwNwP99fGCNnxmPwbu4aBylBO4cFGxdYR3XIWM8mo/s1253/The_Miami_Herald_Sun__Aug_28__1960a_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1253" data-original-width="969" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV-7eFMtJ0y62XkVb7uS5UTMa3vRwQxoL7ba1dO8OlsD6W6kS3bFrS7BCvkgWHS6PKscdX-Bm6HRwl6bVCDk2UABEvAlYTa76OqPBwNwP99fGCNnxmPwbu4aBylBO4cFGxdYR3XIWM8mo/s320/The_Miami_Herald_Sun__Aug_28__1960a_.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The following brief review of <i>The End of the Night</i> was published in the August 28, 1960 edition of the Miami <i>Herald</i> as the opening section of Beatrice Washburn’s regular <i>Books in Review</i> column headlined "MacDonald Had a Pen". It contains some original JDM quotes on modern child-rearing that he believed led to the formation of characters like Kirby Stone, Sander Golden, Robert Hernandez and Nan Koslov, the four members of the </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666;">fictitious</span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Wolf Pack.</span></span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7d3c6c93-7fff-6465-3b0e-7545b03db859"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">Up in Sarasota lives John D. MacDonald, ex-Army lieutenant colonel who turns out books almost faster than a tape recorder. This is not to imply he needs one. No mere machine could keep up with Mr. MacDonald's mind which has produced more than thirty books in the last ten years.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">It seems as though every time a batch of books arrives on the doorstep there is a MacDonald—both paper and hard covers. His last one <i>The End of the Night</i> (Simon and Schuster, $3.50) is, in our opinion, the best of the lot.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">It is the tale, expertly told, of four young people who whip across the country in stolen cars, murdering, destroying, kidnapping, killing right and left. The four have come together by accident, from different walks of life.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">One is a college youth from a good family, social register background, nice manners. One is "a caricature of the brute in man." One is a youth with, sharp, shallow face, hopelessly talkative, nervous, restless. One is a girl of the sub-moron variety.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">This is one of those violence books you can't put down because the author has gone deep below the surface, of ferocity and unmeaning malignity to try and find out what has sparked this wolfpack of apparently sane young people.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"Monsters?" asks MacDonald. "If this type is a monster we have created him. He is our son. We have been told by our educators and psychologists to be permissive with him, let him express himself freely. If he throws all the sand out of his sandbox he is releasing hidden tensions. We deprived him of the security of knowing right and wrong.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"We let sleek men in high places go unpunished for amoral behavior and the boy heard us snicker. We labeled the pursuit of pleasure a valid goal, and insisted that his teachers turn schooling into fun. We preached group adjustment, security rather than challenge, protection rather than effort.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"We discarded the sexual taboos of centuries, and mislabeled the result freedom rather than license. Finally we poisoned his bone marrow with strontium 90.. sat back in ludicrous confidence expecting him to suddenly become a man.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">"Why are we so shocked and horrified to find a child's emotions in a man's body -- savage, cruel, compulsive and shallow?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe; font-family: arial;">In crime-suspense, Mr. MacDonald cannot be equaled. This time he has produced a thoughtful novel. Incidentally, if you ask him for advice, he might tell you to take a business course to become a writer. He took his bachelor's degree at Syracuse University, a master's degree in business administration at Harvard</span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-73350425496140196152020-12-21T12:24:00.000-08:002020-12-21T12:24:01.516-08:00"Kids on Wheels"<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYCoN-V_cPYUOvLGnRiqfyVvKHlNbrMxy7LKiDLAyaK8wXBmhCGo7yrenEijTcjS_zsqwlxICYHG_aIGgB6R1itk8rPBColy0xDafNFx6CJ4HqHTCDQJyfhis3TexeRMJhchQlcys1Xvo/s2048/Kids+on+Wheels-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1507" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYCoN-V_cPYUOvLGnRiqfyVvKHlNbrMxy7LKiDLAyaK8wXBmhCGo7yrenEijTcjS_zsqwlxICYHG_aIGgB6R1itk8rPBColy0xDafNFx6CJ4HqHTCDQJyfhis3TexeRMJhchQlcys1Xvo/s320/Kids+on+Wheels-1.jpg" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s been over two years since I’ve written a piece about a specific John D MacDonald story, “<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2018/08/so-sorry.html" target="_blank">So Sorry</a>” back in August of 2018. I’ve moved away from doing these kinds of postings for two reasons: a general lack of interest in short fiction in general and the lack of availability of most of these tales. But every once in a while something comes along that merits talking about. And believe me, for a JDM fan, short story collector and aficionado and amateur bibliographer, this is something that merits talking about.</span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-09e44463-7fff-26a2-2fa8-d95b7237aa02"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve written often about my early days of JDM fandom, when I assisted JDM’s “official” bibliographer Walter Shine in trying to hunt down ten published short stories that could not be located. Specifically, these were stories that -- according to the author’s own records -- were sold to publishers but no record of where they appeared could be found. There were no notations in MacDonald’s records and he received no tear sheets from the publisher, and, after years of searching by any number of early bibliographers, no evidence of their publication could be uncovered. These were, for the most part, stories that were sold to pulp publishers, either Popular Publications or Columbia, and issues of pulps can be rare (especially in the case of Columbia). Since the publication of the JDM <i>Bibliography/Biography</i> in 1980 most of the titles have been located, either by Walter, other JDM fans, or by me (“<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2020/03/short-story-update.html">Big League Busher</a>” and “<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-gentle-killer.html" target="_blank">The Gentle Killer</a>”). But ever since the <i>Bibliography</i>’s publication, there has never been -- to my knowledge -- the discovery of a JDM story that completely escaped discovery by MacDonald, Shine or any of his helpers. That just changed.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A few days ago I received an email from a JDM fan and Trap of Solid Gold reader who lives in Greece, Petros Papagiannidis, informing me that he had come across a short story that was not on my list, titled “Kids on Wheels” and published in the June 1954 issue of <i>The American Legion Magazine</i>. Now, MacDonald was no stranger to that publication: in 1951 his very best Christmas story, “<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/12/cardboard-star.html" target="_blank">The Cardboard Star</a>,” appeared in the December issue. But there was never even a whisper of a second story purchased by the Legion. The MacDonald records are a complete blank regarding “Kids on Wheels”.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I immediately went to the Finding Guide for the JDM Collection at the University of Florida and matched up the first sentence of the story in the listing of MacDonald’s unpublished works and there it was, originally titled by the author “The Most Terrible Time of My Life”, written in 1953 and containing 4,000 words. No indication whatsoever that it had ever been sold.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The story is told in first person by one Davie, no last name given, who is in his early teens. He pals around with four other same-aged kids from school and all ride bikes. Then, one by one, the others begin to acquire motor scooters. I don’t think it was legal for under-16 kids to ride motor scooters in Maryland where I grew up, but apparently it was in 1950’s Florida where the story takes place. Eventually every one of the five own their own motorbikes except Davie. He tries to get his parents to agree to let him get one but is met with refusal, especially from his father. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“Davie, you are not going to have one of those damn things. Florida has got the narrowest roads, the craziest drivers and the fastest traffic there is. I am not going to mount any son of mine on one of those scooters so that some vacationing creep from Dubuque can bunt him off into the boondocks and mush his head against a palm tree. Let's have no more nonsense, Davie. My God, a bike is bad enough."</span></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDHIAOMq8WZuNaCZoog8m98fz3HORfvF9-RHYr22LA9hqhg7qWcUe7mj3SiZpaHbAI_Ubf-Mx1nfDY6StqKYO5clC2p3SYJtCdnopwWiARB_llDtmYaTOkHYDJI4hj2suIHKhzwjaSdzs/s2048/Kids+on+Wheels-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1427" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDHIAOMq8WZuNaCZoog8m98fz3HORfvF9-RHYr22LA9hqhg7qWcUe7mj3SiZpaHbAI_Ubf-Mx1nfDY6StqKYO5clC2p3SYJtCdnopwWiARB_llDtmYaTOkHYDJI4hj2suIHKhzwjaSdzs/s320/Kids+on+Wheels-3.jpg" /></a></div><br />The scooters begin to distance the other boys from Davie, and they eventually exclude him from their group. He mopes and sulks and becomes essentially friendless, spending most of his spare time reading in his room. Eventually the father relents and a scooter is purchased, but not without a long list of rules from the father. So even though he is accepted back into the group, the rules he has promised to obey gradually cause him to be ostracized once again. </span><p></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then one day a policeman stops him while riding home from school, and later that evening another one comes to the house…</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Kids on Bikes” is a good story with a surprisingly adult ending, and one wonders why it appeared in <i>The American Legion Magazine</i>. This was almost certainly not the first market MacDonald’s agent sought to have the story published in, and he probably didn’t get paid anything near what he was getting from some of the other magazines he sold to in 1954: <i>Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, Argosy, This Week</i>, and even <i>Bluebook</i>. I’m sure this is a case of a story getting rejected multiple times and MacDonald mistakenly filing it away as unpublished. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The good news is that my friend Petros discovered this story on the Internet Archive, where anyone with a computer or smartphone can read it for themselves. You can get there from here:</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/americanlegionma566amer" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.5pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://archive.org/details/americanlegionma566amer</span></a></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now I have to wonder about any other stories that may be out there and undiscovered. Maybe that oversized claim of 500 stories might be true… or not.</span></p>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-55984937786950643602020-11-22T23:00:00.002-08:002020-11-22T23:00:01.651-08:00Everybody Knows Something is Wrong<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAx2WMnwUAHaM9hfgUUXCyXiBJ7nQ_AX3blSmV7PtbeRgQPuSmPnRVa2VgEj6GYJiNAAl4v3yLs4bT9dJ2esG6CV-Kec9QUEMgKH90OQ0AqpYUAOfrME15IEd11btI1FnQsPL8hPFNvUE/s2048/Tropic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1822" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAx2WMnwUAHaM9hfgUUXCyXiBJ7nQ_AX3blSmV7PtbeRgQPuSmPnRVa2VgEj6GYJiNAAl4v3yLs4bT9dJ2esG6CV-Kec9QUEMgKH90OQ0AqpYUAOfrME15IEd11btI1FnQsPL8hPFNvUE/s320/Tropic.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">This article appeared in the October 15, 1967 issue of the Miami <i>Herald</i>, between <i>Yellow</i> (and <i>The Last One Left</i>) and <i>Gray</i>, and was featured in the newspaper’s Sunday supplement <i>Tropic</i>. Titled “Everybody Knows Something is Wrong,” it reads like a McGee aside, and in fact features McGee prominently. It’s interesting to note that this was written only three months prior to that <i>annus horribilis</i>, 1968.</span></span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-ed7c999e-7fff-8e22-aa9e-4c5762973579"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><i>John D. MacDonald of Sarasota is one of America's master mystery writers. His 55th book, </i>Three for McGee<i>, will be published Nov. 17 by Doubleday - a hardcover edition containing the first three books in the Travis McGee mystery series, </i>The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink<i> and </i>A Purple Place for Dying<i>. Novels 56 through 61 are in varying stages of completion.</i></span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Everybody Knows Something is Wrong</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">By John D. MacDonald</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">There is a fellow named Travis McGee who lives aboard his houseboat, <i>The Busted Flush</i>, in Fort Lauderdale, and manages to sidestep the processors and go his own way at his own pace. I used to have the illusion that he was a fictional character, and that I had invented him and thus, in the nine novels I have thus far written featuring him, I could make him do whatever I happened to think of.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">My illusion dropped dead a month ago when I met with a pack of frighteningly bright high school kids from Tallahassee who came to Sarasota by bus to go to the Asolo Theater and the Ringling Museums. At their teacher's request I met with this experimental group in the gardens of the Ringling Museum for questions and answers about writing, about McGee and so on.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">They got onto the reality and unreality of fictional characters, and one staunch girlchild said firmly, “I <i>know</i> Travis is real." And, bemused, I asked her what made her so sure. She said, “Because, if <i>you</i> didn't believe he was, Mr. MacDonald, you couldn't make <i>me</i> believe it either.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">And in my moment of reluctant revelation I realized how many times my books about Travis McGee have come to a sickening halt when I attempted to make him take certain actions inconsistent with his private and personal beliefs. He plants his feet. “No <i>sir</i>, boy. Not me."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee resents being processed, programmed, fed through the machinery by experts trained in handling people rather than persons.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">He knows that the dentist, the post office, the county, the IRS, the airline hostess, the librarian, the highway engineer, the supermarket, the city government, the census bureau, the banker, the advertising agent, the automobile agency, the hospital and the mortician are all intent upon using him as a statistic, as one atom in a manageable mass, and then studying him, weighing him, measuring him, predicting his actions on some huge probability table.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">They use manuals and trade journals and computers and statistical methods and psychological testing devices to predict mass reaction, and handle mass demand on a totally impersonal and totally efficient basis.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It irritates him to have society take away his face and dump him into the great hopper labeled Standard Operating Procedure.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">But don't try to tell him that in a densely populated urban culture it has to be that way, that people <i>must</i> be turned into a commodity, or we would have chaos. Don't try to tell him that if the processors tried to measure the uniqueness of each human personality, the wonderful specialness, the delicious inconsistency of every one of us, all the memory banks would start smoking, the sorters would spew out a snow-storm of punch cards, and all the complex technology of our culture would grind to a sickening halt.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee <i>knows</i> that. But he reserves the right to resent being sorted and graded on the basis of "sameness" rather than on the basis of uniqueness. It makes him feel degraded, and he reserves the right to do his little bit here and there to startle the processors out of their compulsion to flatten and deaden all human contact, thereby creating a cumulative indifference and unawareness, as well as a truly frightful boredom.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The other day he had to go over to the Courthouse to get his two-year Florida driving license renewed. The girl behind the window was a pallid, colorless, competent mouse who took the old license without glance or greeting, put it beside her typewriter and rolled the new license blank into the machine. As she typed flawlessly and speedily, McGee studied her, thinking that about 24 years ago a nurse had announced her arrival to a nervous daddy.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">There had been for her the enormous and frightening adventure of kindergarten, first grade, high school, first kiss. Everything she had on was the result of her going into a store and making a selection, evaluating appearance and price. And every morning she looked at her quiet little face in her mirror and brushed those teeth, and God only knows what myths and despairs, fantasies and hopes, depression and joy moved through that subdued and secret mind.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">So as she finished the typing, pulled the duplicates and put his copy on the ledge for his signature he said, “That blouse is a very good color for you.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The eyes that looked at him were like recording lenses in some kind of equipment. The blink was an electronic click. They saw a thing standing there renewing a bit of paper.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“What, sir?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"I said the color of your blouse is becoming. It's a good color for you, Miss."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">She looked down at herself and then back at him in a kind of blank astonishment, a transition stage from processor to person, and blushed, and the eyes were the eyes of a person then, and the mouth became a girlsmile instead of a slot in the machinery. “Thank you," she said, in a barely audible voice. McGee paid the renewal fee and walked away, aware of having struck another small blow in the war against regimentation. He knows that the sterility of mass methods degrades the dignity of the processor as well as the processed.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I think that the readers who are so hearteningly flocking to the banner of T. McGee are expressing a hunger to escape the irritation and boredom and humiliation of being just another commodity in a commodity-oriented society.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">But what IS it within us which is so affronted by the benign paternalism of the computer? Any exercise of simple logic must excuse the necessity for increasing amounts of regulation and order in a land where we grow at the rate of ten thousand new souls a day, a Laredo a week, a Toledo a month, a Chicago a year. Regimentation is <i>good</i> for you!</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The resentment is not intellectual. It goes deeper. It is way down in the roar of the blood, flex of muscle, steaming of glands. This is because the urban capture of mankind is a contemporary phenomenon.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Imagine that the whole pre-recorded and recorded history of the race during the past two million years were condensed into one year.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">For eleven months and three weeks we roamed a savage world, hunting and running, fighting and breeding. Last week we began to build our own shelters and stay in one place and plant crops.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It is now midnight. At lunch time today some nut began to write down the first words. At eight o'clock this evening Christ was born and died. At quarter to midnight we began to power clumsy machines with fossil fuels. Within the past five minutes have come the miracle drugs, atomic fission and fusion, aerospace, television, transistors, computers. In the last five minutes our world population has increased by one billion.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">So are we in revolt against a computerized society, or have we merely hustled ourselves into an ordered, artificial, constricted environment too rapidly for our natural bodies (so admirably designed and so long used for flight, attack, climbing, digging, hiding, slaying) to accept the safety, the inertia, the little cubicles and politenesses and repressions of our urban removal from the savage urgencies of two million years?</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">When we look at ourselves as individuals, caged by our own cleverness, each of us as out of time and place as a tiger on a raft, it is easy to see how desperately hard it is to contain and subdue the wildness in so brief a time.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">We call it "the tension of modern life.” Chain the primitive part, tie it down, and then it breaks out in despairing ways: heart attacks, ulcers, nervous breakdowns, addictions, all the psychosomatic woes, perversions, depravities, ugly mischief.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">When we form groups, this same sickness of the caged creature takes other shapes.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I find it very wry and entertaining to translate group efforts into these same terms.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The legions of Birch, who demand a return to the rigid moralities of pioneer America, and a stunting of the federal government, and an end to "the erosions of our freedom," are saying: Let's put an end to this stifling regimentation!</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The hippies, with their mind-changing drugs, flashing strobes, body paint, deafening music, and their demands that we make love, not war, and that we dig the flowers, are saying: Let's put an end to this stifling regimentation!</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The bands of young Negroes burning the guts of the old ghettos, sniping at cops and firemen, declaring war on Whitey, demanding equal opportunity and freedom and color television for all are saying: Let's put an end to this stifling regimentation!</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Communists blame capitalistic oppression for all the urban miseries of man. The Nazis blamed the Jews. The democracies blame the Red conspiracy. The first Hearst blamed the yellow races.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Everybody knows <i>something</i> is wrong, and everybody has an eerie and formless nostalgia for something he has never known. And because we have no choice except this neon jungle, this asphalt wilderness in which we have entrapped ourselves, when we get together in groups we pick out something or someone specific we can safely blame, and we whomp up a group hate and a group action, and then we have a chance to use those ancient muscles and ancient glands and ancient reflexes in some imperfectly rationalized way.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It does no good for Whitey to say to the Detroit rioters, “Look, man, being on this side of the fence doesn't change a thing. There's just as much frustration, just as much despair, just as much formless longing, just as much envy. And when you get sick and miss your payments, they grab back your wheels just as fast.”</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">No matter what group or class or category any one of us is in, we find that we are a part of the hated symbol of somebody else's unfulfilled longing.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">And the more we find ourselves being “processed," being measured and managed, counted and administered, placed in numerical groups and sociological categories, protected from old diseases and newly invented ones, the more serious and desperate and compulsive becomes the urge to bust out.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">There are a great many imitation ways of busting out, ways that make the demands on muscle and reflex that the savage planet made on us when we were the wild roamers.