The Trap of Solid Gold

Twenty-Five Years Ago

2011-12-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

Photo by Jerry Bauer

December 28 will mark the twenty-fifthanniversary of John D MacDonald's death, a date I recalled with a posting onthis blog two years ago. I'm reposting that entry today, a few days early,along with a some new comments at the end.

Monday, December 28, 2009

It's Been 23 Years...

JohnD MacDonald died 23 years ago today. As I write these words I find myself in astate of disbelief that it has been that long.

InSeptember 1986 MacDonald checked into St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee for a "routine" heartbypass operation. He was 70 years old. The operation took place on the 18th andMacDonald developed pneumonia afterward. He was bedridden and did not improve.In late November he slipped into a coma and died a month later, on December 28,1986 at 10:40 am.

Accordingto biographer Hugh Merrill, MacDonald's doctor had assured him that theoperation was relatively safe, with "only a 5 to 8 percent operativerisk."

Amonth after his death an article appeared in the Milwaukee Sentinel(reprinted in the JDM Bibliophile39) written by one Joe Manning, describing JDM's time in the hospital:

"JDM's wife of 49 years, Dorothy, and their son Maynard,and a grandson, Karsten, were with him when he died ... from complications ofheart disease...

"'You would not believe the impact his death has had on thehospital staff who were involved in his care. So many people had gotten closeto him and his family,' said Steven Pinzer, hospital spokesman.

"Mrs. MacDonald and her son had remained in the Milwaukee throughoutMacDonald's stay in the hospital.

"Nurses brought food from home Thanksgiving and Christmasso the MacDonald's could have home-cooked dinners together in the hospital'sintensive care unit.

"A physician at St. Mary's said MacDonald 'had technicallydifficult arteries to bypass,' and complications to other organs led tointensive respiratory support.

"MacDonald's hospitalization had been particularly drainingto the staff and family members because ' his progress was like a rollercoaster, up and down.'

"'When it looked like he was going to make it, there wouldbe a setback. Everyone thought he was finally on the road to recovery, but hehad another coronary arrest and went into a coma,' the physician said...

"'There were MacDonald novels all over the hospital,' saidthe physician, who asked not to be named.

"The physician said MacDonald 'was incredibly lucid and hisnotes were extremely descriptive.' (JDM's wife Dorothy actually kept the notes,and wrote a detailed log of what she thought would be of interest during JDM'sstay in the hospital.)

"'His intelligence came through all of it. He was unique inthe way he coped with all the vicissitudes in the intensive care unit,' thephysician said...

"Maynard, who lives in New Zealand with his wife andchildren and makes rocking chairs, remembers following behind his father on afamily walk during a visit by his father.

"'He was walking alone with all of his five grandchildrenin tow, as if they were following a big battleship. And this battleship, myfather, had complete and constant awareness. He was aware of the people aroundhim and he noted little things he saw. He had tremendous insights into people.

"'It was as if he had radar and electronic sensingequipment like a battleship would have, and nothing escaped his detection --the exotic little things. He was very curious about the world.'

"During the visit, Maynard said, he told his father about afriend who worked in the sewer department. The friend had told Maynard thatpeople often lose their false teeth down the toilet and the teeth are held atthe treatment plant until claimed by the people who lost them.

"Maynard and his father had a hard time believing that, butwent with his son to visit the friend, who worked the late-night shift.

"'My friend, Simon, took him into a room and showed my dadrow upon row of false teeth that had been recovered from the sewer. Hethoroughly enjoyed it. He was curious enough to go check it out for himself.

"I've been waiting for years to pick up a McGee and see theteeth thing in there,' he said..."

Nearlyevery newspaper in the country wrote some sort of appreciation of the man andhis work, a fact that must seem astounding to anyone today who is not familiarwith him. He was deeply respected, especially by his fellow writers, andauthors such as Stephen King, Ross Thomas, Tony Hillerman, Dean Koontz andDonald Westlake all wrote appreciations. The BostonGlobe wrote that JDM was"the Dickens of mid-century America -- popular, prolific and,if not conspicuously sentimental, conscience-ridden about hisenvironment..." The Richmond News Leader said "No reader everfinished a MacDonald book without having learned something of value" andThe Raleigh News and Observersaid JDM was "almost certainly the most important novelist contemporary Florida hasproduced."