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Sky diving and skin diving. A long solitary voyage in a small sailboat. Riding giant waves on little plastic boards. Racing big noisy beasts on wheels, on water, or airborne. Fighting small wars in far places. Knocking over banks and gas stations. Picking fights in bars. Learning judo. Bullfighting. Wire walking. Triple somersaults on the high trapeze. Lion taming. Hunting Cape buffalo with a handgun. Pro football.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">But the imitation ways are, each for its own reasons, limited to a percentage few.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">So a man, without ever moving out of the same office building, puts up a desperate battle to capture the elusive promotion. In his veins is the same blood, right down to the last fractional analysis, which flowed in his ancestor of a million years ago who put up the desperate battle to capture the plump young gazelle. And when the heart blows up, it is blamed on the tension of working under a sadistic boss.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">This is not a paen to exercise, per se. There is a considerable difference in glandular secretion and emotional involvement between a man jogging around the block before breakfast out of a sense of duty, and a man jogging through thickets wondering if the sabertooth tiger has circled and is crouched waiting for him somewhere just ahead. Waiting for a tennis serve has not the same total effect on the organism as waiting for a sharp stone to be hurled at the head.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">This, I suspect, is the vicarious fascination which Mr. T. McGee holds for many people. Amidst all the clickey-tick of the memory tubes and print-outs and data recovery, McGee has found the sabertooth tiger and the sharp stone. He has managed a bust-out which makes the regimented man wistful because his response to it is deep and primal.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee is a boat man, so he is not constrained to stop at the red lights and never cross the double yellow line. He is "processed” only when he permits it as a necessary part of some far more interesting pursuit. And though he likes things, he is not possessed by things. And his love life - one of those last bits of the original and primitive life experience which has not been blurred and perfumed and anaesthetized into forgetability, as with birth and pain and dying - is not overburdened with any responsibilities except the emotional.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee, as a loner, conducts his own kind of wry and bemused little revolt against the processors and the programmers. To fold, bend or spindle the punch-card bill which is in error would be crude, and probably ineffective. McGee finds it more useful, and more fun, to take the corner of a razor blade and cut out a few more oblong holes similar in spacing and identical in size to the ones already in the card. Then he writes his complaint on the card itself, in the comforting knowledge that the sorting machine will spew it out and an actual human being will pick it up out of the reject slot and read the message.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">He keeps a box of fairly heavy, envelope-sized steel plates in a storage locker. When junk mail gets too voluminous, he puts these plates in the First Class Permit envelopes along with a polite card which gives his name and address and asks that he be removed from the mailing lists.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">He divides people, regardless of race, creed, color, age, background or status into two groups, the very small group he is happy to spend time with and the very large group he isn't. He believes you get that one lap around the long track, and each one has to run his own race in his own way for his own reasons, and it is absurd to spend your time, while running, criticizing the other people on the track for their style of running, or how they take the turns, or how slowly or quickly they get up when they trip and fall.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">McGee is a non-conformist in only a limited sense. Sometimes he finds it simpler and easier and quicker to accept the processing than to resist it. He thinks obstructionism for its own sake is a waste of good time, and when you waste time you are wasting life itself if you are not wasting it in a way that pleasures you.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">He believes that any human endeavor which requires more than two people to consummate is not worth attempting. The reluctant exceptions are some theater, some ballet, some music. He does not believe in committees, will not sign petitions, and would not stand in line for any award, spectacle or bonus he has ever heard of.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">There must be a great yearning among men to live in this same way, yet too many reasons why they cannot. We ride our inevitable assembly lines past those who study and measure and process us, and never find a way to hop off, never find the ways to use ourselves up as we used to, for hundreds of thousands of years, before our clever monkey-brains found the machines to make everything easier and safer.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I do not promulgate the myth of the Noble Savage. In all the centuries of wandering, and for most of the 40,000 years of village cultures, life was cruel, dirty, oppressive and very abrupt. Until a few moments ago in time, the life expectancy of those who survived the infant years was only 30 years. Starvation brutalizes. Untreated disease brutalizes. Superstition degrades.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">So here we are in the bright morning of civilization, heading inevitably toward the elimination of all monotonous labor. Guaranteed food and shelter for all. Further prolongation of life. Ever-increasing leisure. By means of little tapes, the machines are now making machines. A bright, flip-top, disposable, asceptic world, safe for all.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">We could walk around smiling, were it not for the lurking primate, the unused creature electric with survival reflexes, demanding terror, anger, hate, violence and victims. So, blocked off from the jungles and plains where we bred and roamed, we compensate with gas ovens for people, napalm, the battered child syndrome, conspiracy born of the fear of conspiracy, labor camps and thought police, rape and riots, drugs and despair.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The computer came along before we were really ready for it. It can think, in a very limited and simplistic way. It will get better at building structures of logic. And because we control the computers, we will have them enforcing these very logical concepts upon ourselves. It would work if the mind of man were logical, but it is not. We have toted along all our barbaric centuries with us, and we carry all the past in our heads in the form of strange dreams and magic, fantasies and confusions, yearnings and images.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Our logic consists of making a sudden violent emotional judgment, and then thinking up a list of sober, sedate, objective reasons for the opinion already arrived at.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The more often the computer refutes these visceral judgments, the more we will resist it. But it, like all targets of hate, is without blame. We were enticed into all these sterile areas with all primitive passions intact, seduced by our intellectual selves into believing man could be transformed into urban man overnight - sedate, wise, considerate and gentle.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The temptation, of course, is to seek refuge in these sterile relationships, to use the imposed mechanics and regulations of our over-ordered culture as a way to hide ourselves from one another, or a way to deny the hang-up we suffer. For example...</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I was on a scheduled flight several years ago, coming back to Florida from a trip to New York to dicker about a book. It was an off day in an off week in the off season, and it was a prop-jet aircraft. I would guess there were no more than 11 passengers aboard. I was alone at a window seat on the starboard side to the rear of the passenger section, well behind the wing.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">At dusk over the Carolinas, the sunset was fantastic and unreal, a broad band of deep hot red from one edge of the horizon to the other.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">There was no one in the double seat in front of me. One of the hostesses, a pretty dark-haired girl who looked of Italian or Spanish heritage, stopped and knelt with one knee on the aisle seat in the double vacancy just in front of me, and, with one hand on the back of the seat in front of me, and the other on the back of the seat in front of that, she bent over and stared out at that sunset.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Her face, in profile, was visible to me over the back of the seat. The furnace-red light shone through the port onto her gentle young Mediterranean face.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">She remained that way far longer than the cursory inspection most people give sunsets. Her expression was somber and thoughtful, and then she began to smile to herself. It was a small, soft curve of parted lips, a smile that reflected an intimate memory of some kind, or an anticipation.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I had the feeling of an inadvertent invasion of her privacy, as when you happen to see the face of a sleeping stranger. But I watched her, and she turned her head quickly enough to catch me watching her. The softness of look and mouth faded, and she backed up briskly and stood in the aisle, and gave a few assertive little pats to her uniform. She looked at me again, this time with the bright social smile of her training, and with eyes that looked at me but did not see me. She saw Commodity, Job, Training, Processing, Routine.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“May I get you a drink, sir?"</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Yes, Mediterranean girl touched by a sunset's beauty, you may get me a drink which in some specialist's electronic computations, allowing for direct costs plus a percentage of service overhead and allowance for space and weight aboard, cost the airline 32.758c.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Maybe it means nothing, or everything. If everybody went around trying to relate to everybody on a totally personal basis the result would be total chaos, and a complete nervous and emotional exhaustion for everyone.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">But lately it seems that even the fragments of empathy and identification grow ever more rare.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It is easier to deal with people as commodities.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">And safer.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">He (she) might be some kind of a nut. I (we) might get involved.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Charlie, you aren't safe on the street in broad daylight any more, I swear.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Wonder why.</span></span></p></span></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-55699761111758742452020-09-27T23:00:00.001-07:002020-09-27T23:00:06.747-07:00His Whodunits Keep All of America Guessing<p><span style="color: #090900; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2pMGEw_osTSSdxTwH-dTGCFPifYGAe4OqqLsVh2FQO_Wkfn6AVxu-xGGi_1JVRKBeF5t4ZPrkuQ25Pkw6v855G21r8K-hg-221f9KgC2Og4nkIE_dBhBpq_nc0EpmXW35OX7IY1hIDnc/s1241/0004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1241" data-original-width="1011" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2pMGEw_osTSSdxTwH-dTGCFPifYGAe4OqqLsVh2FQO_Wkfn6AVxu-xGGi_1JVRKBeF5t4ZPrkuQ25Pkw6v855G21r8K-hg-221f9KgC2Og4nkIE_dBhBpq_nc0EpmXW35OX7IY1hIDnc/s320/0004.jpg" /></a></div>The following is a brief article that appeared in the April 7, 1962 edition of The Miami <i>Herald</i>, titled “His Whodunits Keep All of America Guessing”. That headline isn’t the only inaccuracy in this piece, written by staff writer Beatrice Washburn: <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/11/brass-cupcake.html" target="_blank">The Brass Cupcake</a></i> a “runaway bestseller”? All his paperbacks published by Crest? Its a quick read, written at a time when JDM emerged from his office to help publicize the film <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-executioners.html" target="_blank">Cape Fear</a></i>.<p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-4054a690-7fff-85ea-6ea8-83ca236c6e9f"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">By BEATRICE WASHBURN</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Herald Staff Writer</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It is difficult to escape John D. MacDonald.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">His name, his picture loom forth from 40 books - books you'd find in any airport, drug store, book store or supermarket from Key West to Seattle. In both paper and hard back versions.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">This handsome author of whodunits is director of 1,200-member Mystery Writers of American Association.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">He was brought up in Sharon, Pa., and got an M.A. from of all places, Harvard Business School.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"I don't think they are too happy about it," he admits ruefully. "I destroyed the image."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">After six years in the Army, he decided to try a typewriter instead of a rifle and the result was <i>The Brass Cup Cake</i>, which became a runaway best seller almost on appearance.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald's work appears frequently in magazines. In fact you can hardly pick up a paperback or a magazine without seeing his name - but he prefers books. He explains that magazine editors like to tailor you to fit the taste.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">His paperbacks have all come out in Crest editions; most of his hard backs, in Simon and Schuster.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald doesn't think there is anything special about writing mysteries -- so don't ask him. It's a question of people, he declares. Catch your people live and then see what happens to them,</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Violence? No, we're not teeming with it, he says. Many of us are gentle as doves.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">His movie, <i>Cape Fear</i>, taken from the novel <i>The Executioners</i>, makes its world premiere in Florida State Theaters this Thursday - and it is NOT gentle.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald didn't follow his book to Hollywood. He let the experts have their way and thinks they made a fine job of it. No complaints - especially of Robert Mitchum who is the hero, or you might say the protagonist.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It's a story of psychotic revenge - take that how you will - but all of MacDonald's books aren't revengeful. Some of them are just good novels.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">I put my foot deep between the teeth by saying I thought women made better mystery writers.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Predictably, he doesn't agree.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald is always two or three books ahead. When he gets tired of one plot, he turns to another. He uses a typewriter, works about six hours a day and has enough novels teeming in that busy brain to last until he is over 100.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">His son, John P., attends Cranbook Academy (an art school) and his daughter-in-law is a Mount Holyoke graduate. The MacDonalds have lived in Florida about 12 years, specifically Sarasota.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">There are no rules for mystery writing, says MacDonald. To some people life IS a mystery and maybe they get the most fun out of it. The plot, the narration is difficult to learn, he admits. It is best to be born with the knack.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Once in my callow youth, I asked Mischa Elman how he slanted his bow to get that tone. Since then I've learned. Elman didn't know.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">And neither does MacDonald. Like most successful people, he can't tell you how he does it.</span></span></p></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-47265173439160067432020-09-07T23:00:00.004-07:002020-09-07T23:00:01.292-07:00'Saint' MacDonald Praised, Probed at Tampa Fest<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOsTKNShltPX2kYiDpj0Neap7oZU3mXG1H-5sf6PSZ3lMf9oq45Ra-Gz32xIZeL38MLSjrLb1cbvzGUP40lqTp9l8_der-GoVx34GcQnfkWezU3LRN3ZenJCWQOjWBdnzwRFkcC6u4_ns/s1017/JDM+1977.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1017" data-original-width="732" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOsTKNShltPX2kYiDpj0Neap7oZU3mXG1H-5sf6PSZ3lMf9oq45Ra-Gz32xIZeL38MLSjrLb1cbvzGUP40lqTp9l8_der-GoVx34GcQnfkWezU3LRN3ZenJCWQOjWBdnzwRFkcC6u4_ns/s320/JDM+1977.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">In November of 1978 the University of South Florida held the first ever John D MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detective Fiction, organized by Professor Ed Hirshberg and sponsored by the college’s English Department and the Popular Culture Association. MacDonald himself was there and dutifully sat through the readings of several scholarly papers on his writing, and he responded to each paper, both at the time and a year later in the first issue of <i>Clues: A Journal of Detection</i>. The press was there as well, and I’ve transcribed the Miami <i>Herald</i>’s version of the event. It’s short but worth reading for the last three paragraphs.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">This appeared in the November 20, 1978 edition of the paper. </span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7bf26b5a-7fff-f091-7b23-5c44137c19dd"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">By STEPHEN DOIG</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><i>Herald</i> Staff Writer TAMPA – John. D. MacDonald, the author who made writing paper. backs a respectable profession, the Harvard graduate whose Travis McGee character is South Florida's favorite beach bum, the environmentalist who scared the plaid burmudas off high rise dwellers with his best selling <i>Condominium</i>, stood before his audience Saturday as bemused as a saint listening to his own eulogy.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"A situation like this, is enough to make any author pretentious," MacDonald said with a touch of modest wonder in his voice. "I have to go home and cure myself of you all."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">THE SITUATION was a two-day McDonald fest, Friday and Saturday at the University of South Florida in Tampa, an easy drive from his winter home near Sarasota. More than 150 people in business suits and blue jeans, evening gowns and halter tops, paid $20 apiece to chat with him at a cocktail party in his honor, dine with him at an awards dinner, and listen with him to literary analyses read by scholars who came from as far away as Iowa.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"I neither encouraged nor discouraged all this academic attention," MacDonald confided to a reporter, "It has just sort of grown, and it is damned amusing."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">All this academic attention was a product of The Popular Culture Association, a national group of professors and students whose athropological study of the seemingly mundane of modern American life has grown in a decade from an object of scorn into scholarly respectability.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">“If you call a course a classics, then the kids won't come," explained Charlie Sweet, a professor at Kentucky University. “However, if you call it the History of the Detective Story, you can give them <i>Edipus Rex, Hamlet</i> and <i>Crime and Punishment</i>."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Sweet argued that the study of popular culture - which can be anything from MacDonald's novels to the evolution of gas station architecture — requires students to use the same critical faculties needed for dissertations on "the blue-eyed imagery in <i>Beowolf</i>."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">ECHOED RAY BROWNE, a professor at Bowling Green University in Ohio, “Our major purpose is to alert students to the complexities of modern life.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">It may be academic, but it's also fun, and MacDonald's insightful observations of the Florida of the last 25 years – sprinkled into tight plots peopled with entertaining characters - have made his large body of novels and stories a favorite grist for the popular culture mill.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The association's attention, in turn, leaves MacDonald on the verge of becoming the next Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories a half century ago have been raptly dissected for decades by such organized admiration societies as The Baker Street Irregulars.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">That level of intense interest was evident at the Tampa conference. For instance, take Peggy Moran, a professor of English at Purdue University in Indiana, who delivered a paper on women in the Travis McGee novels.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Cataloging more than 100 female characters in the 17 McGee books, she analyzed how MacDonald had faceted a serious character who is deeply introspective about his relationships with women. The hero who, despite his macho life of action and conquest, thinks there is more to love than a Playboy Club key.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"The male-female roles in the McGee novels," concluded Moran, "are MacDonald's answer to the loneliness of the one-night stand."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">FRANCIS NEVINS, a law professor at the St. Louis University Law School, researched MacDonald's earliest works, the more than 160 stories he wrote for the now largely extinct pulp magazines that died out in the early 1950s.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"John is the last of the great story tellers, who honed his skill in the pulps, the training ground of all the great, hard-boiled writers," said Nevins.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald glanced to the sky occasionally when some of the papers contained phrases like "Manichean dualism" or "socialistic relativity," but took the whole experience right down to the long line of autograph seekers and the man in the green Hawaiian print shirt who insisted that MacDonald's wife Dorothy photograph him with her husband - in good humor.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"It is rather strange to be examined in this fashion," he noted, saying he felt somewhat like Early Man being disinterred by a paleontologist. He acknowledged his use of what he termed "folk dance aspects” of formula detective fiction, but spoke of conscience as being what can make detective stories something more than hack writing.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">"AS A WRITER, I still feel like an imposter," he confessed. "It is like someone's given me a license to steal. It's wonderful to work at something you love and get paid for it."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">The fact that MacDonald isn't an imposter content to make an easy buck by combining formula writing with static characters came out in a discussion of his next McGee novel now under way.</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">Moran had asked for a hint of how McGee's romance with Gretel, chronicled in the recent <i>Empty Copper Sea</i>, is progressing and MacDonald revealed: “ At this moment her ashes are in a bronze urn waiting for McGee to take them back to California for burial next to her brother."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">With a small groan, Moran cried out: "But you should have spared her."</span></span></p><span style="color: #2b00fe;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">MacDonald, with a helpless shrug of an author whose characters now have lives -- and deaths -- of their own, replied: "I tried to".</span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-87052449553549284072020-08-03T01:00:00.000-07:002020-08-03T01:00:13.583-07:00The Golden World of Travis McGee<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9c__2BLR9_5JP5oNn6E4pkORHBfxF8j34qWCUx6xis6xedAH8EBWMN9bIjsi7m32FLR66xmyki6sRc7hoYTyGJu7ybHGYWizV_c7P3IGgAIguJxnRfHg9BRNGv-mH7jB_91GZ-W-twt0/s1600/001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1383" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9c__2BLR9_5JP5oNn6E4pkORHBfxF8j34qWCUx6xis6xedAH8EBWMN9bIjsi7m32FLR66xmyki6sRc7hoYTyGJu7ybHGYWizV_c7P3IGgAIguJxnRfHg9BRNGv-mH7jB_91GZ-W-twt0/s320/001.jpg" width="276" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back in 2015 I posted an article on John D MacDonald that had been published in my then-hometown newspaper The Washington <i>Post</i>, titled <a href="https://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-man-who-writes-those-travis-mcgee.html" target="_blank">“The Man Who Writes Those Travis McGee Stories”</a>. It was a reprint of an article that originally appeared in The Miami <i>Herald</i>, one I had never seen, nor did I know what the original title was (hoping that it wasn’t the same clumsy and unimaginative one the <i>Post</i> dreamed up). I’ve now acquired a copy of the original and am happy to report that 1.) it <i>did</i> have a different title, and 2.) it is quite a bit longer than the version published in the <i>Post</i>. So here it is, as originally written, “The Golden World of Travis McGee.” Some of the excised bits are quite interesting, especially (for me) his comments on his 1970 short story “<a href="https://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/11/dear-old-friend.html" target="_blank">Dear Old Friend</a>” (a masterpiece). They nicely describe exactly why MacDonald’s writing is so brilliant, so superior to all of his contemporaries.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The article appeared in the December 14, 1969 issue of <i>Tropic</i>, the <i>Herald</i>’s Sunday supplement and was written by Mike Baxter.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The tugboat captain was saying that he'd seen a ghost ship, and in the context, it seemed not only possible but inevitable. The context was Bahia Mar marina in Ft. Lauderdale, which on most days has a look-dad-no-cavities gleam. Today the sky was overcast, a movie company was filming a John D. MacDonald mystery on Pier B, and MacDonald arrived on time, but it was the wrong John MacDonald. The search for the right MacDonald led to a nearby hotel bar -- and the tugboat captain.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"A couple of weeks ago I read one of those mystery stories,” he said. "Travis McGee, it was called. In the book he had this houseboat, the Busted Flush. So this morning we were walking down the pier here. Saw this boat called the Busted Flush. I couldn't believe it...."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Amazing,” his friend said.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"And there's this guy going <i>shhhh</i> — they're making a movie out of it!"</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I'll be damned."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">John D. MacDonald, the real MacDonald, was delighted. Told about the tugboat captain, he laughed happily, the laugh of a man who can race typewriters and adding machines with</span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">equal speed. By this time the next day, after a long wait for MacDonald, going <i>shhhh</i> seemed a good idea. MacDonald, however, roared at malicious intervals.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There were more roars as Australian actor Rod Taylor jack-in-the-boxed out of a small Starcraft trailer on to the pier. He and MacDonald exchanged polite bellows.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Hi, John, how's my man?” The rugged Aussie face concealed any dismay at MacDonald's larger entourage. Taylor had only his bodyguard, paid to protect the star from his public.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I'm taking over now," Taylor boomed. "He's my responsibility.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“At last, they'll no longer confuse me with him," MacDonald said. “Now you'll be McGee and I'll be MacDonald.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Him” was Travis McGee, a creation of MacDonald's fiction, master of the Busted Flush, and holder of the producers' $2 million stakes in the box-office sweepstakes. To watch Taylor and MacDonald was to witness a ceremony of exorcism. With each forward frame of 35mm film the Aeroflex cameras of Cinema Center Studios were stripping the fantasy figure of McGee from MacDonald and his books, and cloaking it around the wedge-shaped and willing shoulders of Taylor.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When the movie, <i>Darker Than Amber</i>, makes its M-rated debut next year, both Taylor and millions of Mature Audience voyeurs can be McGee, for all MacDonald professes to care. "I hate to disappoint people," he said, and laughed easily and loudly, the sound like gravel rattling on cardboard. The writer known to friends as “John D" was in a sportive mood.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I hope they make a dozen of them," he said, watching Taylor, Jane Russell, and lesser names with greater talents - Theodore Bikel, for one -- turn <i>Amber</i> into gold. Movie rights are earning a "sizeable five-figure sum” and a box-office percentage, and he has also sold options on the other McGee books at pyramiding rates.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This alone should forgive him his excesses. "It so happens, man, I stay pretty loose," he said as he arrived at Bahia Mar, and he certainly looked loose enough in a pastiche of Miami Beach styles: Swedish nautical cap, canary slacks, a rose-bowled pipe propped in the corner of a grin, dark glasses despite the overcast day. It was as if something in him were reluctant </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to surrender the role of McGee's alter ego. But despite innate acting talent he never succeeded at making the role seem reality. A MacDonald friend later dismissed his costume and roleplaying as protective coloration for a sensitive man facing the Cinemascope egoes at Bahia Mar.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee was born in 1964 as a full-grown six-foot-four, 212-pound freelance adventurer. In five hectic years, he has piloted the Busted Flush through Gulf and Gold Coast waters and 11 bestselling paperbacks. Gifted with a Rod Taylor physique and a John MacDonald intellect, McGee salvages private property in extralegal situations for half its value which, he tells Victims of Injustice, is better than nothing. For both of them. But sometimes, a rampant sentimentalist, he forgives the fee. In a McGee book, the victim is usually attractive.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That McGee is not MacDonald does not lessen the utility of contrast, instantly apparent on flipping over a paperback from a blue-eyed, gold-skinned McGee line-cut on the front cover to the photograph on the back of a bespectacled, balding writer.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unlike McGee, whose self-expressions are physical and often pontifical, the six-feet-nothing MacDonald just writes: books, magazine articles, short stories. Anything, it seems, but a bad check. In five years he has written into third place behind Perry Mason and Mike Hammer in the suspense league, and third place is still big money.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald was a struggling lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services, nearly 30 and without a line in <i>Who's Who</i>, when he sold his first story. That was 59 novels and 37 million readers ago. Except for the Bible, there is not much left to catch up with. With prudish disavowal of its literary importance, MacDonald produced a clipping that said only four living authors have outsold Fawcett Publications' “paperback king."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One is Mickey Spillane, father of Mike Hammer. Spillane visits MacDonald's Gulf Coast home at intervals, and both write mysteries. As craftsmen, however, they are as close as Eldridge Cleaver and Sam Spade. Even Spillane can recognize the gulf. "I am a writer; you are an author,” The Mick once told MacDonald. There is more in that than semantic nonsense.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald writes on a beige IBM Selectric as if Doom were about to unplug it in the last great denouement. A MacDonald week in his adopted home town of Sarasota has three fixed points: The Plaza for lunch Friday, his color television set on Mission: Impossible nights, and the Selectric. He devotes a businesslike seven-to-nine hours a day writing, doing it until the lunch hour, then doing it again until the cocktail hour. Fast subtraction shows that this leaves “too little time, dammit" for other pursuits.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Travis McGee's debut in <i>The Dark Blue Goodbye</i> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(sic)</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, first of a rainbow of titles, was hailed by <i>Saturday Review</i> as “a publishing event." The late Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, automatically bought each new McGee as it appeared, high praise in anyone's mystery book.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to his 18 lines in <i>Who's Who</i>. MacDonald won the 1955 Benjamin Franklin award for the best short story of the year, and in 1964 the Grand Prix de Literateur Policiere. In non-fiction, his <i>No Deadly Drug</i> account of the Coppolino murder trial became required reading at Harvard Law School.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald the crime writer “never lets the customer down,” the <i>Review</i> said, choosing the word “customer” with deliberation. The tribute interlocks with an often-echoed MacDonald quote: “I feel that the man who pays 35 cents for your books is as worthy of as much bitter effort as the man who pays $3.50. And he is much more numerous."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In its latest edition that quote was updated to “50 cents” and “$5.50,” an increase unequal to inflation. The paperback books today cost 60 to 75 cents.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet customers for them are more numerous than ever, with about six cents a copy sold ($75,000 on a million sales), going to MacDonald.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Godot could have been found earlier and easier than MacDonald that day at Bahia Mar. Waiting for him caused embarrassment for every white-haired man of about 53 who wandered near the pier, and constant phone calls to the room of another John MacDonald staying at the Bahia Mar hotel. A call to MacDonald's Sarasota home could have ended the mystery of his arrival time. This suggestion was offered to MacDonald acquaintances on the set. To a man, they shuddered. They spoke of The Writer's privacy with the reverence a movie publicity man had said: “And he does all his own typing."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once arrived at Ft. Lauderdale, MacDonald shrugged permission to visit him at his eight month-old hideaway on Siesta Key. He affirmed, however, a fondness for privacy.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Smiling, he described his moat, barracuda, cross-beamed lasers and a wife who patrolled with a Whammo slingshot.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In their place were found only two aging Fords and, on stilts above them, an airy “Early Fish House”, design-built big and modern. The house does have an elaborate security system, however, and privacy in a glass-walled house is assured with curtains of outdoor lights turning the glass into one-way mirrors. It is a privacy not even Travis McGee is allowed to violate.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"You know," MacDonald said, "when I originally started the McGee thing, I was apprehensive about that. He could have been based in Sarasota. But if successful it would have been right in my own backyard. So I put him in Ft. Lauderdale."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Before moving in April to his hideaway, MacDonald said, his work was interrupted by a recurring incident: “You'd see some man stop, having an argument with his wife, nod his head, then shuffle up to the house with a couple of books. It'd be immoral not to sign them. Then you chat five minutes, come back and wonder where in hell you were."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He admitted his vanity would be piqued if no one came to interrupt him with praise or questions, an admission that would have arched reportorial eyebrows when MacDonald met the press at Bahia Mar. A Ft. Lauderdale reporter had not read MacDonald's books but said he would.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Moving your lips?” MacDonald had asked.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"He was going to get at the core of you in three and a half minutes and leave,” a guest said:</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“He probably did,” MacDonald had replied, and laughed loudly. Now, at home, his manner was more subdued. He seemed hesitant to immediately enter a structured question-and-answer interview. He answered calls in his study, lit a pipe, showed color transparencies from a Mexican vacation. He was missing the Friday luncheon at the Plaza, but said nothing about it at the time. Talking about the house and the movie, he became more animated and his manner progressively warmer. The movie-set kibitzer in clothes that would have turned a Brazilian admiral's head was now wearing chino slacks and sleeve-rolled shirt. The guise of hearty-beer can-crunching outdoorsman was clearly left far behind in Bahia Mar.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Though he finally resigned himself to answering questions, the longest answers were for questions that were not asked. He began talking about ego and introversion. "I'm an ambivert,” he said. His eyes glazed in introspective thought and his gaze swiveled slightly toward the Gulf beyond the veranda. He found the thought he searched for, and looked back. “That's the way I think of myself. A very introverted kid with moments of manic extroversion.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is also in MacDonald an ambivalency toward sentiment. Few novelists write with his power of violence. And few writers have his weakness for chain letters, for inside jokes (he named an <i>Amber</i> character after his agent) and for pets. Living with the MacDonalds are two half-Abyssinian cats, one cross-eyed; a goose, “Knees”; and a duck, “Trampis,” nee “Travis" but rechristened in a manner compatible with the accent of a 28-year-old Honduras woman who lives with them.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Four years ago MacDonald wrote a book about his life with pets, <i>The House Guests</i>. He offered this as the closest book to an autobiography he has written. In it he described the writing of more than 200 manuscripts and 800,000 words between his first and second sales:</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“This is the equivalent of ten average novels. Writing is the classic example of learning by doing. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the 'preci</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">sion and facility I acquired in four months. I could guess that I spent eighty hours a week at the typewriter. I kept twenty-five to thirty articles in the mail at all times, sending each of them out to an average of ten potential markets before retiring them.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The attitude may represent a business background more than the traditional desperation of the starving artist. MacDonald was born on July 24, 1916, the son of Eugene MacDonald, who "was in financial stuff with small corporations” in Sharon, Pa. and Utica, N.Y. John earned a degree in business administration at Syracuse and a master's from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Until he sold his first story in 1946 as an Army officer in Ceylon, writing fiction because censors redlined all meaning from letters home to his wife, he planned a business career. Vestiges of business training appear in his home office.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His study faces the Gulf. Alongside objects d'art are objects d'artiste: A 60-power Sears telescope through which he can see a neighbor's telescope aimed at him, another inside joke; a Random House dictionary he sometimes finds himself reading for 15 minutes; a Xerox 660 copier used in his voluminous researches; an adding machine, and Travis McGee in the unfinished twelfth manuscript.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He admits that McGee, now rich and famous, may be near retirement.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I said I'd do 10 when I started," MacDonald said. “I really screwed up <i>Indigo</i> (the 11th). So now I'm doing 12 - as a matter of personal pride, to have it real solid. After 12, I'm not going to arbitrarily say again that I won't do anymore. If I come across an idea I think could work into a McGee, I'll do it in some other form. I like to write. I don't want to foul my own nest by turning writing into a dogged chore.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In <i>Indigo</i>, MacDonald transported McGee from South Florida to Mexico, the locale of MacDonald's most recent vacation. McGee indulged in his customary editorializing, but too clumsily, MacDonald said. According to MacDonald, McGee is “a separate, entirely distinct individual. He has opinions that are far more black-and-white than mine. In some basic areas I don't agree with him. I think he's flawed in ways I'm not. He has not really accepted the necessities of being a grown-up boy.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A middle-aged reporter in Ft. Lauderdale had told MacDonald he still felt young, but he thought McGee was nearing his golden years, geriatrically as well as commercially. The reporter learned that even reading MacDonald's books was no sure defense: MacDonald abruptly told him that McGee wasn't, but the reporter was.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I'm trying to change McGee imperceptibly," MacDonald explained later, “in line with what I think would normally happen. But you can run into trouble and change a guy too much, like John Creasey did with the Gideon series.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee will never die like Sherlock Holmes; money has bought him that much. “I wouldn't want to accept the commercial stupidity,” MacDonald said. “Once he's dead, all the other books become history. Anyway, before I could kill him I'd have to go up to New York and kill all the people at Fawcett Publications who have anything to do with it."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald can pension McGee off without affecting his workload. While completing McGee No. 12, he is working on three other novels in his unorthodox way, moving from one to another at the first outbreak of boredom.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He writes without outlining, weaving intricate plots and large casts into the empty middle separating a known beginning and a known climax.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He writes on expensive 25-pound bond paper. "I think the same situation is involved as with painting and sculpture. If you use the best materials you can afford, somehow you have more respect for what you do to it.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He seldom edits with pencil. “I rewrite by throwing away a page, a chapter, half a book, or go right back to the beginning and start again."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He is also a happy writer, another unorthodoxy. "I enjoy the hell out of writing," he said, “because of the rare times when it really works good. It's like an Easter egg hunt. Here's fifty pages, and you say, 'Oh, Christ, where is it?' Then on the 51st page, it'll work. Just the way you wanted it to, a little better than anything in that same area ever worked before. You say 'Wow! This is worth the price of admission'.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His wife of 30 years, Dorothy Prentiss MacDonald is an artist whose predominantly blue oils cover much of the house's whitestained cedar walls. While we talked, she emerged from the kitchen with Tuborg and Heineken beers and, for MacDonald, a Bloody Mary, which he chased with milk and an untipped Gaulois cigarette. There is a faint but noticeable deference in her attitude towards her husband.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald observed that the interview had cost him his Plaza luncheon: “Now don't you feel bad?”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Current magazines litter the coffee table, a backdrop for a thin manuscript and an acceptance letter from <i>Playboy</i>. The magazine had just bought “Dear Old Friend,” an ironic short story, for $2,000, twice its normal rate. The editor said it was to encourage MacDonald, who once had a study wall papered with rejection slips, to write more for them.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story had been cubbyholed in a closet filled with other unpublishable material. “I wrote it about four years ago and it didn't work. It was too fancy. I had it lying around, and thought of it sometimes, and last month I did it again and did it real flat.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Flat? “I'm talking about trying to achieve more simplicity, so you give the reader really more of a chance to relate his own emotional climate to what you're writing. I feel like I'm still within my learning period. I haven't flattened out yet.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like Simenon, Doyle and others, MacDonald is an intellectual, or perhaps a pop-intellectual, who quotes <i>The Lonely Crowd</i> and <i>Games People Play</i>. But he writes without pandering in a genre that is known more for its surrender-or-die dialogue than Travis McGee's rough eloquence.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Suspense is like a mental exercise,” he said. “Once you accept the limits of what you're doing, you try to do the best you can within those limits. And you're not going to be patronizing anybody. The only patronizing for anybody would be the decision to accept those limits.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a written interview with a French doctoral student, MacDonald invoked examples from Camus to John Updike, dichotomized the Judeo-Christian ethic into a pair of neat dilemmas, and questioned the classifying of "suspense" novels as distinct from “straight” novels.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"If all this sounds as if I am being all too terribly artsy about crime fiction,” he wrote, “I ask just one question: How much of the great Faulkner trilogy could be so categorized?”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So MacDonald writes, and Travis McGee rights wrongs. The lingering after-vision from Sarasota is double: the twain shall never meet. McGee, who may be retiring, is not MacDonald, who will never retire. After all, there is still Perry Mason and Mike Hammer. And the Bible.</span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-44400002243070230112020-07-13T01:00:00.000-07:002020-07-13T01:00:03.413-07:00John D MacDonald: Travis McGee Does His Swashbuckling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 1975 John D MacDonald enjoyed his first-ever success on the hardcover best seller lists with the Lippincott publication of the sixteenth Travis McGee novel <i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i>. It was, in fact, the second McGee to have its original appearance in hardcover and spent 23 weeks on the New York <i>Times</i> Best Seller List, reaching a high of number three. It brought MacDonald much notoriety in circles he had not previously been considered and raised the expectations on the success of his future output, especially with his publisher. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the author didn’t follow up <i>Lemon</i> with another Travis McGee adventure; he instead ventured forth with a standalone, his first since 1967’s <i>The Last One Left</i>. 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. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That novel was, of course, <i>Condominium</i> and it hit the bookstands in March of 1977. It had great success, lasting 27 weeks on the <i>Times</i>’ 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 <i>Florida Accent</i>, the Sunday newspaper supplement to The Tampa <i>Tribune</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">J<b>ohn D MacDonald: Travis McGee Does His Swashbuckling</b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>By Rick Barry</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">True, that may change with the projected popular success of his latest novel, <i>Condominium</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He and Dorothy, his artist wife of 40 years, live there.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If <i>Condominium</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When he's working on a book -- any book -- MacDonald adheres to a rigid work schedule. Monday through Thursday, he sits down at his IBM at 9 a.m. and finishes at 5:30 p.m. On Fridays and Saturdays, he spends half a day from 9 a.m. to noon, sometimes repeating the schedule on Sundays.