Oneof my favorite recollections of MacDonald came from Dave Hughes, a BIB subscriber from Colorado who had interviewed JDM in themid-1970's:

"He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a ready smile andfriendly conversation always waiting to be released. His love and pride for hiswife and son were obvious and unmistakable. He loved life, he loved writing, heenjoyed good talk, he liked people. His grin and good-natured teasing wereaimed at himself as much as at anyone or anything else. He flatly refused totake his fame and critical appraisals seriously. He was aware of his ownfoibles and had long since accepted them. He was satisfied with what he hadbecome -- although he was never satisfied with his writing. No matter whatstage of his career was discussed, he described himself as 'still learning mycraft.'"

We'recurrently living through a period -- at least, I hope it's only a period --when MacDonald and his works have become largely forgotten by the readingpublic. Except for the Travis McGee novels, there are only two of his other 56books still in print: The Executioners(published under the title Cape Fear)and A Bullet for Cinderella,which was reprinted by Wonder Publishing Group as part of their Noir Mastersseries. A new biography promised this year by Schaffner Press seems to havedisappeared, although it may see the light of day eventually. A film version ofThe Deep Blue Good-By is"in development" and will likely star Leonardo DICaprio, but thatwouldn't appear until at least 2011 at the earliest, and it is one of 27 (!)films listed under DiCaprio's IMDb profile as being "in development,"so who knows if it will ever be filmed.

Wouldn't it be ironic if afilm version of a MacDonald work was the trigger for a new explosion ofinterest in his work? If the medium that never seemed to understand him or gethim quite right was the cause behind having his books republished? I think evenJDM would have a good laugh over that.

Posted by Steve Scott at 8:40AM

When I consider that it's been twenty-five yearssince MacDonald took his last breath, it seem incredible to me. At times itwill feel like only yesterday, and at other times like a million years ago.Little has changed since I posted this entry. One additional John D MacDonaldshort story anthology has been published, the eBook Death Quotient and OtherStories. A Bullet for Cinderella was republished in paper format by GutterPress under MacDonald's original title, On the Make. And MacDonald's 1955 shortstory "The Killer" was included in a mystery anthology -- anothereBook -- called Master of Noir: Volume Three. Other than that there hasn't beenmuch change in the world of JDM. The film version of The Deep Blue Good-By isstill "in development," and has gone through a number of proposeddirectors. The JDM biography that was originally to have been published in 2009is still MIA, although I have been contacted by the author, who assures me thathe is still working on it. MacDonald expert and former managing editor of theJDM Bibliophile, Cal Branche, along with his wife Nola, have just completed a three year project of transcribing John and Dorothy MacDonald's wartime letters-- 523 of them! -- for the Archives Department of the University of Floridaand they are hoping they will eventually be made available to the readingpublic. And The Trap of Solid Gold is still humming along, albeit at a slower pacethan the one-post-per-day I somehow managed when I began this project.

JDM on the Hollywood Red Scare

2011-12-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

Now that the headlines onthe testimony of various Hollywood charactershave faded away -- to reappear later, no doubt -- we must confess that thewhole affair gave us an odd feeling of unreality. There were those famous faces-- R. Taylor, G. Cooper, R. Montgomery -- performing for the investigatingcommittee. We are used to those people as two dimensional beings on a flatsilver screen. We are accustomed to seeing little publicity releases on theirmarriages and their swimming pools. To have them plunked down in the middle ofa discussion of ideologies seems a bit like reading an appreciation of Einsteinby one Mickey Mouse.

The next time we go a fewsteps up Fountain street and buy ourselves a hunk of celluloid escape, we willgaze at those famous faces and ponder that the life of an actor or actress inindeed a hard one. Not only do you have the responsibility for getting rid ofseveral thousand dollars a week, but you might at any time have to sit in frontof a group of un-sympathetic Congressmen and be led into a discussion ofrealities. Any touch of reality must be quite a jolt to our tinseled friendsout there.