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there's the formula:</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(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 <i>JDM Bibliophile</i>. (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.)</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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 <i>Condominium</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He really needn't be, with 41 paperbacks still in print and statistical surveys showing newsstand paperback audiences change every 12 months.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As his agent puts it: "As long as John keeps writing, a whole lot of people are going to keep on eating."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pass the caviar, please.</span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-58964982572191875602020-06-15T01:00:00.000-07:002020-06-15T01:00:00.189-07:00Violence on Violet Nights<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The following article appeared in the March 17, 1985 edition of <i>Inquirer</i>, the Sunday magazine supplement to the Philadelphia <i>Inquirer</i>. Written by William Ecenbarger, it’s a lengthy, boilerplate piece on MacDonald and McGee, featuring all the usual questions and MacDonald’s pat answers. Still, these are fun to read just to seek out the occasional JDM comment one has never heard before. There are a few of those scattered among the paragraphs.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Violence on Violet Nights</b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>By William Ecenbarger</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TRAVIS McGEE IS sprawled on a deep curve of the yellow corner couch aboard his houseboat, staring into the dregs of his scattered thoughts.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“This is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the rocks and crannies of the large and rigid structure of an increasingly codified society," he says. "Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the streets. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and well-adjusted."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee, a rebel with many causes, has declared independence from "plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, checklists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, Junior Chambers of Commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He lives alone aboard the Busted Flush, a 52-foot barge-type houseboat that is docked in Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar Yacht Basin in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The vessel's name is derived from the fact that McGee won it from a Brazilian playboy during a 30-hour poker game with "four pink ones and a stranger down." The boat is equipped with a special security system that alerts McGee the instant anyone steps on board.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On land, McGee drives Miss Agnes, which is a Rolls Royce converted into a pickup truck. “She is vintage 1936, and apparently some previous owner had some unlikely disaster happen to the upper half of her rear end and solved the problem in an implausible way. Some other idiot had her painted a horrid electric blue. When I found her squatting, shame-faced, in the back row of a gigantic car lot, I bought her at once and named her after a teacher I had in the fourth grade whose hair was that same shade of blue."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At 6-foot-4, McGee is a full foot taller than Hercule Poirot. He buys his clothes from L. L. Bean, not on Savile Row like James Bond. He's gentler than Mike Hammer, and he charges more than Sam Spade. Like Philip Marlowe, he plays chess, and he used to smoke a pipe like Sherlock Holmes.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THERE REALLY IS A BAHIA MAR YACHT BASIN in Fort Lauderdale on Florida's Atlantic side, and people come there looking for Travis McGee. But McGee lives only on the pages of 20 best-selling novels by John D. MacDonald, who lives on the gulf side of Florida and today is widely considered to be one of America's best mystery writers.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">About 7,000 people are crowded on Siesta Key, a seven-mile, white-sanded strip in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from Sarasota. Condominiums, like ice cube trays standing on end, line the beach. The main road is illuminated day and night by nervous neon boasting of high interest rates, large salad bars and free movies with every room. Traffic lights bite off huge chunks of traffic, and impatient drivers lock horns.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An unmarked, gravelly lane escorts invited visitors to the home of John D. MacDonald. The wooden rectangle of the house is supported, stork-like, by 12-foot pilings as thick as telephone poles and laced with huge wooden crossbeams. Two vans, an old Ford and a new </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Toyota, are parked beneath the house. There is a wraparound veranda with a profusion of hanging plants. A sign on the wooden stairs leading to the veranda warns that the house is protected by an electronic security system.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald is standing on the gulf side of the veranda, being scolded by a blue jay. He wears blue running shoes, athletic socks, khaki pants and a lemon shirt with epaulets. Both hands are thrust in his side pockets in a diffident gesture. “The pilings underneath are hurricane insurance," he explains. "We could lose maybe five feet of soil here and still be OK.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fencing, palm trees and shrubbery afford seclusion for MacDonald. The house is exposed only to the water, and the view is relentlessly picturesque. A gentle surf spreads white lace on the sand, and faraway sailboats inhale the wind. “Privacy is so damned valuable for a writer. How can you observe anything when you're observed yourself?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“We spend our summers at a camp in the Adirondacks on land that we bought with money I won in an overseas poker game," he says. "We still like Sarasota, but it's not like it used to be. The air used to smell like orange blossoms. Now when the wind is right, it smells like a robot's armpit.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">SINCE HE BEGAN WRITING FOUR DECADES ago, the 68-year-old MacDonald has turned out about 600 stories and 75 books - all but two of which are still in print. His books have sold 90 million copies, and it is estimated that 8,000 MacDonalds are sold every day.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In addition to the McGee series, MacDonald has written dozens of suspense novels, such best-selling non-suspense books as <i>Condominium, One More Sunday</i>, and <i>The House Guests</i>, a tribute to his cats; and <i>No Deadly Drug</i>, a nonfiction account of the Coppolino murder trial in New Jersey that for several years was required reading at the Harvard Law School.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald is one of the few American mystery writers to win France's coveted Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, and he is the recipient of the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America (others are Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner and Graham Greene). MacDonald is probably the first mystery writer since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to have an active fan club, and his admirers have included Norman Mailer, Orson Welles, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marlene Dietrich, Ian Fleming and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who predicts that "to diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald will be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.” Carol Brener, owner of Murder Ink, the mystery specialty bookstore in New York, says MacDonald is her best-selling author. "We keep every one of his titles in stock, and I'd have to say that John MacDonald helps pay the rent around here."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But despite his prodigious sales and the continuing popularity of Travis McGee, MacDonald's name is not instantly recognizable by most Americans. Fate conspired in this by naming him MacDonald (other contemporary mystery writers are Gregory McDonald, Philip MacDonald and the late Ross Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar). John Dann MacDonald eschews celebrity by being as devious as any of his fictional villains in preserving his privacy. He avoids New York City, interviews and talk shows. He dislikes being recognized by strangers (he has been known to appear in public with a sign reading TYPHOID CASE), and he deliberately has out-of-date pictures published with his books.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For most of his career, MacDonald was ignored by the critics and labeled a mere purveyor of drugstore fiction. But recently many of his early paperback works have been reissued in hardback, two volumes of his vintage short stories have been published, and he has begun to receive the serious attention that is warranted by the bearer of a torch lit more than 60 years ago by Dashiell Hammett.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THE TROPICAL HEAT AND THE AIR CONDITIONING are battling to a draw aboard the Busted Flush, and McGee reaches into the stainless steel cooler for a beer. "I always buy the brands with the pull tabs," he explains. "You stare at the tab, think deep thoughts about progress, advertising, modern living, cultural advances, and then turn the can upside down and open it with a can opener.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee, as portrayed in MacDonald's mysteries, is an intense physical fitness buff and a moderate drinker. His spirituous tastes now center on martinis made with Boodles gin. During much of his career, he favored England's Plymouth gin, but he gave it up after they began bottling it in New Jersey and changed the taste.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever a consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide-rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase the market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make a profit of 30 cents a unit, when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus, the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee, who is wearing ratty old woolen slacks and a Norm Thompson flannel shirt faded to a sky blue, fixates on a Syd Solomon painting hanging on the wall of the stateroom and is asked whether he considers himself a private detective.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Me? No. Those people have to have licenses and be bonded and carry insurance and report to the law people wherever they go. They charge fees and have office phones and all that. I just do favors for friends. Sort of salvage work."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Specifically, McGee is a salvager of private property, on land and sea, and works on a 50 percent contingency fee, which he has been known to waive or reduce if the client is an attractive woman. McGee tracks down villains by a process of elimination – sometimes cerebral, sometimes actual.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TWO OVERWEIGHT CATS PROWL the gymnasium-size living room of the MacDonald home. A large picture window is filled with the emerald meadows of the gulf, and the walls are covered </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">with paintings by Syd Solomon and Dorothy Prentiss MacDonald, the author's wife of 45 years. “The living room is so big because we only have one bedroom." MacDonald says. “You have more than one bedroom in Florida, you get house guests."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Off the living room is a downstairs office, where MacDonald does most of his writing. It holds a beige IBM word processor, a printer with a paper tractor feed and silencing cover, and hundreds of books.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Simenon, that old master, had it right, you know. He said that if people want to know about me, they ought to read my books. And then if they want to know more about me, they should read more of my books.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I enjoy the hell out of writing because of the rare times when it really works good. It's like an Easter egg hunt. Here's 50 pages, and you say, 'Oh, Christ, where is it?' Then on the 51st page, it'll work. Just the way you wanted it to, a little better than anything in that same area ever worked before. You say, 'Wow! This is worth the price of admission.' People who claim to endure agonies during the process of creation should find other lines of work.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I start work every day around 9 with scut stuff like letters and bills just to get my head cleared. After about 45 minutes of that, I start writing and go through to about 6 with a short break for lunch. I am a news junkie, so I watch the evening news, and then Dorothy and I have a quiet dinner.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The 21st book in the McGee series, <i>The Lonely Silver Rain</i>, will be in bookstores this month and is a Literary Guild selection. MacDonald is working on McGee No. 22. Other simultaneous projects are a novel about two Florida real estate partners who break up and suffer postpartum depression, and a possible book involving a long exchange of letters that MacDonald had with Dan Rowan, the comedian. “I'm not sure this will make a book that has an audience, but some of the stuff is real funny, and a lot of it is interesting. One of the classics is me writing to him and saying, 'Dan, I don't think a weekly <i>Laugh-In</i> Show is going to work at all.'"</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald admits to a certain uneasiness over living and working in an area where most people his age have retired. "All these old people are irritating to me in a sense. It used to be that Sarasota had lots of writers and artists. It still does, but they're a much smaller percentage of the total community. Here I keep working while all around me, the place is filling up with geriatrics. I went to the movies last night, and the girl in the ticket booth assumed I got the senior citizen discount. I told her, 'Hell, no! I'm an old man, but I'm not a senior citizen.'</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“The truth is that 95 percent of the world is pretty dumb, but when you're young you can hide it with your clothes, your job and just sort of knowing the right things to say and do. But after age 60, you've got no way to conceal it."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDONALD WAS BORN IN SHARON, PA., NEAR the Ohio border, but his father, a businessman, soon moved to Utica, N.Y. At the age of 12, MacDonald suffered a lengthy bout with scarlet fever and developed an avocation that he would practice nearly every day for the rest of his life – reading. Today he is scornful of nonreading Americans. “They sit with their minds turned off, so they won't have to use any mental energy decoding those black marks on the paper, and watch some picture on TV that gives them the story minus work. But there is no growth without effort."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He entered the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1934, but he dropped out in his sophomore year because he was uncertain about what he wanted to do with his life. Three months later, he enrolled in Syracuse University and received a bachelor's degree in business administration in 1938. He graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. MacDonald was fired from jobs with an investment house and an insurance company ("apparently, they didn't size me up as a future member of the board of directors"), and his rapid descent in the business world was interrupted when he joined the Army in 1940.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He became a member of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and was assigned to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he says his duties were more housekeeping than cloak-and-dagger. He lived in a bungalow, had eight servants, two chauffeured cars, a motorcycle, a converted B-25 bomber for air travel, several secretaries, and a liquor ration. In 1944, he mailed a 2,000-word story home to his wife, Dorothy, who did some editing, typed it and mailed it to <i>Story Magazine</i>, which bought it for $25.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He was discharged as a lieutenant colonel in 1946, and armed with four months of Army pay for unused leave time, he began writing 14 hours a day. He estimates that he churned out 800,000 words in short stories, lost 20 pounds and collected 1,000 rejection slips. In the fifth month, he sold a story to <i>Dime Detective</i> for $40, and for the next three years he published an average of a story a week - some in such magazines as <i>Esquire, Collier's</i> and <i>Cosmopolitan</i>, but mostly in the "pulps, such as <i>Dime Detective, The Shadow</i> and the legendary <i>Black Mask</i>, which decades before had been launching pads for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. MacDonald's first novel, <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/11/brass-cupcake.html" target="_blank">The Brass Cupcake</a></i>, was published in 1950, and since then he has written everything except a rubber check — though he is, of course, most famous for fathering Travis McGee.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">VERY LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT TRAVIS McGee's past, except that he sold cars as a youth, served as an NCO in the Korean War, and played college and professional football until a linebacker for the Detroit Lions named DiCosola ended his career by injuring him. McGee had a brother who was swindled out of his money and committed suicide - a trauma that appears to have motivated McGee to devote the working part of his life to rooting out greed, corruption and social putrescence. Like his counterparts, McGee seems to age at about one-third the normal rate, and since he was created 20 years ago, he has remained somewhere between 40 and 50.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I retire whenever I can afford it,” says McGee. "When the money is gone, I go back to work. Salvage work. Retirement comes when you are too old to enjoy it completely, so I take some of mine whenever I can. What good are beaches without beach bums?"</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee does well by doing good, and the Internal Revenue Service would be interested to know that he keeps his money, all in cash, in a secret water-filled compartment below the water line of the Busted Flush. From time to time, McGee has also been known to bring aboard for extended periods of time female visitors - almost all of whom are astonishingly attractive and tall and therefore appreciative of one of the Busted Flush's most unique accoutrements — its 7-by4-foot pale-blue bathtub.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I happen to think they are people," McGee says, a trifle defensively. "Not cute objects. I think that people hurting people is original sin. To score for the sake of scoring diminishes a man. I can't value a woman who won't value herself. McGee's Credo. That's why they won't give me a Playboy card. I won't romp with the bunnies. If there's no pain and no loss, it's only recreational, and we can leave it to the minks.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"The biggest and most important thing in the world is to be together with someone in a way that makes life a little less bleak and solitary and lonesome. To exchange the I for the We. In the biggest sense of the word, it's cold outside. And kindness and affection and gentleness build a nice warm fire inside."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee is interrupted by the appearance of his closest friend, Meyer. ...</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THERE IS A SECOND OFFICE UPSTAIRS in the MacDonald house, and it has more books, including <i>Waterways Guide</i> and <i>Boats and the Law</i>. MacDonald humps his shoulders like a roosted bird and says that when he decided to write the McGee series, he agonized over a name for his hero.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I liked McGee for a last name, and I have a fondness for geographical first names, like Tennessee Williams and Vermont Royster, so I originally chose Dallas McGee. But then there was an assassination in Dallas, and the name acquired a certain unpopular resonance, so I dropped it. The late Mackinlay Kantor, who lived in Sarasota and was my friend, said he liked the names of Air Force bases, and so I named him after the base in California.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I wrote two McGees and shelved them because they weren't right. The third one worked."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The first Travis McGee adventure appeared in 1964 under the title of <i>The Deep Blue Good-Bye</i>, and each of its 20 successors has had a color in its title - a device that MacDonald says helps readers avoid buying the same book twice, which is a common error among serial mystery fans. “I don't decide on the color and the title until I'm finished writing. Then I go back and look for an appropriate passage to hang it on.” McGee originally was a paperback hero, but his popularity has been so great that the latest books have been issued first in hard-cover, and all of the early volumes now have been reissued in hard-cover.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald says that when he begins a mystery, he doesn't know how it will end, "and the book becomes an adventure for me as well as the reader.” MacDonald likens writing a series to creating a folk dance, "where you have to invent new steps without changing the basic pattern."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His plots are more concerned with whydidit than whodunit, and MacDonald takes great care in developing minor characters. The McGee series is packed with editorials and instructional material, ranging from the treatment of chigger bites to open-heart surgery. As one would expect from a Harvard MBA, there is a lot of business intrigue in the McGee books. They are filled with expert descriptions of chess, stamp collecting and photography - all of which interest MacDonald in his personal life. Many of the McGee plots turn on traffic accidents, and MacDonald's descriptions are detailed and horrifying. He studies police accident files</span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and goes to universities where research is being conducted on traffic fatalities.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I do not write cheesy little potboilers, phony dragnets with nothing in them but action,” says MacDonald. “It's got to have some bonds, some basic human relationships. That's my last ethical stand.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald has had a bittersweet relationship with Hollywood. He liked the Gregory Peck / Robert Mitchum film <i>Cape Fear</i>, which was based on his 1958 novel, <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-executioners.html" target="_blank">The Executioners</a></i>. But he pronounced the film version of his <i>Darker Than Amber</i> to be "feral, cheap, rotten, gratuitously meretricious, shallow and embarrassing."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because the McGee series is written in the first person, the character of Meyer, McGee's best friend, is important because it keeps to a minimum McGee's internal monologues.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MEYER'S FIRST NAME IS RARELY MENTIONED, and MacDonald says it will never be mentioned again. Only the most unbalanced of McGee fans know it's Ludwig. Meyer lives 70 yards away from McGee at Bahia Mar. For the first 19 McGee adventures, Meyer's cabin cruiser was named the John Maynard Keynes, but it was blown up by the villain of No. 20, <i>Cinnamon Skin</i>, and now Meyer lives aboard the Thorstein Veblen. Meyer says he chose to name his boat after the economist-sociologist, who developed theories on conspicuous consumption, because "it will be utterly meaningless to everyone who graduated from high school in the past 20 years."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By training, Meyer is an economist, and he invests and writes articles for incomprehensible journals. On his business cards, Meyer lists himself as a "certified guarantor.” But he spends most of his time accompanying McGee on his salvage operations and occasionally rescuing him from certain death. </span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee marvels at Meyer's hairiness (little thatches of black hair between every knuckle, a blackbird's nest at the neck of his T-shirt, and a blue sheen on his jaws after a close shave) and his ability to get along with people. "You can watch the Meyer Magic at work and not know how it's done,” McGee says. "He has the size and pelt of the average Adirondack black bear. He can walk a beach, go into any bar, cross any playground and acquire people the way blue serge picks up lint, and the new friends believe they have known him forever. Strangers tell him things they have never told their husband or their priest."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While McGee is a practical intellectual - a sort of hard-boiled egghead – Meyer's cerebral edges are more rounded and complete. Meyer picks up where McGee's intellect leaves off — as when he corrects McGee's statement that someone who died in an explosion "never knew what hit him.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Nothing can happen so fast that there is not a micro-instant of realization," says Meyer. “Each nerve cell in the brain can make contact with three hundred thousand other cells, using its hundreds of branches, each branch with hundreds of terminals, and with electrical impulses linking cell to cell. Ten trillion cells, Travis, exchanging coded information every instant. The brain has time to release the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why, what, who ... and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We're each expert on our own death."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A favorite topic of commiseration between the two friends is the great terrain robbery in Florida by developers.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“The rivers and swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying," laments McGee. "They're paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can't be heard. The developers make big campaign contributions. And there isn't enough public money to treat sewage."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meyer agrees and takes it further. "Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got here. So why would they fight to turn back the clock? It looks great to them the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it for the first time and wouldn't change a thing. And meanwhile, the people who knew what it was like 20 years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meyer believes that the eighth deadly sin is to be boring, and he defines a bore as “a person who deprives you of your solitude without providing you with company."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A MOUNTED SCALE MODEL of Miss Agnes sits on the bookshelf in MacDonald's upstairs office.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Two guys from California, brothers, I think, sent that to me a couple of years ago. They did a great job on building, but a terrible job packing it, and it arrived here in about 64 pieces. We managed to patch it up."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald often gets letters, forwarded to him by the Fort Lauderdale Post Office, that are addressed to Travis McGee, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Yacht Basin. Graduate students write theses on MacDonald and McGee, and collectors try to amass copies of MacDonald's books and his many magazine short stories.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I'm a little bemused and flattered by all this attention," says MacDonald, "and I'm not sure I understand it."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fictional detective approaches the status of an institution in America and England. Edgar Allan Poe is widely hailed as the father of the mystery genre with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," published in 1841. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle popularized the form in 1887 when he created Sherlock Holmes. Dashiell Hammett spiced the form with reality in the 1920s with the creations of the Continental Op and Sam Spade.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">W. Russel Gray, a communications professor at Delaware County Community College in Media, recently delivered a paper to the Midwest Popular Culture Conference on the detective genre. “McGee, perhaps the very best of the private eyes still operative," he wrote, "offers us an illuminating corollary to dark reality: Society resists reform, and its corruption is never completely eradicable; the hero wins by not succumbing to it."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, there is a Travis McGee Fan Club, whose members get a “Me and Travis McGee" button and a subscription to the <i>JDM Bibliophile</i>, which has been published since 1965 and has a subscription list of about 3,000. Each issue contains reprints of articles on McGee and MacDonald from other publications, a classified section for collectors, at least one new article by MacDonald himself, and a plethora of McGee arcana (a recent offering was a 2,000-word memoir by someone who knew the "real Travis" – that is, Brig. Gen. Robert F. Travis, for whom the Air Force base is named)</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The <i>JDM Bibliophile</i> comes out every six months and costs $5 a year. It is edited by Edgar Hirshberg, a professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa (ZIP code 33620), whose biography of MacDonald is scheduled to be published in September by the Twayne U.S. Author Series.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hirshberg, a close friend of MacDonald, has no doubts about why McGee is so popular: “He's the kind of guy every man wants to be but can't - an impossible combination of sex appeal, strength, intellect, freedom and tenderness.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What kind of a person reads Travis McGee? When Harper & Row published <i>Cinnamon Skin</i> in 1982, the publishing house included in 100,000 copies a questionnaire seeking information about the buyers. It got 40,000 responses, and it turns out that McGee fans had an average family income of $40,000 (a third were more than $50,000), most of the readers were between the ages of 30 and 50, and there was a high percentage of educators, lawyers and doctors.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The question most asked of MacDonald, and the most pointless, is whether McGee is his alter ego. “I'm not going to have McGee say something I disagree with totally,” he says. “We're going to be on the same side of the street, but not walking at the same pace. McGee sees the world in black and white. I see more grays."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald gazes out the window at the scrawling signature of the shoreline and says that another part of his hero's appeal is believability. "When I started writing the series, there was one editor who insisted that McGee ought to win more often than he does. I fought him on this and finally won. He's also believable because he feels out of place with the modern world. If McGee wants to park his car, I have him drive around a while looking for a space, ruminating all the time on why he shouldn't have to do this. This sort of thing strikes a resonant chord with a lot of people."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald often is criticized by his fans for having McGee's loves die at the end of the book. “But if I didn't kill off the ladies," he says, "the Busted Flush would sink under their weight.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ABOARD THE BUSTED FLUSH, McGee is listening to the Columbia recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Shostakovich <i>Fifth</i>, and his Fisher amplifier is driving the two AR-3 speakers very nicely. The music makes him pensive.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"If I were king of the world, I would roam my kingdom in rags, incognito, dropping fortunes onto the people who are nice with no special reason to be nice, and having my troops lop off the heads of the mean, small, embittered little bastards who try to inflate their self-esteem by stomping on yours. I would start the lopping among post office employees, bank tellers, bus drivers and pharmacists. I would go on to checkout clerks, bellboys, prowl-car cops, telephone operators and U.S Embassy clerks. By God, there would be so many heads rolling here and there, the world would look like a berserk bowling alley. Meyer says this shows a tad of hostility."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Will the developers ever drive him from Florida? "Tacky though Florida might be, its fate uncertain, too much of its destiny in the hands of men whose sole thought is to grab the money and run, cheap little city politicians with blow-dried hair, ice-eyed old men from the North with devout claims about their duties to their shareholders, big-rumped good-old boys from the cattle counties with their fingers in the till right up to their cologned armpits - it is still my place in their world. It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee, ever close to danger and death, ponders them both often.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"It is my fate and my flaw to have learned long ago that this is what I am about. This is when I am alive and know it most completely. Every sense is honed by the knowledge of the imminence of death.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"My luck will run out. Maybe not this time. Or the next time. Sometime, though. And like everybody else, I will go down with that universal plea blazing in the back of my mind. 'Not me! Not yet! Wait!”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">BUT IT APPEARS THAT Travis McGee will go on righting wrongs as long as John MacDonald goes on writing books, getting wizened and wiser in the process. It has been widely reported that MacDonald keeps in his safe an unpublished manuscript, titled <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/06/black-border-for-mcgee.html" target="_blank">Black Border for McGee</a></i>, in which his hero dies. MacDonald, raising his eyebrows and forgetting them on his forehead for a moment, says it's not true.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I promulgated that idea some years ago because I found it useful in bargaining with publishers. I haven't killed off McGee. On the other hand, it wouldn't take me a hell of a long time to make such a book exist.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Given the fact that all McGee is written in the first person, there would be certain problems in getting rid of him, though. I guess I'd have to have him say, 'They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist. ...'</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Besides, why would I kill him off?" MacDonald asks, placing his feet on the desk and lacing his fingers behind his head. "He's allowed me to live in a style to which Travis McGee is accustomed."</span><br />
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<br />Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-42740379396076060192020-05-25T01:00:00.000-07:002020-05-25T01:00:01.078-07:00The Six Green Grand<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The following article appeared in the August 1, 1965 edition of the Miami <i>Herald</i>, under the title "The Six Green Grand". John D MacDonald was still living on Point Crisp Road, Maynard was still called John, and <i>Bright Orange for the Shroud</i> was a month away from hitting the stands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's fairly straightforward as MacDonald articles go, but at the end there is a mention of <i>The Blood Game</i>, the novel he spent years working on and was ready to publish until... he didn't. I've never been able to find a reason why this work was mothballed, and done so at the last minute after the publishers has produced working galleys. The setting for the novels was the world of banking, and much changed in that industry in the 1960's, perhaps to the point where it made certain plot points untenable. Just a guess. Those galleys still sit, gathering dust in the John D MacDonald Collection at the University of Florida. Perhaps one day some enterprising publisher will take the initiative and bring out a "new" John D MacDonald novel.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The Six Green Grand</b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By Larry Devine</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">BY 1 p.m., the sun is beating down hard on the side street in Sarasota and the old Plaza Spanish Restaurant has its Venetian blinds closed.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From his manager's table just inside the front door, little Benny Alvarez bends down a slat with a crooked finger and peers out. The rest of his Friday regulars are already inside, but MacKinlay Kantor and John D. MacDonald are missing.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kantor comes in a striped shirt and some pants that are too big for him since he lost all that weight. Kantor wrote his Pulitzer-winning <i>Andersonville</i> here and has lived here for 30 years. He is grousing about the increased traffic lately.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now only MacDonald is missing, the prodigious selling author of 48 mystery novels, whose latest success is the brittle Travis McGee series. "Mac can't get here today," says Kantor. "He's down with one of those migraines he gets every three or four months. He called and said those horse-pills he takes for them has him a little groggy."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The group of authors moves into the back dining room. They have been gathering every Friday for the past 15 years at Benny Alvarez's restaurant. Everybody knows enough by this time to leave them alone and they sit around drinks and lunch until 3:30 and talk about anything else but writing. There is Joseph Hayes in a white short-sleeved shirt, the author of <i>The Desperate Hours</i> ... Ted Woltman, another Pulitzer winner for his 1947 series in the New York <i>World Telegram</i> on communism . . . Dick Glendinning, who is writing young people's books lately. Back in the high-ceilinged dining room with the drab green-and-cream wallpaper, they leave a chair because maybe MacDonald will show up after all. He never does, but he is talked of as a good friend.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">About MacDonald's work, crusty Mac Kantor said "Sure, sure he's a good writer. I just wish to heaven he'd get off these books about those little girls with bikinis and sand on their legs, and write something serious like he could ..."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next day, his migraine gone, the man a publisher's flack once dubbed “the best-selling unknown in America" is back behind his typewriter.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Mac Kantor," he says resignedly, "has been saying that same thing for 15 years. He is not the only one.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"But I write now exactly what I feel like saying. I'm doing what I can do as well as I can do it. I don't do it with my tongue in cheek. I don't think there is anything reprehensible in entertaining people. I have my own vision of reality. I can express my individual reactions in the kind of book I write as well as I could in a more pretentious work.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"In doing this, I am certainly avoiding more profitable areas of fiction. I don't need to write 'the big book,' however." The "big book" kind of writing is what MacDonald calls “the Irvings"</span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- Irving Wallace, "Irving" Robbins,"Irving" Ruark — "and that woman, Ayn Rand." He shudders a little.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald for years has been many a mystery-story connoisseur's pet. He has been pouring them out since 1945. The latest count is more than 500 short stories and 48 books. Three more books are in the works now. His books carry what New York <i>Times</i> critic Anthony Boucher described as "a sense of sweet warm horror." More than that, however, a MacDonald book is marked with his own particular psychological insight, unstinting sex analysis, and recurring </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">strong statements of his own philosophy about things he considers criminal in a way: housing developments, conventioneers, TV dinners, Miami Beach hotels, installment buying, and litterbugs.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Early last year, John Dann MacDonald wrote a book about a tall, tanned "reject from a structured society" named Travis McGee who lives on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale and engages in extra-legal sorties against crime for a living. MacDonald called the first of what he hoped would be a long series of McGee books <i>The Deep Blue Good-By</i>. It sold out its first printing within weeks and Travis McGee and MacDonald were on their way.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald is unknown no longer. "That hokey business about 'best selling unknown' was just something Simon and Schuster made up anyway," he snorted. McGee has sold over three million copies since last year in five books, the sixth is on its way. All the titles are colorful: <i>Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying, The Quick Red Fox</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I can keep going until I run out of colors," MacDonald says with a grin. "I have yet to investigate the criminal possibilities of fuschia, puce or heliotrope."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">HIS McGee lives on a 52-foot, barge-type houseboat called The Busted Flush. "McGee won it on a bare-faced bluff with two deuces in a stud poker game in Palm Beach. He docks it at slip F-18 at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee is what MacDonald wryly calls "a salvage expert."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"If X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away from him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back and you keep half. Is that it?" one of McGee's inevitable sun-tanned girls asks him in <i>The Deep Blue Good-By</i>. "It's a simplification," McGee drawls dryly, "but reasonably accurate... I am sort of a last resort."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee is a maverick, wary of plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits. savings accounts, trading stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages. miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, political parties, lending libraries, television, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But he is a Lochinvar of sorts, on the comfy big houseboat with the pale blue four-by-seven foot sunken bathtub. He has yet to fail in his "salvage work." He does not always take his 50 per cent cut, because he is a sucker for a pretty girl who is sad about something or needs the cash herself.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee does not like cookouts, funny chef aprons, slacks on fat female picnickers, or meat burned on the outside and red in the middle. He does not think a big cigar is a sign of masculinity or success.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald never lets him get too overcome with philosophizing to bypass an opportunity to knock a few heads together (he weighs 212) and get back the rubies, gold idols, incriminating pictures or whatever the current "salvage" calls for.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The inescapable feeling, of course, is that McGee is an extension of MacDonald.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"No. Travis over-simplifies. He is less tolerant than I am. He is more inclined to see things in black and white than in shades of gray like I do. He wants some kind of security, but he's unwilling to pay the price. So he makes like he really doesn't want it."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">McGee drives an incredible car. It is a 1936 Rolls-Royce, cut down by some former owner who made a pick-up truck out of it. It is weird blue, the color of McGee's old school teacher's hair.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald himself drives no such picturesque vehicle. A British Land Rover is parked outside on the road, but it is his 26-year-old son John's. Many authors write as if a man's car is a clue to his character. MacDonald's auto is a Ford station wagon, colorful enough in an outdoors way. It has heavy-duty springs and heavy duty shock absorbers, a giant, extra-cost 420-horsepower Thunderbird engine "and a couple of little gizmos on the carburetors."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The rush to buy Travis McGee does not impress MacDonald too much. "When I was poor as a church mouse, Universal one day suddenly paid $15,000 for a book of mine called <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/05/cry-hard-cry-fast.html" target="_blank">Cry Hard, Cry Fast</a></i>. A terrible title, they made it up, not me. There are enough of my books going at any one time to give me a little bit of a cushion. I know, somewhere, somehow, a little bit of dough will be coming in."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He treats very cautiously an offer from a screenwriter to collaborate on a movie of McGee. "I'd want a five-million dollar budget and my own choice of star. I'd like Jack Lord for McGee. His face sort of looks lived-in." But MacDonald is in no hurry to crack the silver screen again. He did it once before with his novel <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-executioners.html" target="_blank">Cape Fear</a></i> for Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. "Eventually Travis will have enough clout and then somebody'll come along and pick him up."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald writes his tremendous outrush of fiction in a big board and glass house out on Sarasota's Siesta Key. From the wide windows by his desk, there is a view of Little Sarasota Bay lapping up at the rough road outside his door on Point Crisp Rd. He writes on a big gray electric typewriter with bright blue keys that he leases from IBM for $200 a year. He writes so fast and so much that he wears out a ribbon in two days.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He writes and re-writes endlessly. A 70,000-word story will get up to 140,000 words before he is satisfied. "I write by throwing away," he said.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald is tall and his wavy hair is white. It has been that way, his friends say, ever since he first settled down in Sarasota 15 years ago. A long scar from birth digs through his forehead from hairline to left eyebrow. He is a voluble and cultivated man who has known few slim days since he gave himself over to the tenuous business of writing for a living.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Born in Sharon, Pa., the writer went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and picked up a master's degree from Harvard's graduate school of business administration. He was married to Dorothy Prentiss in 1938 and still is.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dorothy P. MacDonald, a talented artist, in 1945 sold a story her husband had sent from an Army post in Ceylon. MacDonald came home -- an O.S.S. light colonel - and worked three months in a business research bureau in Utica, N.Y. One day he chucked it to start writing full time and he has never gone to the office since.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"And I never regretted it a damn bit," he said about passing up the business world with his Harvard M.A. After the Army, I'd had it up to here with people telling me what to do. Most people who tell you what to do are idiots anyway. And by the end of 1946, I'd made about six grand."</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">HE now has had his books translated into 14 languages and has sold more than 25 million of them. He has an agent named Max Wilkinson he is making money for and a talented editor in New York, Knox Burger, who likes him and comes down to go fishing with MacDonald out in the Gulf.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Out there, at the end of the road beside Little Sarasota Bay, the creator of Travis McGee, the sensitive, sun-tanned worldly man, lights his pipe from a bowlful of kitchen matches and heads back for the gray IBM with the bright blue keys. He has work to do. He is half-way through the next McGee book, a quarter of the way through the next one after that and part way into a long novel called <i>The Blood Game</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His credentials are impressive, but he discounts them. "I just get a great deal of pleasure out of saying things the way I want to say them."</span><br />