-- from JDM's ClintonCourier column "From the Top of the Hill," November 6, 1947

Kahala Road

2011-12-06T03:30:00.001-08:00

Travis McGee fans will be interested to learn of a forthcoming new literary series character inspired by the Ft. Lauderdale knight-in-slightly-tarnished-armor. Screenwriter and columnist Charles Memminger has written his first novel, titled Kahala Road, created as an "homage" to John D MacDonald, and set to be published by Minotaur Books. Here is the press release:

Oct. 13, 2011

For Immediate Release:

St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books Sings Two-Book Deal

with Hawaii Writer Charles Memminger

“Kahala Road” Is An Homage to John D. MacDonald’s

“Travis McGee” Series

NEW YORK, NY – Minotaur Books has signed a deal with Hawaii-based writer Charles Memminger to publish his first novel, “Kahala Road” and a sequel. The publication dates have not been set yet.
Memminger is best known as a national award-winning humor columnist and screenwriter who was a staff writer on the final season of “Baywatch Hawaii.” But he also spent years as a newspaper crime and investigative reporter. He drew on both his experiences in crime and humor to create “Kalaha Road,” a light tropical thriller set on Oahu. “Kahala Road” is an homage to John D. MacDonald’s celebrated “Travis McGee” series.
“I wanted to create a 21^st century Travis McGee character set in Hawaii,” Memminger said. “The result is Stryker McBride, a former newspaper reporter-turned barefoot philosopher who withdrew to a houseboat in Kaneohe Bay after being shot by a rogue cop during an investigation of Honolulu organized crime. In ‘Kahala Road,’ Styker emerges from his self-imposed exile to find himself in drawn into a mystery whose roots reach back to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
Memminger has been recognized as one of the top humor columnists in the country by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. His essays and columns have appeared in national magazines, distributed by the New York Times News Service and he was the only writer in Hawaii to be included in “Chicken Soup For The Soul of America,” written in memory of the victims of 911. He’s had too books of his work published in Hawaii, the most recent being “Hey, Waiter, There’s An Umbrella In My Drink (Tales From The Tropics By Hawaii’s Favorite Humor Columnist)”.
He is represented by the New York literary agency Inkwell Management.
Minotaur Books is an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, a subsidiary of Macmillan.

Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly

2011-12-03T06:59:00.001-08:00

Stephen King -- ever the John D. MacDonald fan -- makes reference to his former friend in his Entertainment Weekly article "My 2011 Pop Culture Favorites," published in this week's issue. Number 10 on his list of 20 is Phillip Caputo's novel Crossers.

"That Strangest Month of All"

2011-11-11T05:50:00.001-08:00

A few postings back I wroteabout Cosmopolitan magazine, how it holds the record for most John D MacDonaldappearances in a slick general interest magazine. While many may think ofMacDonald as a "pulp" writer -- and indeed he was one, with themajority of his short fiction written for such periodicals -- he wrote an awfullot of general interest, non-crime fiction that appeared in magazines notnormally associated with mystery fiction. I'm talking about titles like Ladies'Home Journal, Redbook, McCall's, Esquire, Playboy, and a host of titles whohave long since published their last issues, including Collier's, Woman's HomeCompanion, Liberty,and The Saturday Evening Post. Most of these magazines published several JDMshort stories over their long history, but a few were one-shots. And while onemay wonder why this prolific author appeared only once under these titles, thereal question becomes why his fiction appeared there at all. A good example isthe one and only short story he ever sold to Family Circle magazine, "ThatStrangest Month of All."

Family Circle seems one ofthe most unlikely homes for JDM fiction. Begun in 1932 as a giveaway periodicalin then-newly emerging supermarkets such as Safeway and Piggly Wiggly's, themagazine was aimed squarely at housewives, with features on cooking, cleaning,sewing and childrearing. There were also the seemingly mandatory features on Hollywood stars, although these articles containednothing that would be considered gossip or innuendo. Indeed the premier issuefeatured Joan Crawford and Bing Crosby on the cover. And, like almost everyother magazine of the era, Family Circle contained fiction -- usually twooriginal short stories per issue -- written by third-rung mainstays of theindustry of the time, authors like George Sumner Albee, Dana Burnet and NeliaGardiner White, people whose work is virtually unknown today to all but ahandful of readers.The artwork that accompanied these stories was illustratedby some of the great names of the era, artists like Peter Stevens, Richard Hookand Ernest Chiriaka, and their artwork in Family Circle is indistinguishablefrom their work in the higher-class slicks.