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<br />Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-55519754819189709482020-05-04T07:51:00.000-07:002020-05-04T07:51:13.077-07:00Travis McGee Really is John D<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRGHYB-tYlYqSHw4nMUpJDUgJ76-WXc9leu36PvxdyRdAw6KNTTUsQ_4ez4aOCy8FzH-RBM2BiTbY9gcqMNQh9bdzJOaedWT3lfd5h-LkC7SfJek055MpgyWPgTWGG9Hp6LqSGnRh97Sw/s1600/Honolulu_Star_Bulletin_Fri__Sep_18__1981_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1106" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRGHYB-tYlYqSHw4nMUpJDUgJ76-WXc9leu36PvxdyRdAw6KNTTUsQ_4ez4aOCy8FzH-RBM2BiTbY9gcqMNQh9bdzJOaedWT3lfd5h-LkC7SfJek055MpgyWPgTWGG9Hp6LqSGnRh97Sw/s320/Honolulu_Star_Bulletin_Fri__Sep_18__1981_.jpg" width="221" /></a></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">In September of 1981 John D MacDonald, along with his wife Dorothy and paperback editor Leona Nevler, attended the Pacific Coast Independent Magazine Wholesalers Association convention, held that year in Honolulu. MacDonald attended these sorts of events because he had to, as most </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">successful</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> authors did, as it was typically part of the contracts drawn up between publishers and writers. This meant that JDM would have to sit for interviews, answering the same questions he was always asked by reporters who may or may not have had any familiarity with his work. Lois Taylor of the Honolulu <i>Star-Bulletin</i> seems to have been in the know, or at least retained much of the pre-interview material supplied to her by Fawcett, but there is little here that is new outside of a few minor quotes.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">When MacDonald talks about his two failed attempts at creating Travis McGee he characterized the second attempt as "too Shell Scott-y," a reference to the popular series character created by Richard Prather, an author JDM never failed to denigrate when speaking of the McGee origin story, mainly because of the author's politics. And toward the end of the interview he confirms something I had always wondered about: he asserts that he did no writing while on any of his many ocean cruises. This would certainly account for the drop-off in output toward the end of his career.</span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;">This article appeared in the newspaper's September 18, 1981 issue and is transcribed in its entirety below, including quotes from some of the novels. It carried the headline, "Travis McGee Really is John D.," something I'm sure JDM would have chafed at if he ever saw this piece.</span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">By Lois Taylor... Star-Bulletin Writer</span></span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-e8be1f3c-7fff-1d15-9031-994900b09fc1"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">It was hot under the screened ceiling of the outdoor Sheraton-Waikiki coffee shop, and hotter still as the sun moved over the people eating breakfast there. Almost unnoticed, a waiter pulled a sunproof tarp across the area to shade it. "In Japan," said John D. MacDonald, "they'd have a heat-and-light sensitive mechanism that would automatically provide shade when it gets hot enough."</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">His editor, Leona Nevler of Fawcett Books, looked properly impressed by this random fact, but his wife, Dorothy, just smiled. The man whose Travis McGee adventure series has had more than 21 million copies in circulation has what he calls "a dustbin memory."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"I read, I listen," he explained. "A cab driver told me yesterday that if you are going to buy a Winnebago motor home, buy it in Canada. They're built to be better insulated for the cold weather there, and that means they're better insulated for hot weather, too. I'll take what he said as gospel -- I don’t have to prove it, and I'll drop it in somewhere."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>Tequila </i>anejo commemorativo<i> is one of the world's more pleasant drinks. The </i>anejo<i> -- the "j" is pronounced like a guttural cough --means old. The </i>commemorativo<i> means a very special distillation. It is drunk straight, pale amber in color, strong, smooth and clean.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>Dress Her in Indigo</i>, 1969. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">MacDonald is in town as a guest of the convention of the Pacific Coast Independent Magazine Wholesalers Association, who are appropriately grateful for the tremendous sales of his paperbacks. Over a waffle, he talked about Travis McGee, a man who has come to mean a lot to MacDonald since he invented him in 1963.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Master of Business </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Administration</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from Harvard, MacDonald might be up to his black knit tie in corporate problems instead of spending part of every year cruising around the world with his wife and the rest of the year in the job he enjoys most -- writing. He has written more than 70 books but it is the 19 published Travis McGee novels that have allowed him to do this.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">“Travis is an amalgamation I arrived at very slowly," MacDonald said. "He really wasn't in shape until I wrote the third book, so I scrapped the first two. The third and two more were published in one month of 1964 with another one coming out four months later.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">“I threw the first two out because I couldn't have lived with the series as they were written. The character was different -- heavy, solemn, Germanic -- in the first book, and then the second went too far the other way, too Shell Scott-y, filled with quips and pranks. In the third, he settled down to someone I could live with."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary… of plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, television, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>The Deep Blue Good-by</i>, 1964. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">As originally written before publication, the hero of the series was Dallas McGee. But in November of 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and MacDonald's publishers insisted that Dallas was no name for a hero. So MacDonald looked through names of military camps and came up with an Air Force base northeast of San Francisco. "Travis sounded enough like Dallas. Since then, in traveling around the country, I've met a whole bunch of little boys named Travis."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">The next decision for MacDonald and his publishers was to find a theme for the titles of the series. "We sat around and we talked about how you name a series. We thought of musical terminology. You want to keep people from buying the same book twice, something that annoys them."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">They settled on color coding -- <i>The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying</i> -- and eventually 16 more. The latest, Free Fall in Crimson, has been a best-seller in hardback and will be available in paperback in December. One million copies are being printed by Fawcett. In the works, half-finished, is <i>Cinnamon Skin</i>. “Now nobody can keep the colors straight because there are so many," MacDonald said.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">MacDonald's legion of fans know Travis McGee as a sort of a Florida samurai who calls himself a "salvage consultant," locating money and property that often weren't acquired legally in the first place and righting wrongs with a fair amount of violence and sex. He lives aboard The Busted Flush, a houseboat he won in a poker game, at Bahia Mar at Fort Lauderdale.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>We had something together once, Carrie Milligan and I, but it was long gone. She came to me now looking years older and used and very scared. She had a lot of money with her. Over $100,000. She wanted me to keep it safe, and no questions please -- for old times sake.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>The Dreadful Lemon Sky</i>, 1974.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">For land transportation McGee drives Miss Agnes, an electric blue Rolls-Royce converted into a pickup truck. His Dr. Watson is a portly economist called Meyer, which is either his first or last name, who lives aboard the neighboring John Maynard Keynes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">Meyer's role, MacDonald explained, is made necessary because of the first-person concept of the series. “Everything has to be described through the eyes of McGee, only how he sees it. It's a restricting form. Without Meyer, there would be too much interior monologue.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"There has to be a vehicle of getting information to the reader, and Meyer's conversations with McGee serve to do this. It's clearer and more entertaining than long paragraphs of what goes on in Travis' head." He added that Meyer also serves as McGee's conscience.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"A guy at the University of Alabama, an expert on computer testing, asked me to take the MMPI (Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory). I answered 540 questions as I would, as Meyer would and as McGee would. His findings were that McGee is my good side, who I'd like to be. McGee is violent, almost but not quite psychopathic, with a touch of paranoia -- much more suspicious. He won't publish this without my permission."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">Is Travis aging, slowing down as the years pass? "Sure he's aging," MacDonald answered, “but at one. third the rate you are."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>I needed a slob summer. The machine was abused. Softness at the waist. Tremor of the hands...A heaviness of muscle and bone, a tendency to sigh. Each time you wonder: Can you get it back again? </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>Bright Orange for the Shroud,</i> 1965. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">Asked about the possibility of making a television series based on the Travis McGee novels, MacDonald said, "I have an arrangement with Warner Communications -- I think they're misnamed because I haven't been in communication with them. Warner bought the rights (to a McGee series) on a reverting basis. If they don't do anything with it in a certain amount of time, I get it back. They've written a two-hour pilot with one-hour shows to follow, but then the writers' strike came along and I don't know what has happened to it since.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"I don't know a diddley about making movies, they don't know anything about writing books. Nothing is more ridiculous than a writer trying to interfere with movie making. Look at (Joseph) Wambaugh. He made a lot of money on the books he wrote and it all went out when he tried to make a movie."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">Dorothy MacDonald added. “We thought that Jack Lord would have been a perfect McGee." </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"But this was before he was in the <i>5-0</i> series," MacDonald said, “and he wasn't considered bankable -- they couldn't borrow money to go ahead. I thought that was a dumb thing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"Lord really isn't McGarrett, he's a totally different man. McGarrett is a humorless guy and Lord isn't. Jack has his first officer's papers, is very boat-oriented. We were disappointed, and so was Jack, but then <i>5-0</i> opened up."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">MacDonald said that he doesn't watch much television, but he's a reader. “I read my betters. Vonnegut I like very, very, very much. One of the best we've got, though he keeps wasting himself, is Norman Mailer. I like Cheever, and Updike. For suspense, Ross Thomas and Robert Parker.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"I once wrote Ross MacDonald that as long as there is some confusion about our names -- people buy his books thinking they're mine and buy mine thinking they're his, it's a handy thing we both can write. He took it in a kindly way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"Everybody lives as well as he can, and every writer writes as well as he can. Comparisons are invidious. I have great admiration for Dashiell Hammett, but if you want to drive a college writing class crazy, ask them to outline Hammett's plots. They're nonsense, but he had great persuasive force."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">MacDonald paused. "A lot of mine would sound like nonsense if you outlined them."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>They weren't ordinary stamps, no indeed, they were rare stamps. $400,000 worth. Even so, McGee was not all that turned on until a generously endowed amazon named Mary Alice McDermit made her grand entrance. She was a 6 foot knockout who knew a helluva lot about rare stamps and the ways of a boat bum's vulnerable heart. </i>Back-cover blurb.<i> </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #3367d6;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The Scarlet </i></span></span><i style="font-family: arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ruse</i><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 1973. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">He said that he was less than satisfied with a recent Travis McGee book, <i>The Green Ripper.</i> "It was a deviation from the pattern, and it was not really successful. It was not as solid a book as the others. It is hard to sustain a given quality over such an extensive thing -- when I finish this one, the 20th McGee book, it will be one-and-a-half-million words.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"Time passes, one is not unchanging day to day, month to month. I was a little afraid of whether I could sustain the life of the series within the existing pattern, so I went outside the pattern in <i>The Green Ripper</i>." (The book, more violent than most of the series, is an assault on the religious cult movement. McGee, rather than working out a subtle plan to overcome the group, simply goes in and wipes them out.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"There are enough easy targets around, so that religious cults are no more reprehensible than the U.S. Senate is reprehensible. What's reprehensible? Taking so much money from the inner cities. What is to replace it? I wonder if they know what they're doing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"We are on our third or fourth generation of welfare people. Right or wrong, you've led people to expect it. What have they done, they will ask, to deserve that it be taken away? I see a lot of inner-city violence in the next year, in May, June and July -- the restless hot weather."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>New York is where it is going to begin. I think...one day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others' throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>Nightmare in Pink</i>, 1964 </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">In the meantime, MacDonald will have finished not only <i>Cinnamon Skin</i>, but a non-fiction book on the final cruise of the <i>Mariposa</i>, the last long trip of the last American passenger ship. It is titled <i>Nothing Can Go Wrong</i>, and is written with the ship's captain.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">"Dorothy and I were on that last cruise and the captain said to me, ‘You ought to write a book about this.' He had done 16 tapes about the trip, so I told him, 'You do it.’” MacDonald said. The result was a compromise by which Harper Row, the publishers, will print MacDonald's comments in one typeface and the captain's in another. Fawcett will bring the book out in paperback next year.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">The MacDonalds live on an island off Florida's Gulf Coast near Sarasota, and spend several months a year at their camp in the Adirondacks. At either place, he spends eight to 10 hours a day at his typewriter while working on a book, a process that takes about four months. He talks about retiring, but not much.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;">“I'm taking my retirement in chunks," he concluded. “I like the ship thing. Dorothy and I are going around the world in the fall on the Royal Viking Sea. No one can get hold of you without an extraordinary amount of effort, and I have found that I can't work at sea. That's a vacation."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>It was named </i>Odalisque II,<i> and it was the splendid playtoy of Lady Vivian Stanley Tucker of St. Kitts. It was a 53-foot Magnum Maltese Flybridge cruiser...paneling, radar, recording fathometer, ice-maker, tub and shower, huge master stateroom...Lady Vivian and I had been out for about two weeks. provisions were running low, and soon we would have to decide whether to put into Nassau or run on over to Miami.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #3367d6; font-family: arial;"><i>The Green Ripper</i>, 1979.</span></span></div>
<span style="color: blue; font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-62646586930258917432020-04-13T01:00:00.000-07:002020-04-13T01:00:05.501-07:00The Author Speaks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A transcription of an article published in the January 2, 1967 issue of Publisher's Weekly, reprinted in an anthology compiled in 1978 titled <i>The Author Speaks: Selected PW Interviews, 1967-1976</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A TELEPHONE CALL caught John D. MacDonald, who has to be near the top of practically anyone's list of the best contemporary American writers in the mystery-suspense genre, in New York en route from Freehold, N.J., to upstate New York and thence to Florida. Mr. MacDonald was headed upstate to spend Christmas with relatives after having covered the murder trial of Dr. Carl A. Coppolino in Freehold (verdict: acquittal) and to rest up before covering the Coppolino murder trial in Florida, now scheduled to start in February.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mr. MacDonald, needless to say, is at work on a book, maybe two books-about the Coppolino affair, which, to put it mildly, has incited the moral fervor for which Mr. MacDonald is well known by his fans. The job may require two books, Mr. MacDonald told PW, because the New Jersey and the Florida cases are quite different: different victims, different courtrooms, different casts of characters, and so on. Whether two Coppolino books by Mr. MacDonald are viable commercially is a matter still to be resolved. Publication plans are still up in the air, Mr. MacDonald indicated, but publication will be probably by Doubleday in hardcover, Fawcett in paperback. The working title for one or both books is No Deadly Medicine, an illusion to the Hippocratic Oath, which Dr. Coppolino may or may not have violated. Also still to be resolved is which will come first: hardcover or paperback publication. One thing certain, however, is that Mr. MacDonald will be in court when Dr. Coppolino's trial begins in Florida: perhaps in Sarasota, where the action was originally brought; perhaps in another part of the state, if the defense is successful in its effort to gain a change of venue. Mr. MacDonald said he rather hoped that the debate on change of venue would take a while, giving him a chance to finish the New Jersey part of his book(s) about the case.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Even if I never publish a word about the Coppolino case -- and that's not likely -- just being associated with it as a spectator has given me ideas for at least two novels about the dilemma between personal and professional decisions: if you do one thing, you harm yourself; if you do another thing, you harm your best friend." It's the kind of theme which Mr. MacDonald has been working on for a long time.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile, he reported, announcement is imminent on a movie deal involving his hot-selling Travis McGee detective series, published by Fawcett. A television project is in the works for one of his earlier novels, The Crossroads, which Fawcett will reissue. One of the few full-time novelists with a graduate degree from the Harvard Business School, Mr. MacDonald these days is rarely unoccupied.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By Roger H. Smith. From Publishers Weekly 191, no. 1 (January 2, 1967), p. 21.</span><br />
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<br />Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-34861372698131815232020-03-30T01:00:00.000-07:002020-03-30T01:00:08.468-07:00"Night Ride" and Interview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Black Mask Magazine</i>, the storied detective pulp of the last century, began publication in 1920, created by H.L. Menken and George Jean Nathan for publisher Pro Distributors. After a period of great and growing success in the 1920’s and early 30’s, circulation began to decline and the title was sold -- in 1940 -- to Popular Publications, joining other great crime titles there such as <i>Dime Detective</i> and <i>Detective Tales</i>. <i>Black Mask</i>’s final issue was published in July 1951. John D MacDonald, whose first attempts at fiction were published in 1946, had seven stories in its pages.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 1985 Matthew J Bruccoli and Richard Layman revived the title, and began publishing <i>The New Black Mask</i> as a quarterly trade paperback. It was a mix of (mostly) new short stories by contemporary authors, along with some classic reprints, but it lasted only until 1987 (eight issues) when some kind of trouble over the use of the magazine’s name caused the editors to end the endeavor. Issue Eight contained a “new” John D MacDonald story.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MacDonald had, of course, passed away in December of the previous year, but this issue had obviously been put together many months prior to his fateful trip to Milwaukee. The story JDM provided, “Night Ride,” was, the author explained in an introductory paragraph, an old one written “twenty-four years ago” (1962) and had never been finished or submitted.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I came upon it last year when I was grubbing around in the old files, looking for something else. I wondered why it had not been published. I cannot remember who thought it needed more work, my agent or I. I suspect that some other project got in the way and it fell through the cracks. So, I gave it a quick polish and sent it in, pleased to find it was not dated."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The story is a good one, concerning a down-on-his-luck man who accidentally hits and kills a pedestrian while he is driving home from a losing late night poker game. The only real problem, apparently unknown to all concerned, was that the story HAD been published before. Walter Shine, in his regular column in the <i>JDM Bibliophile</i>, revealed that it was, in fact, a reprint of MacDonald’s excellent “<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-small-motel.html" target="_blank">In a Small Motel</a>,” which appeared in the July 1955 issue of <i>Justice</i>, a crime digest of the era. For years I took this as gospel and, because it was only a reprint, never bothered to hunt down a copy of <i>The New Black Mask</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now I have, and I can corroborate Walter’s assertion that the story was published before its appearance in <i>The New Black Mask</i>, but it is not “In a Small Motel,” it’s one titled “Scared Money,” which also appeared in <i>Justice</i>, in the October 1955 issue. He got the magazine right but not the story title, which compounds MacDonald’s own error as to both the prior-publication and the date he wrote the story. Also, note that JDM writes that he “polished” the story for its new publication, much as he did for the <i>Good Old Stuff</i> stories. Happily I can report that the changes are minimal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This was not the only time MacDonald pulled out a story from his files that he thought hadn’t been published and submitted it for publication. In the very same issue of the <i>JDM Bibliophile</i> where Walter Shine called out “Night Ride,” editor Ed Hirshberg published a short story MacDonald had given him for the fanzine a week before he left for Milwaukee. Hirshberg quoted MacDonald as telling him, “Here’s one that was never accepted, but it isn’t too bad and you might as well use it in The Thing. [JDM’s appellation for the <i>JDMB</i>.] There are more in my files, and I will let you have these as time goes on, when the need for copy arises.” This one was titled “<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/04/killer.html" target="_blank">The Killer</a>,” and it should have been obvious to everyone involved, since it had been published under that very title in the January 1955 issue of <i>Manhunt</i>. There must have been something askew with JDM’s 1955 sales to crime digests.