John D. MacDonald came toFamily Circle relatively late in the game, at a point where his short storywriting had taken a back seat to his novels. "That Strangest Month ofAll" appeared in the October 1959 issue of the magazine and was one ofonly two shorter works he would have published that year. Coming in at a tidy5,000 words, the author employed an oft-used premise that bears a closeresemblance to Stanley Ralph Ross' 1952 short story "You Got To HaveLuck" (and probably dozens of other tales), where a housewife, living in aremote location, is home alone and terrorized by an escaped bad guy. In Ross'stale it is a convict, in MacDonald's, an escaped mental patient. And MacDonald,as he often did when featuring a female protagonist, uses the plot to tell amorality tale, where wishing for more, or simple unhappiness seems to be thecausation of the events that follow. Not a very progressive notion, especiallyin a male writer (see his "Jail Bait" and "Pickup") but Ithink here the author was attempting something a little deeper than simply astory about a woman in peril. Much of the writing deals with the mental processof fear, as the heroine (in third person limited narrative) is suddenlyconfronted and then held captive by a powerful lunatic.

"She was a wife namedSusan, a slim tanned woman with a soft cap of black hair, a lively face, butwith a brooding inward look, an air of containment. She was called Susan. NotSue. Not Suzy."

Susan and family(MacDonald's typical four-member family unit) live on an old farm, fourteenmiles from an "industrial city" and barely within visual distancefrom their nearest neighbor. Husband Paul has left for work and the school bushas left, carrying her two children to morning classes. It is a day of"incomparable stillness and clarity," with the sun shining in acloudless sky and warm enough for Susan to put on her "treasured andthreadbare yellow sun suit" so she can finish sanding an old drop-leaftable out in the large backyard.

"Autumn had always beenfor her a time of haunting nostalgia, a longing for something she could noteven identify. A time for what Paul called her 'gypsy' mood. It left thechildren uncertain and Paul troubled. They seemed to sense she was off in someplace where they could not reach her."

As she works on her projectSusan is surprised to see a helicopter flying low over her farm, and then thesound of sirens in the distance. A fire, perhaps? Children gone missing?

"As she worked, shebecame aware of a curious feeling of restlessness, a tiny threshold ofirritation. She turned suddenly and looked behind her and found herself staringinto the eyes of a man who stood a dozen feet away. She looked at him and knewthe meaning then of the helicopter and the sirens."

And not just any man.

"He was big, as big andhard and solid as the trunk of one of the old oaks. He wore gray denimcoveralls that seemed to be some sort of uniform... She looked into the man'sface and saw an animal emptiness that stopped her breath. The shaved head andthe hard high cheekbones and the flattened cartilage of the nose gave himalmost a cartoonist's version of brutality. But what horrified her was theslackness of the lower part of his face and the pale uncomprehending opacity ofhis eyes... She remembered a long-ago time when she had been cornered by avicious dog. She had stood very still then, a small frightened girl, sensingthat any attempt to run would be the necessary trigger."

Susan attempts to smile andholds her hands out so he can see she is carrying nothing. He has troublespeaking when he asks if anyone is in the house. When the sirens sound again he"raised his head sharply, the flattened nostrils widening," grabs herby the arm and drags her inside. As the sirens fade she "stood there inher terror [and] one part of her mind thought quite calmly, saying 'This is theway it happens.'"

After giving him a drink ofwater, she notices that the man has been shot through the hand.

"He stood for a momentwith his eyes shut, and her sudden pity was as keen and unexpected as a knife.He was exhausted. His hurt hand was horrid. Dumb creature in pain. And what ofall the tales of the thorn in the pad of the lion? Were they true? ... Shethought, 'And for you there is no place.No place in this world.'"

After bandaging his hand shegets him to sit calmly in a kitchen chair. But suddenly the phone rings and allthoughts of paws and lions are thrown out the window as he leaps upthreateningly. Susan quickly convinces the man that the call is probably fromher husband, and to ignore it would bring the police here. She picks up thereceiver and Paul tells her that there is an escapee from the local lunaticasylum loose, one who has already killed three people, and for her to lockherself in the house and to keep the kids inside when they return from school.The thought of the school bus returning and her children coming home awakens arealization within her.

"You must think, shetold herself. This is an almost mindless thing. You can't run from him, evenwhen the school bus stops. You can't save everything. So it comes to a choice.At any cost to you, Susan, you must warn them. Before the school buscomes."

She quickly devises a planto lure the man upstairs under the pretext of hiding him in the attic. Oncethere she will break a jar of turpentine onto the floor, light it and jump outonto the roof, with the belief that the flames will prevent the man from followingher. The plan almost works, but Susan is unable to light a match quickly enoughand darts out of the window. Unable to follow her because of the heavy boots heis wearing, he grabs the nearest object -- a can of orange paint -- and hurlsit at her, hitting the standpipe she is holding onto and splattering the paintall over her and onto the roof. Then she sees him emerging from the window,boots now off, climbing out with little difficulty and toward her...

The basic plot andresolution of this story are fairly predictable, and I recall that the firsttime I read this back in 1982 I was thoroughly unimpressed by it, thinking thatMacDonald surely could have done better by this point in his career. "ThatStrangest Month of All" was, after all, written only one year before hepublished two of his finest novels, The End of the Night and Slam the Big Door. But re-reading it nearly thirty years laterreveals an interesting subtext that was lost on me in my younger years: theprocess the protagonist goes through in a moment of real peril. The ending ofthis short story -- which I won't reveal other than to state the obvious, thatSusan does indeed survive -- contains several interesting touches that neverwould have been articulated in earlier JDM work, including some poignantrevelations about the escapee's past and Susan's processing of her ordealmoments after it is resolved. MacDonald had come a long way from "JailBait," where a similar situation seems almost like divine retribution forwanting something different in life than marriage and children. JDM's shortstory output had been reduced to a relative trickle by this point in his life,but the quality of the product was far and away superior to his early pulpwork. This should have come as no surprise to me, but writing this blog hasbecome a learning experience.

In 1982 Family Circle celebrated its 50thAnniversary, and its September issue of that year contained loads ofretrospectives and histories of the various departments and features of themagazine over the years. To celebrate all of the fiction the magazine hadbrought to newsstands over five decades, the editors chose only one story toreprint, and that story was "That Strangest Month of All." Itappeared with a brief introduction and a smaller reprinting of the originalstory art, a meticulously accurate illustration by Dick Hook. It was, perhaps,an easy editorial decision to choose an author who, in 1982, was at the heightof his bookselling power, but the story itself is good enough to have left nodoubt as to the wisdom of its selection.

"That Strangest Monthof All" has yet to be anthologized.

JDM in Panama (1977)

2011-11-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

"We sat in the shelterof the [Hotel Panama] Pool Terrace and talked with others who had been millingaround town that day, about what they had found and the attitude of the people.Because of the increasing agitation for a new canal treaty, we expected thesame sort of obvious hostility we had once experienced in Caracas: people glaring, shaking fists,blocking the sidewalk, making audible comments.

"But no one experiencedany of this. The Panamanians seemed pleasant and courteous, though not overtlywarm. One cabdriver had told us his particular view of reality. He said thepoliticos and the students were the ones making the big fuss about the canal.and the general public did not really care that much. The thing they caredabout was that the canal keep operating, because it brought in a lot of moneyin wages, and it brought tourists. He said he thought Panamanians could run itokay if they took over, but probably wages would go down and tolls would go up,because that is always what the politicos do, everywhere.

"In all Latin countriesone sees, of course, those quick dark glances from the slender young men.Scorn, disdain, challenge? A look is only a look. Without accompanying word orgesture, it can be interpreted incorrectly. Instead of thinking about plastiqueand machine pistols and assaults on the embassy, he may be wondering where youbought the funny hat or pondering what he is going to wear to the eveningdisco. Many travelers have acute attacks of paranoia in foreign places. Drawingthe most generous conclusions is the way to retain balance and sanity. Fearspoils the view."

-- from Nothing Can Go Wrong(1981)

The Stephen King Connection

2011-10-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog have no doubt seen the small list of quotes I've placed in the right column of the page, quotes of praise about the work of John D MacDonald. The most succinct and adulatory of this tiny collection is also the most oft-quoted: author Stephen King's "[John D MacDonald was] the great entertainer of our age."

Although the two writers were separated by 31 years of age their careers shared many characteristics, including early years as short story writers working in entry-level markets (JDM in the pulps, King in second-tier men's magazines), similar writing styles that featured a strong gift of narrative, and ultimate best seller status in the world of American fiction writing. The two men were also friends, a relationship that began with MacDonald's agreement to write the introduction for King's first short story anthology Night Shift. After MacDonald passed away King wrote a fascinating tribute to his pal that appeared in the inaugural issue of Mystery Scene magazine, along side tributes from over two dozen other writers, including Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Charles Willeford and Harlan Ellison. King's piece offered an interesting history of his introduction to the fiction of JDM, how the elder author came to write the introduction to Night Shift, and ended with King's heartfelt admission of deep loss.