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Along with the submission of “Night Ride,” MacDonald agreed to a short interview for <i>The New Black Mask</i>. By this time in his life most of the interviews JDM agreed to do were by mail only, answering a set of pre-written questions submitted by the interviewer, and he only answered the questions he felt like addressing. Without the give and take of an actual conversation MacDonald often comes across as impatient, condescending and, at times, outright angry. This interview has such moments, and I’ve transcribed it below.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>John D. MacDonald: An Interview</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>John D. MacDonald was born in Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, and Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He served six years in the army in World War II. He is married and has one son and five grandchildren residing in New Zealand. Since he began writing in 1946 and has published seventy-five books and over six hundred short stories, novelettes, and articles. His work has been translated into sixteen languages, and his books have sold over ninety million copies worldwide.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>New Black Mask:</b> You began your writing career producing stories for the pulps, a large writers' market that no longer exists. How important was your pulp-writing apprenticeship, and how has the demise of the pulps affected genre fiction—especially the mystery?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>John D MacDonald:</b> I began my career writing stories for the pulp magazines as well as the so-called slicks. In the first years-1946 to 1950—I had stories published in <i>American Magazine, Argosy, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Story Magazine, Liberty, This Week</i>, and the <i>Toronto Star Weekly</i>, in addition to a wide range of pulp magazines. I do not think that the demise of the pulps has affected the quality of today's fiction writing as much as has the demise of those slick-paper magazines, which used so many pieces of fiction each year. In the case of <i>The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's</i>, and <i>Liberty</i> alone, a market for seven hundred pieces of fiction a year at quite good rates disappeared seemingly overnight. Thus in the general field of the novel, in all categories, some very clumsy work is being published. There is no training area. The university courses lean so heavily on subjectivity that the prose becomes muddy and pretentious. I am sent many sets of bound galleys in hopes I will make some useful comment for public purposes. I rarely have to read beyond page ten.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> You were trained as a businessman at Harvard and used your business skills to become one of the most successful novelists of your time. To what degree have the instincts and mindset of the businessman affected your fiction?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> I can see only a very remote relationship between my formal education and my writing. I have the instincts of the businessman only when I am involved with the problems of everyday life. I am often shocked at the gullibility of some of the members of my peer group when their innocence in investing in tax shelters is revealed in the press. I do not have the mindset of a businessman. Their scope, like that of doctors and lawyers, is for the most part quite narrow.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> There is a trend now, demonstrated by recent novels of Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard, for writers of mysteries to attempt what Parker calls the “Big Book” -- the novel that will transcend the bounds of genre fiction and attract attention as a mainstream work. Are you concerned that because of your success as a mystery novelist your works will be neglected over the long haul and categorized by critics as ephemeral?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> I think that trying to puff a small story into a big book is a mistake. Books and short pieces of fiction should be permitted to find their own proper length. My most recent novel, <i>Barrier Island</i>, is not long. Knopf expressed dismay that it was not a thicker book. I did the story the way it felt right to me. Puffing it would have upset the rhythm of it. I must confess to being a little distressed by your patronizing tone in categorizing me as a mystery novelist. We Americans feel more comfortable with categories and filing systems, and butterflies pinned to the board in proper order of species, I guess. I am pleased to write novels of mystery and suspense, of course. But at the risk of boring you, here is a list of my published novels which do not fall into that category: <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/12/wine-of-dreamers.html" target="_blank">Wine of the Dreamers</a></i> (1951), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/12/damned.html" target="_blank">The Damned</a></i> (1952), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2009/12/ballroom-of-skies.html" target="_blank">Ballroom of the Skies</a></i> (1952), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/02/cancel-all-our-vows.html" target="_blank">Cancel All Our Vows</a></i> (1953), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/03/all-these-condemned.html" target="_blank">All These Condemned</a></i> (1954), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/03/contrary-pleasure.html" target="_blank">Contrary Pleasure</a></i> (1954), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/05/cry-hard-cry-fast.html" target="_blank">Cry Hard, Cry Fast</a></i> (1955), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-man-of-affairs.html" target="_blank">A Man of Affairs</a></i> (1957), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-deceivers.html" target="_blank">The Deceivers</a></i> (1958), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-executioners.html" target="_blank">The Executioners</a></i> (1958), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2015/05/clemmie.html" target="_blank">Clemmie</a></i> (1958), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2016/02/please-write-for-details.html" target="_blank">Please Write for Details</a></i> (1959), <i><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-crossroads.html" target="_blank">The Crossroads</a></i> (1959), <i>Slam the Big Door</i> (1960), <i>The End of the Night</i> (1960), <i>A Key to the Suite</i> (1962), <i>A Flash of Green</i> (1962), <i>The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything</i> (1963), <i>I Could Go on Singing</i> (1963), <i>The House Guests</i> (1965), <i>No Deadly Drug</i> (1968), <i>Condominium</i> (1977), <i>Nothing Can Go Wrong</i> (1981), <i>One More Sunday</i> (1984), <i>Barrier Island</i> (June 1986), <i>A Friendship</i> (November 1986).</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Insofar as "being neglected over the long haul and categorized by critics as ephemeral," I could not care less. It has been my personal observation that those members of my peer group who get terribly earnest about their literary immortality are the ones least likely to achieve any. And, of course, any writer who pays attention to critics is an ass. I write because I enjoy the hell out of it, and if I couldn't ever sell another word, I would keep right on amusing myself with it.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> You are known as a writer with a social conscience, concerned about environmental issues, corporate greed, economic abuses, immorality on a large scale. Do you consider yourself a social evangelist?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> What a dreadful phrase that is: "social evangelist!" I would not invite one of those into my kitchen for a beer. Any intelligent person who is indifferent to the environmental issues, indifferent to the corporate greed which pried unearned billions out of NASA and the defense program, indifferent to a lethargic, self important bureaucracy which spends two dollars on itself out of every five appropriated for social programs, that person is not living in the world. He is not experiencing life. He is as dead upstairs as he soon will be in toto.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> Are you interested in politics as an active participant?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> I have supported a few -- a very few -- politicians I respect. But only with donations. I am not a group person. I like to be alone, work alone, so that both blame and praise are undiluted.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> Writers' organizations are in the news lately -- The American Writers Congress and the PEN conference, for example -- largely due to their interest in national and international political matters. As a former president of MWA, do you have any observations on the role of a writers' group and the matters writers' organizations ought to address?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> Historically, all autocratic governments oppress writers. The dictator does not want to be told he is wearing no clothes. A lot of very good work has come out of such oppressions. I suppose it is reasonable for organizations of writers to complain as loudly as possible about their fellow writers in the gulags, prisons, and asylums. Sometimes it seems to do some good. But I far prefer the sort of activity the Authors' Guild undertakes when they publish model contracts with publishers and recommend the abolishing of traditional unfair clauses therein. The Screenwriters' Guild has used the strike weapon successfully to pry loose a share of the income from sale of tapes.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> Early in your career, you wrote science fiction. Why did you stop?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> I will probably write some more science fiction some day. I will come upon an idea which cannot be expressed as well in another form. Science fiction is particularly useful in making social comment without being dull.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> A turning point in your career was your introduction of Travis McGee, who has now been the protagonist of some twenty novels. Does the time come when, despite your best intentions, you find that you have exhausted a character's possibilities and you become bored with him?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> Are you serious? How could I know if a time will come when I will become bored with McGee? I am not bored now.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>NBM:</b> You will be seventy in July. Have you contemplated retirement?</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MacDonald:</b> I haven't given it a thought. I'd hate to have to pack it in. It's too much fun.</span><br />
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<br />Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-37233192626004192162020-03-16T01:00:00.001-07:002020-09-27T08:18:10.749-07:00Short Story Update<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWSQp2piAhX56Wt9lIZJl18BJbfYm36UBUSqKDOHZ-RrBM9nR7QtboLaUIK26XU6dsFrF0TCXbCbEneOnzn21QAF9RZTt6uaQ-mXZYCDBvZCDEvP46cXd7GwRRTJAhMWQk1RYIgdwwmrU/s1600/Doc+Savage++n04+V27+%25281946%2529+-+Page+1.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1167" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWSQp2piAhX56Wt9lIZJl18BJbfYm36UBUSqKDOHZ-RrBM9nR7QtboLaUIK26XU6dsFrF0TCXbCbEneOnzn21QAF9RZTt6uaQ-mXZYCDBvZCDEvP46cXd7GwRRTJAhMWQk1RYIgdwwmrU/s320/Doc+Savage++n04+V27+%25281946%2529+-+Page+1.jpg" width="233" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The June 1946 issue of Doc Savage</td></tr>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The task of compiling a complete and definitive listing of John D MacDonald’s published short stories began back in 1965 when <a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/12/len-moffatt-1923-2010.html" target="_blank">Len and June Moffat</a> published the first issue of the <i>JDM Bibliophile</i>, 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 <i>The JDM Master Checklist</i>. 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. </span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Eleven years later Walter Shine, a retired attorney living in Palm Beach, along with his wife Jean, expanded on the <i>Checklist</i> with their invaluable reference work <i>John D MacDonald: Bibliography Biography</i>, 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 <i>Bluebook for Men</i> as "<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2011/06/dark-people-thing.html" target="_blank">A Dark People Thing</a>"), “Devil Head” (retitled “Three Strikes -- You’re Dead!” for the June 1949 issue of <i>All-Story Detective</i>), “A Good Judge of Men” (<i>Cavalier</i>, March 1953), and, supposedly “That Old Grey Train,” which was said to have appeared in the March 1947 issue of <i>Super Sports</i>, 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, “<a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-gentle-killer.html" target="_blank">The Gentle Killer</a>,” which was published in the November 1948 issue of <i>All Sports</i>. </span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">There were also a few entries on the official list that were deemed as questionable, most notably “A Handful of Death”.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilQIjLtjpx7YqKwtHObP_g-LYLg90eCkjQ25NUBEJduEstuocU4G4nw0sRkOJLxxV7u5lx_el2r-zCnx8vgHRZOsksLGwNuQQz2HDbUnozdlfOSY1y_uOmg0OE6NrHGgM3pbYAYGWv8oc/s1600/Doc+Savage++n04+V27+%25281946%2529+-+Page+123.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1079" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilQIjLtjpx7YqKwtHObP_g-LYLg90eCkjQ25NUBEJduEstuocU4G4nw0sRkOJLxxV7u5lx_el2r-zCnx8vgHRZOsksLGwNuQQz2HDbUnozdlfOSY1y_uOmg0OE6NrHGgM3pbYAYGWv8oc/s320/Doc+Savage++n04+V27+%25281946%2529+-+Page+123.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">It was published in the June 1946 issue of Street and Smith’s <i>Doc Savage</i>, the first of many JDM stories that would appear there. It was included in the <i>Master Checklist</i>, 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 <i>Bibliography</i>.</span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">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 <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/stevescottswebpage/Home/short-stories-by-john-d-macdonald" target="_blank">my own version</a> of that list shortly.</span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg20o78X1B8ssnV82gD8gQwta7-VfjaPHAzajnGPU6tq-K5Ix7C-zIuO2N1qxz8UOW3taiiP1oQuYBSS1BUnuKJId6bSVM2dWQfOWLZi12_Bn4rpAXssLQS32MslfUkyCMoMUbKQ2QLqos/s1600/The+Sinner+of+the+Saints_Apr+1953.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1206" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg20o78X1B8ssnV82gD8gQwta7-VfjaPHAzajnGPU6tq-K5Ix7C-zIuO2N1qxz8UOW3taiiP1oQuYBSS1BUnuKJId6bSVM2dWQfOWLZi12_Bn4rpAXssLQS32MslfUkyCMoMUbKQ2QLqos/s320/The+Sinner+of+the+Saints_Apr+1953.jpg" width="241" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Adventure: April 1953</td></tr>
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">A while back a copy of the April 1953 issue of <i>Adventure</i> 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 <i>Adventure</i>) 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…</span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Finally, back to “That Old Grey Train”. It was one of the original ten, but soon after the <i>Bibliography</i> was published Shine claimed that it has been located in the March 1947 issue of <i>Super Sports</i>. 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 <i>Super Sports</i>. </span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><i>The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps</i> (2000) is considered to be the bible of pulp magazine publication history, and it lists no issue of <i>Super Sports</i> 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”. </span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">So we are left with a mystery. Either Columbia’s numbering of its <i>Super Sports</i> 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, <i>Sports Fiction</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">An ongoing mystery, and I'll leave it on the list for now.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHIJfn3rNBGASBT37hCrrMqteZ16XjRwoeymi8BCKyalwy6I_jV4ip-apuOj0YSDYCsmHcR5NtzM2R7PVQ7nD9W23ONeSh1KlcrVoGfzun_hdd0VY1GDMzAfS1qxyKgqrIpt4f6q1ajb0/s1600/Super+Sports++n04+V6+%25281947%2529+-+Page+72.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1112" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHIJfn3rNBGASBT37hCrrMqteZ16XjRwoeymi8BCKyalwy6I_jV4ip-apuOj0YSDYCsmHcR5NtzM2R7PVQ7nD9W23ONeSh1KlcrVoGfzun_hdd0VY1GDMzAfS1qxyKgqrIpt4f6q1ajb0/s400/Super+Sports++n04+V6+%25281947%2529+-+Page+72.jpg" width="277" /></a></div>
<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br /></span><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>UPDATE (September 27, 2020):</b></span></div><div><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.</span></div>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-36644757238741632522020-03-02T01:00:00.000-08:002020-03-02T01:00:02.115-08:00Afloat, But Not at Sea<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qZG0JZAs5GBRYDOXTHk9S6uvPZZWtS00D2GcyHe1WVxcjWL_m4W0nTAl-XQY5favKRTfjFJyXq2zzDFbcV4-4-5CwbINv3zKPNfCbf5ree4pGqPCUmcwwhmSZgZfHiHehBl2HX1bqXQ/s1600/16340577608_acb4e54ba9_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1009" data-original-width="1600" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9qZG0JZAs5GBRYDOXTHk9S6uvPZZWtS00D2GcyHe1WVxcjWL_m4W0nTAl-XQY5favKRTfjFJyXq2zzDFbcV4-4-5CwbINv3zKPNfCbf5ree4pGqPCUmcwwhmSZgZfHiHehBl2HX1bqXQ/s320/16340577608_acb4e54ba9_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">S.S. Mariposa</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In 1981 John D MacDonald published a non-fiction book titled <i>Nothing Can Go Wrong</i>. It was an account of his and Dorothy’s 77-day journey from San Francisco to Leningrad and back, aboard the cruise ship <i>S. S. Mariposa</i>, a trip that had taken place in the spring and summer of 1977. At this point in time the MacDonalds were veteran cruise ship passengers, having logged thousands of miles on over half a dozen trips. According to Hugh Merrill in his JDM bio <i>The Red Hot Typewriter</i> the couple's maiden voyage took place in 1975, but this is incorrect -- any reader of <i>Darker Than Amber</i> (1966) or his <i>This Week</i> story “A Touch of Miss Mint” (1964) would have guessed correctly that the author had had experience aboard a cruise ship. In fact, the couple’s first voyage took place in May of 1958 on a relatively short trip around the Bahamas. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Nothing Can Go Wrong</i> was published in hardcover and enjoyed only a single printing. The following year a paperback edition came out that had two editions, October 1982 and March 1983. Then, in October of 1983 he wrote a newspaper piece on cruising that appeared in the October 9 edition of the <i>New York Times Magazine</i>, titled “Afloat, But Not at Sea,” which is reprinted below. Special thanks to Trap of Solid Gold reader David Blankenhorn for transcribing this.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Afloat, But Not at Sea</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">JOHN D. MacDONALD is the author of the Travis McGee novels, of which the most recent is <i>Cinnamon Skin</i> (Harper); he has also published, with Capt. John Kilpack, a book about a long cruise, <i>Nothing Can Go Wrong</i> (Harper). </span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By JOHN D. MacDONALD</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One time, off the North Cape of Norway, we stood amidships at the port rail of the promenade deck of the old <i>Mariposa</i> and watched the sun slant at a weird flat angle toward the horizon. We stood in a wind so cold and so strong that the tassel on the Norwegian wool cap that Dorothy had bought stood unwaveringly out behind her as if frozen into position. The bottom of the sun touched the horizon, moved along it, and then began to slant up again, in an Arctic parody of dawn.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I laughed, because at that moment the world was so strange it was grotesque. Laughing let the cold wind in. It blew my cheeks fat and stung my teeth. You know the feeling of unreality: What on earth am I doing here? At this moment in time, at this spot on our ball of mud.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If you are jaded by traveling by land or air, the thought of a sea voyage may amuse you. I myself have traveled 156,000 nautical miles on ships, and, if time permits, I will run up as many more again. I am fond of this mode of travel because, primarily, it saves a lot of packing and unpacking and allows one to avoid the broad, plastic, glassy squalor and the institutionalized anxiety of international airports, along with the drugged ennui of jet lag.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But there are also frustrations, limitations and random idiocies connected with cruising that the habitue will wearily endure and the newcomer will observe with disbelief and dismay. In what follows, I shall describe some of these. And, if you are a newcomer to cruising - and particularly if you are thinking about a long cruise on several oceans - I shall try to answer some of the questions you forgot to ask your travel agent.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first rule for newcomers: If you can afford longer than a three-day cruise, do not try to find out what cruising is all about by going on a three-day cruise. The people who go on them are almost all uniformly young (except for the kindly uncles who take their nieces on vacation), loud, energetic and determined to go without any sleep at all for the entire cruise. They drink and sing and go barefoot. These are not crimes. Trying to use the same dance floor with them, however, is like trying to slip, unnoticed, into the Los Angeles Rams backfield. They butt their cigarettes into the rugs, engage in occasional fisticuffs and take 500 photographs a day of each other in front of ship fittings and slot machines that have just paid off.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Passengers and crew need at least two weeks to settle into the routines of shipboard and get used to each other's eccentricities. On three-day cruises the dining-room waiters are harried, sullen, insolent and unlikely to bring you what you ordered; the waiters and captains and barmen and deck stewards are all obviously wishing they had been on leave when this job was scheduled.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A two-week cruise is really the minimum for learning whether or not you like cruising. You can go from San Francisco to Glacier Bay and back - or from Copenhagen to the North Cape and Spitzbergen and back - or one way to London and Copenhagen, or Fort Lauderdale to Athens, or Athens to London, or Los Angeles to San Juan, or, in a little more than two weeks, from Rio de Janeiro to Fort Lauderdale. Most lines now have a return air-fare allowance, which deadens, somewhat, the sting of paying for the cruise tickets.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What kind of a stateroom should you get? The cruise ships, with the exception of the <i>Queen Elizabeth 2</i> (and that only on trans-Atlantic crossings), are one-class ships. Whether you are in a penthouse suite or an inside cabin on D deck, you have access to all the public areas, order from the same menu and are provided with the same entertainment. And pay the same amount for your drinks. The <i>QE2</i> discriminates only to the extent that people in the most expensive staterooms and suites eat in a different dining room.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Otherwise, everyone is treated almost the same. It is simple logic that the stewards and stewardesses become less experienced the closer you get to the waterline. And the chap in charge of the dining room is going to know which cabin you have when he makes the table assignments - and some areas of every seagoing dining room are less desirable than others. But these are minor differences. Whatever kind of room you have, you can get room service day and night. You will not be coddled the same way people were on the great old ships - the <i>Queen Mary</i>, the <i>Bremen</i>, the <i>Normandie</i> - but you will get more personal attention than you could expect in a first-class hotel.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is silly to generalize about nationalities, but after cruises that add up to about seven circumnavigations of the globe, we have found that, on balance, the people who wait on you in any capacity, from deck steward to barmaid, and do so with a certain amount of pleasure, and who are aware of you as individuals, are the Italians, Latins, Portuguese, French and Turks. On our most recent cruise our two table waiters were Italian, and once we were acquainted, the four of us were in some pleasant conspiracy to find the very best of food and drink in spite of the whims of the galley chefs and hotel managers.