King revealed that his first exposure to MacDonald occurred in 1959 when he read the author's 20th novel Murder in the Wind, which was published three years earlier. He described how the book illuminated a truth that was instrumental in guiding his own career choice as a writer:

"[I was] knocked cockeyed by it... and both while reading it and afterward, I went around in a state of exhilaration, thinking 'So it can be done. It can be.'

"By 'it' I suppose I meant telling the truth about life even while you were writing for the popular market, so often regarded by those self-esteeming English profs as a market made up of closet sadists, lowbrow truck-drivers, and bored housewives. But even at twelve, with no more experience of life than a rural upbringing could afford, I knew the feel of the real when it touched me in that book. How could I, or anyone, not feel it? Murder in the Wind did not reach out and touch you; it grabbed you, jerked you into a dark alley, and assaulted you.

"MacDonald was writing about people I knew, about smells I had smelled, and I thought, about the way I would feel under certain circumstances. It was like seeing your first color movie after a lifetime of black-and-white."

When King was in college he managed a brief period of "writer's block" by reading many of MacDonald's novels, a recollection he revealed in his excellent 2000 memoir On Writing, where he mentioned the incident in a condemnation of creative writing classes. By the the time King had become a full time writer -- after the publication of the paperback edition of Carrie in 1975 -- his second novel 'Salem's Lot contained an interesting passage, probably an unconscious bit of writing but one which would blossom into a kind of literary mutual admiration between King and MacDonald. The novel's hero Ben Mears is an author who returns to his boyhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that the town's citizens are slowly turning into vampires. During a lengthy interview with Homer McCaslin, the county sheriff, he reveals his occupation and it turns out McCaslin had read some of Mears' published work. McCaslin was not impressed. The interview (and the chapter) ends with the sheriff offering the author some advice:

"You ought to write books with better sense. Like the guy who writes those Travis McGee stories. A man can sink his teeth into one of those."

Three years later, after the publication of his third novel The Shining, King put together a collection of his early short stories he called Night Shift, and after the initial editing process with his editor Bill Thompson, he was asked who he would like to write the introduction. Specifically, King recalled Thompson's question thusly:

"If you could have anyone in the world do the introduction to the book, who would you pick?"

King remembers his response as being "quick and automatic. 'John D. MacDonald,' I said."

"Why MacDonald?" [Thompson] asked.

"Because he taught me everything I know," I said, hesitated, and then added in spite of my embarrassment (hell, it was the truth): "Because I idolize him."

"Well, let's ask him," Bill said

I said that would be okay (as long as we was Bill Thompson), but I was taken aback all the same. To me it was like asking God to write an introduction... Someone like that writing an introduction for my book? Presumptuous, man. Extreeemly presumptuous.

"He'll probably be too busy, though," I said. What I really thought was that John D. MacDonald was about as likely to waste his valuable time writing an introduction to my book of short stories as Adolph Hitler was apt to be then employed building snow-forts down in hell.

"Doesn't hurt to ask," Bill said...

I went back to Maine, thinking little more about the business. In my mind MacDonald had already sent Bill a form letter or no response at all.

Instead, Bill called and read me an extremely courteous letter from MacDonald, saying he would read my stories, and, if he liked them, do the introduction. I couldn't believe it. Refused to believe it, in fact, until Bill sent me a photocopy. Then I had to... but I knew he'd decline, because the stories weren't very good, mostly just pulp stuff I'd published to help keep my family afloat during the first four years of married life (and having no inkling, at that time, that MacDonald had fought his own battles for light and survival and a little extra nourishment in that same pulp jungle, as Frank Gruber termed it), and besides, MacDonald wrote crime stories, not horror stories, although I'd be less than honest if I didn't add... I also knew he'd written some horror and fantasy shorts, and two sf novels.

His agreement to do that introduction and its prompt arrival a couple of weeks later pleased and impressed me more than the kind things the essay itself had to say about my work; MacDonald's generosity to a young writer who he'd never met helped to keep that young writer open to the needs -- and wistful hopes - of other young writers...

MacDonald's piece was a rambling yet brief and pitch-perfect analysis on the art of writing and being a writer. Discussing King -- a man he had never met or spoken to -- he was really writing about himself, putting into words beliefs about his profession he would repeat in interviews over and over until his death eight years later. Remember, this was before King had become STEPHEN KING, the bestselling American author of all time, so MacDonald's agreement to write this introduction was obviously done because he genuinely liked the stories and enjoyed the craft employed in creating them.

King wrote MacDonald a thank you letter before the book was actually published, saying how much he appreciated the gesture and the content: "I thought [it] was intelligent, witty, and very kind. Your comments on why and how we write were especially welcome." He went on to praise MacDonald's novel Condominium, which King has just read, calling it "a good, honest, meaty job of writing and an acrobatic feat of storytelling." MacDonald responded a month later, saying "Glad the introduction seemed okay to you," and went on to bemoan the mountain of mail that had piled up while he was away on a cruise.

In 1980 King sent two copies of Night Shift to MacDonald, apologizing that they were "sadly overdue" and revealed that he and his wife Tabitha had been in Florida the month before and had thought about giving MacDonald a call but didn't because King was afraid that JDM "might bite [his] head off" for not sending him a copy of the book.

The next year King published his sixth novel (I'm not counting the Richard Bachman books -- that particular secret hadn't been revealed yet). Cujo was the story of a rabid St. Bernard who menaces a mother and her young son trapped inside a car in a remote location. Containing almost no supernatural content, it featured King's second fictional reference to his idol. As things turn bleak and it becomes apparent that there is no way they can get free, the mother ruefully thinks:

The time might also have gone, but she would have to live with that -- and perhaps die with it. No one was going to come. There was going to be no knight on a silver steed riding up Town Road No. 3 -- Travis McGee was apparently otherwise occupied.

That same year King published his first non-fiction work, the indispensible Danse Macabre, a lengthy and wonderfully written study of the horror fiction genre. In it he relates the story of how JDM came up with the title for his 1979 Travis McGee novel The Green Ripper:

John D. MacDonald tells the story of how for weeks his son was terrified of something he called "the green ripper." MacDonald and his wife finally figured it out -- at a dinner party, a friend had mentioned the Grim Reaper. What their son had heard was *the green ripper, and later it became the title of one of MacDonald's Travis McGee stories.

One year later MacDonald finally reciprocated in the literary game by including a Stephen King reference in the 1982 Travis McGee novel Cinnamon Skin. While staying in the apartment of Meyer's niece, the duo eat dinner and Meyer heads to bed.

I cleaned up, looking around, and found a paperback by Stephen King about a big weird dog. Took it to bed and read a lot longer than I'd planned to. Very scary dog. Very scary writer. Wondered if he would be able to guess what kind of person Evan Lawrence was: as scary as King's dog, but in a different way.

King's 1983 novel Christine featured a scene where a man is sitting reading a John D MacDonald novel.

When King's Pet Sematary was published later in 1983 King gave a copy of the book to John and his wife Dorothy, inscribing it "I hope this book scares the hell out of you." So, in the subsequent and final McGee novel The Lonely Silver Rain MacDonald plays the game again. While waiting at an airport McGee buys a book; this time it's King's Pet Sematary:

Once through Security I found an empty chair that backed up to a wall. There I pretended to read the book I had picked up at the hotel newsstand. I had gotten to the part where a buried cat came back to life, but couldn't walk well.

That was MacDonald's last King reference, as he wrote only one more book before he died in December of 1986. King, however, has continued to include references to MacDonald in his works of fiction. In Bag of Bones the protagonist recalls having read 23 John D MacDonald novels. In Needful Things a character reads a JDM novel while nursing her baby son. In Duma Key a character references the kinds of sociopathic people that MacDonald turned into an art form in the persons of Max Cady, Junior Allen and Boo Waxwell. And in the fifth entry to The Dark Tower series, Wolves of the Calla, MacDonald's name appears on a menu board(!)

King's most direct fictional reference to MacDonald came in 1990 when he published Four Past Midnight, an anthology of four novellas. The final entry was titled "The Sun Dog" and King dedicated it to his literary friend:

This is in memory of John D. MacDonald. I miss you, old friend -- and you were right about the tigers.