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But too often the potential passenger thinks of life on cruise ships as being an unspeakable elegance of Champagne, caviar and ballroom dancing. It isn't. Take Champagne. Unless you have the wine steward bringing the stuff to your table at $24 to $35 a pop, all you get is what you can take on at one of the captain's receptions, where too few harassed waiters try to serve too many thirsts. If you have the agility of a broken-field runner and the voice of a hog caller, you might get one of those little shallow glasses filled enough times to give you a remote little buzz.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The most dubious item on any cruise menu is the so-called fresh fish, which appears soon after leaving a port. Seldom do the purchasing people buy fish ashore, especially if the ship visits the port rarely. The fish that you get aboard ship is generally something from Scandinavia, deep frozen for so long that it can vie with glacial mastodon meat, and has the same taste as kitchen curtains.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The sheer quantity of food stowed aboard affects the quality of preparation. The Royal Viking <i>Star</i>, for example, is not a giant ship: 28,000 tons, 674 feet long. On its 1983 Pacific cruise, it left California with 480 tons of food; after 30 days cruising, the executive chef's computer printout showed that, among other things, the passengers had already consumed 3,870 dozen eggs, 19,700 pounds of meat, 18,600 bottles of beer, 1,330 bottles of Champagne and 680 pounds of peanuts. For those of mathematical bent, there were about 500 passengers aboard.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Some rules for surviving meals at sea: Avoid ethnic foods when the ethnic is other than the kitchen staff. Don't order anything you can't pronounce. Don't eat everything in sight just because you have paid for it. Clothes that have ceased to fit take the pleasure out of dining. Ask your waiter what looks good. When something is in too short supply to be put on the menu, it is often very good indeed. Like papaya.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A long cruise gives you a chance to observe the strange fads and fancies of the human condition. Think of this: You are part of a group of 600 people, most of whom have come aboard in pairs, as on Noah's Ark. They have come from all over the world. Now that long cruises are increasingly segmented, you can have 150 Australians getting on in Sydney, or 100 Germans in Hamburg. But the majority of the passengers on almost all cruises will be your fellow Americans. In the shoreside terminals where you wait to come aboard, you look at all these strangers with the same curiosity and suspicion with which they regard you. You look at the clothes, the deportment, the carry-ons, the demeanor. You listen to the accents. You wonder what most of them are doing on the same cruise you selected.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cruise passengers are separated from the artifacts of their identity - house, car, circle of friends, club membership - and dumped into an unlikely environment that attempts to amuse them even as it glides from here to there. There is a useful word in Spanish that refers to the habit of a certain kind of bull in the ring: This is a bull that has begun to feel uncertain, and so he will locate his <i>querencia</i>, a space in the bull ring where he feels most secure. He will make his stand there, and when the matador manages to dislodge him from this station, he will make a single charge and then return to the <i>querencia</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So it is with cruise ship passengers. The cruise is nothing like what they expected. They cannot readily identify the social, financial or educational status of their fellow passengers. And so they find corners where they feel safe. Whole groups find places they like better than other places, and they use hats, scarves, purses, books and programs to save the nearby chairs for their chums. In this manner they create a smaller society in which they can feel secure - a society small enough to be comprehended.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pecking orders are established, bores identified, boors avoided. The booze people stake out the bar stools they like best, and the deck walkers circle endlessly around the promenade deck, past the deck-chair people, the ones who have brought a thick book to read and the ones who sleep, jaw agape, looking uncomfortably dead.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On a long cruise, or on a middle cruise in a series of short ones, expect several things to be broken, and in that way you will not suffer disappointment. On a recent cruise on a five- star vessel (in both the Fielding and Fodor ratings) three out of the five automatic washing machines in the laundry room gave up the ghost and the waffle machine quit early on, so that though they had waffles on the menu every morning, there were in fact no waffles at all. The air-conditioning system went quite mad for a time, creating areas of stifling heat and tooth- chilling cold. A pressure hose broke and all the toilets quit and could be flushed only by filling wastebaskets with water in the tub or shower and upending them into the bowls.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And so on.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What you have to remember is that a large ship is a very complicated mechanism. When it is trying to be a ship and at the same time be a hotel, a chain of saloons, a lecture hall, a health farm, a country club and a flock of nightclubs, only extraordinary pre-planning and superb management can keep the whole top-heavy thing running like a $1,000 watch. Pre- planning and good management are a couple of the things they don't have too much of. Docking presents its own problems. At last your ship comes into port. It is made fast to the long pier, lines taut, tin rat- guards in place, gangways lowered. The big engines are turned off, and it is dead against the pier, like some huge slain animal. It is now at the mercy of the ant-swarms of bureaucrats, the customs and immigration officials, the port agents, the vendors of this and that. The big ship is far from home and helpless - it is at the mercy of the venal, the greedy and the mischievous.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The leverage is, of course, clearance. ''Be very very nice to our civil servants, Captain, or it will take a long long time to clear this ship and your passengers are going to get very angry at you.''</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On short cruises in limited areas, such as the Caribbean and the Greek Islands, these matters tend to get worked out because the particular ships are in port so often. There are many ports in the Caribbean area, from Nassau down to La Guaira, and if one port gets too greedy and obstructive, it is crossed off the list, and the merchants ashore whip their officials into line.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Recently we left a cruise ship in Kowloon, Hong Kong, tied up to the big pier there that adjoins a glossy shopping center of hundreds of shops offering treasures from all over the world. The officials had mixed emotions. They didn't want to clear the ship so quickly they'd lose their self-respect, but they were under pressure from the shopkeepers to let the buying begin. The solution was to delay clearance for a long unnecessary time but let the passengers wander off regardless, unstayed by gangway guards.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The compartmentalization of ships services is another point at issue. On all large passenger ships you will usually find a shore tour office and a shore tour director. You will find a cruise office, to advise you about future trips, make reservations and so on. You will find a purser and a hotel manager and various other people behind the big counter where you put your goodies in locked boxes, ask for cabin phone numbers, buy stamps and cash checks.</span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All of these people have a home office counterpart, and apparently the home office people do not keep each other informed any more than do the ones afloat.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Because of this strange lack of communication, a year and a half ago a well-known passenger vessel went on a cruise around Africa, arranged in such a way that the shore tour people could not book a shore tour to an African game farm. And so the cruise was a failure, the ship traveling far below capacity. Such stupidity has to be seen and experienced to be believed.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Actual physical layout is another area in which lack of communication within the cruise lines shows plainly. For example, the Royal Viking <i>Star</i> was ''extended'' a few years ago, an additional 93 feet added so that up to 720 passengers could be accommodated at one sitting. The advertisements speak of all the wonderful big windows in the main dining room - which for some obscure Norwegian reason they call the ''restaurant.'' In all of that dining room, the layout provided for only eight (8) window tables for two. And the ship boasts 19 very expensive suites, usually occupied by couples who can afford them and who expect, after presenting themselves with a green handshake to the </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">maître d'hôtel</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, to get one of those tables as their God-given right. Whoever designed the layout could not have conspired more effectively to create manic-depression among the dining-room staff.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One thing cannot be blamed on the lines, the ships or the people. But it can be a disappointment. Unless you go far from any land mass - such as from Honolulu to Yokahama - you will be sailing on a gray-green sea under an oyster-colored haze. Paul J. Weitz, the commander of the first flight of the <i>Challenger</i>, reported that, ''Unfortunately, this world is rapidly becoming a gray planet.''</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And, near the land masses - such as through the canals, the Mediterranean, along all coasts - there is no longer pure blue sky and dancing blue sea, the way it looks in the posters and the cruise pamphlets. In some places - Bombay harbor, Hong Kong, Venice, Amsterdam - you begin to get the feeling you are in a kind of eternal twilight, no matter what time of day it is. This twilight has an odd brassy sheen to it, a look of chemicals and a smell of fuel and solvents. Perhaps it is the twilight of a world, a winding down of our time and our place in the history of the galaxy.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But, so what, you can still get a sunburn on deck, perhaps an even more violent one than you would get had you the direct sunlight to warn you. I am not an expert on tan. My skin turns red, blisters and falls off. I am a hat person.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, when you take your cruise, do not expect to be told very much by those folks up there who run the ship. On every ship they have a public address setup so designed that a message can be sent to every area of the ship, or to the public areas only, or to the crew areas only.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A good and rare captain will break in now and then and say, ''This is the captain speaking. We are coming up on some gray whales, a pod of them a mile or so off the port bow.'' Or: ''That ship passing to starboard is a new Russian container ship on her first voyage.'' Or: ''Off the starboard bow you can begin to make out the first sight of Cabo San Lucas. We'll stay close as we can to give you a good look.'' But no captain has ever told us enough. There were always things we saw that puzzled us which were never explained.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As I said, however, we will take more cruises in the years ahead. We will complain bitterly about the broken doohickeys, the rotten weather, the singer who can't carry a tune in a bucket, the drinks that seem to get tinier and more expensive every trip we take . . . But we will keep on boarding because it is the last good game in town.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Why? Not many months ago, Dorothy and I walked forward into a stiff, warm wind, up to the bow rail of the promenade deck of a cruise ship heading through the Torres Strait en route from Australia to Bali. The moon was almost full, the sea luminous. We could see all the navigation lights, near and far, and we could watch the small lighted buoys appear quite suddenly after having been far away for a long time, sweeping by us, bobbing astern. It was a magical two hours traversing tricky seas explored by brave men long ago. That warm night lasts forever in memory.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And so we shall see you aboard. You and I will regard each other with deep suspicion, circle like new kids in the schoolyard and maybe end up friends. Some of the very best we have, we found on the white ships.</span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4290476670691353414.post-74367912062973554942020-02-17T01:00:00.000-08:002020-02-17T01:00:05.160-08:00John D MacDonald vs. Doc Savage<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIjy1W4MlAurYMZwS5geDrdDJKP5YxIgvUsfJFC0paonODsHV_wod_zkl5-9E5JBRBYHdBsSsDxW0EK61t9m9b7Knp4slAYd2qRiytkOuA8VppofGYpvxzhoD_T_O_S4UqD9mk328ap3g/s1600/Babette+Rosmond+bw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="890" data-original-width="615" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIjy1W4MlAurYMZwS5geDrdDJKP5YxIgvUsfJFC0paonODsHV_wod_zkl5-9E5JBRBYHdBsSsDxW0EK61t9m9b7Knp4slAYd2qRiytkOuA8VppofGYpvxzhoD_T_O_S4UqD9mk328ap3g/s320/Babette+Rosmond+bw.jpg" width="221" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Babette Rosmond</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Bronze Shadows</i> was a fanzine published in the 1960's dedicated to the study of two of the biggest hero pulps ever published, <i>Doc Savage</i> and <i>The Shadow</i>. Created by the late Fred Cook, the 'zine ran from 1965 to 1968 for a total of 15 issues. Like most fanzines of the era, it was homemade, printed on a mimeograph machine and stapled together. It was only one of several such journals centered on Doc Savage and The Shadow.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But it was, apparently, the only one to ever end up in the hands of John D MacDonald, whose early pulp stories filled the pages of these two magazines from 1946 to 1948 when he was just starting out as a writer. This was thanks to the then-editor of both of these pulps, Babette Rosemond, who I have discussed many times in this blog. Here is a paragraph I wrote in 2018 on the subject:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"When writing about the early fiction of John D MacDonald, that period when he was just starting out and learning his craft, enough words cannot be said about the support and guiding influence of pulp editor Babette Rosmond. At that time she was an editor at Street and Smith, managing two of the publisher’s premier titles, <i>Doc Savage</i> and <i>The Shadow</i> magazines, crediting herself as B. Rosmond, probably because of her gender. Like every other editor MacDonald submitted stories to in the that six-month time frame between October 1945 and March 1946 when he couldn’t sell anything to save his life, she was among those who rejected many of his submissions, but her rejections were personal and encouraging. In one rejection letter she wrote, “I, too, am an admirer of atmosphere, but too much atmosphere and too unconvincing a plot make [your story] a weak yarn... However, I am extremely fond of the way you write -- so dry your tears and send me something else very soon." She was an early coach, mentor and -- eventually -- friend who not only helped him in getting a literary agent but counseled him to expand the scope of his stories’ locales.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"To put it in real perspective, of the 57 stories MacDonald had published in his first two years as a writer, 30 of them, or 53%, were purchased by Babette Rosmond."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The second issue of <i>Bronze Shadows</i> was published in December 1965 and one of its contributors made the suggestion to Cook to send a copy to MacDonald. The author responded with the following letter, recalling his time with the magazines, his relationship with Rosmond, and his early pulp career. Below is a transcription of that letter, prefaced and postscripted by Cook:</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>(John Keasler, whose article appears elsewhere in this issue, suggested that John D. MacDonald might be interested in receiving a copy of </i>Bronze Shadows<i>. Mr. MacDonald, the highly successful author of countless best-selling mystery novels, was sent a copy of #2, and reciprocated by sending along the following article, telling of his early pulp days and his brief association with </i>Doc Savage<i>.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>I feel flattered and deeply appreciate the time and effort of such a busy and talented person as Mr. MacDonald, to pause and reminisce with a total stranger.)</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">JOHN D. MacDONALD vs. DOC SAVAGE</span><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by JOHN D. MacDONALD</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm glad John Keasler suggested that I receive a copy of <i>Bronze Shadows</i>. I had no idea that a Doc Savage cult was in existence,</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You have my permission to use this small and peripheral memory of my association with Doc Savage, though it might give some of the more devoted members of the Savage Coterie an aching desire to take a trip to Sarasota to hit me in the mouth.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I began writing full time when I was sprung after six years in the Army in late 1945. My first attempt at fiction, written while overseas, was sold to Whit Burnett of the old <i>Story Magazine</i>, Consequently my initial efforts - some 800,000 words of unsaleable crud, all in short story form, all completed within a 4 month period, were full of dying blind musicians, incredibly sensitive and oblique dialogue, and everything from imitation Maugham to imitation Tolstoi. I was keeping at least 30 stories in the mails at all times, papered one small room with form rejection slips lost 25 pounds, worked up to 100 hours a week, and acquired a considerable reputation around Utica, New York as a prime case of readjustment problems. No one could understand why I did not put my perfectly good master's degree from Harvard Business to work.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eight hundred thousand words accomplished in 4 months is in essence a crash training program. It is equivalent to 10 full length novels. No writer of reasonably serious intent can write a single page without learning something of value and improving his control. I sold my second story to Mike Tilden - God rest him - of Popular Publications for <i>Dime Detective</i> in February of 1946. The third one I sold was to one of the Standard Magazines pulps, and the fourth - which was the beginning of a lasting and valued association - was bought by Babette Rosmond of Street and Smith, then editing <i>Doc Savage</i> and <i>The Shadow</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I would estimate that Babs bought forty to fifty short stories of varying lengths from me in 1946, 1947 and a portion of 1948. The first eight or ten were all based on a very personal knowledge of India, Burma, China and Malaysia. She wrote bright, charming letters, but in my mind's eye she was a meaty type in her middle years with a shamelessly evident mustache. From my letters she knew I was a Colonel and she later confessed she had me pictured as middleaged, erect, slight British accent, bulging blue eyes, guardsman's mustache and carrying the inevitable swagger stick.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After those eight or ten based upon the same locale, she wrote to me, saying, “Isn't it about time you took off your pith helmet?”</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At about that time I went down to New York to meet the people I'd been dealing with - Mike Tilden, Harry Widmer, Alden Norton. And Babette, who turned out to be a slight, dark, spry gal in her twenties, a very wry and pyrotechnic conversationalist.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also about that time I was beginning to realize that there were two basic approaches to pulp writing, hence but two kinds of writers. One was the dogged chap who reads and analyzes pulp stories, makes little charts and graphs, develops a clumsy and reasonably direct style and he [...] the stories like a carpenter making different sizes of tables for a furniture mart. The other breed was the group I belonged to, the ones who have no interest in formula or pattern or specific editorial requirements, who want to tell stories, and who, once they accept the minor limitations of the pulp market, take their tongues out of their cheeks and do the best job they can do, and worry later about who might want to buy it. The ratio of work to sales is not as efficient as in the case of the table-makers, because it is a variety of risk-taking, but you can generate considerably more pride in your work, and have more satisfaction in doing it. Working in this manner made the boundary line in those days between pulp and slick very vague. A novelette I thought had its best chance at <i>Cosmopolitan</i> ended up in <i>Dime Detective</i>, A novel I thought might hit <i>Argosy</i>, then a pulp, was diverted to <i>Colliers</i> by my agent, and purchased as a serial.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Insofar as reading pulp magazines, I discovered I could read only those stories by people who were working in the same manner I was. In 1947, Babs Rosmond asked me, very cautiously and tentatively, if I would like to try a Doc Savage. I have the vague memory that Lester Dent was ill at that time. I do remember that I certainly had need of the money. I told her that I would let her know. I got out some of the back copies of the magazine which I had saved because they had contained stories by me. (Some contained two or three by me, the additional ones under the house names Babs and I had devised: Scott O'Hara, Peter Reed, John Farrell.) For the first time I read two Doc Savages all the way through. I did some fretting and some pacing and finally phoned Babs at her office at Street and Smith and said that I could not fault them on the basis of action, or moving the people around, but I just could not bring myself to imitate a prose style so wooden, so clumsy, so labored, so inadvertently hilarious that it was like a parody of the style you might term Early Comic Book. I said that Doc seemed to me to be a truly great comic figure, and I was sorry to let her down, but....</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She said she hadn't really believed that I would do it, and that in fact she would have been a little disappointed if I had given it a try, disappointed in me.</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I hope the Bronze Cult will understand that I put the knock on the Hero on the basis that any cult has the historical responsibility of assembling the con as well as the pro. I had my chance. I've done some mighty wooden writing under my own name, but at least I never did it on purpose,</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>(Oboy! How about that? I was introduced to Mr. MacDonald in the pages of </i>Doc Savage<i> and </i>The Shadow<i> along with </i>Thrilling Wonder Stories<i> and </i>Startling Stories<i>. Personally, I have enjoyed his novels more than his short stories because he uses the broader framework to thoroughly develop ideas and characters. I particularly enjoyed </i>The Girl, The Gold Watch And Everything<i> better than most because of the deft development of a most fascinating idea, the complete stoppage of time.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>I'm sure we all forgive Mr. MacDonald for this one foolish mistake in his then beginning career.... but then - who are we to argue with success?</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Thank you, John, for sharing your start with us. At least for me, you've become a real person in place of just a name on a cover.)</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As one might imagine, MacDonald’s comments on the literary quality of the Doc Savage stories elicited several responses, which were printed in issues #4 and 5. JDM again received copies and responded to the objections, which you can read here: <u><a href="http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2015/03/pulp-perspective-plus.html" target="_blank">Pulp Perspective Plus</a></u>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bronze Shadows<i> issue courtesy of the John D. MacDonald Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida</i></span>Steve Scotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15863138617383626261noreply@blogger.com0