The novella is preceded by a lengthy "note" where King relates how he came up with the idea for "The Sun Dog." Nowhere does he mention MacDonald or the cryptic reference to "the tigers." It is probable that the note was written before King decided to dedicate the novella, for nothing in the subject matter of the story bears any relationship to MacDonald, at least as far as I can tell. "The Sun Dog" is about a Polaroid camera that is given as a birthday gift to a young boy. Instead of reproducing images of what the camera is pointed at, it prints images of a particular scene in front of a house, with a savage-looking dog in the corner of the frame. As subsequent shots are taken the dog slowly begins to fill the screen, eventually ripping through from some other dimension and attacking the camera's owner. The novella is an unfortunate choice as King's one and only story specifically dedicated to MacDonald, as it has got to be one of the weakest works of fiction he has ever written. Dull, predictable and wordy beyond belief (even for King!), it might have made a fairly interesting 3,000-word short story as part of a larger anthology. At its existing length of 62,000 words spread over 145 pages it is nearly unendurable.

(Lest anyone think I am being disrespectful to King, I would note that I was an early and rabid reader of his works, beginning in 1975 when I unpacked pile of paperback copies of Carrie while working in the book section of a department store. Leafing through it I noted the epistolary style of the writing -- reminding me a great deal of Bram Stoker's Dracula -- took it home and devoured it. I purchased and read every subsequent King novel -- in hardcover! -- up to The Talisman, when I simply ran out of gas and lost interest. I have been back to the well now and then over the years but have not come close to reading everything the man has published.)

In 2007 King was chosen to receive the annual Grand Master award from The Mystery Writers of America. Not surprisingly, his acceptance speech included a JDM reference:

"I'm delighted to be getting the Grand Master Award and to be joining the company of some of my greatest idols and teachers -- people like John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain and Donald E. Westlake. The award means a great deal to me personally, because it's an award from people who understand two things: the importance of good writing and the importance of telling stories."

In interviews over the years King rarely fails to mention MacDonald when talking about early influences. A good example is one you can read here, where he states,

"I had cut my teeth on [JDM] stories. I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, he is the best. He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over."

It really must have been a waking dream for King to have become an associate, and later a friend, of his childhood idol. The two authors and their wives eventually met, and MacDonald and King exchanged letters regularly in the years up to JDM's death. During MacDonald's final year King was one of the few people on earth to whom JDM revealed the plot of the never-to-be-written new Travis McGee adventure, and he wrote to King of personal travails, including his wife's cancer and chemotherapy treatments. And in 2001 the Kings purchased a winter home in MacDonald's adopted town of Sarasota, barely a mile south from the home where the MacDonalds lived from 1952 to 1969.

It's safe to assume that King's Mystery Scene tribute really was as heartfelt as it reads, and it's as touching to read today as it was back in 1987.

The death of a writer who has spoken so clearly from his own heart into your own is always a painful, scouring thing, and I'm in a little too much grief to find any uplifting conclusion... It doesn't seem right to me, somehow, that a voice like that should ever be stilled... I'll read [one of his books] when I need something I know will hold up. Man, he was a good writer, wasn't he? When you went out to the drugstore to grab a paperback, most times you got a bologna sandwich. With John, you got the whole fucking delicatessen. And man, he was a good man.

Jesus, John, I miss you.

Stephen King on JDM

2011-10-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

Question: "Is there a novel you go back to again and again? If so, why? What does it teach you?"

King: "I go back to the John D. MacDonald novels from the fifties, like The End of the Night and One Monday We Killed Them All. Great stories. The Travis McGee books are small beer compared to the stand-alones (the greatest is The Last One Left); the stand-alones are real American literature -- rough, sure, but so's Thomas Wolfe. These books taught me how to write stories."

--from The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook (2010) Edited by Daniel Alarcón

(Interestingly, the three titles King cites were all written in the sixties, not the fifties.)

The Empty Trap

2011-10-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Empty Trap is one of my all-time favorite John D MacDonald novels. I felt that way the first time I read the novel back in 1975 and have confirmed my opinion every time I have reread it. When tackling it once again for this blog posting I was amazed at how fresh and alive it seemed, and -- re-reading the JDM novels in chronological order -- how sharp a departure it was from the books the author had penned up to this point. Its plot it simplicity itself -- a pulp revenge-morality tale that bears strong resemblance to some of his earlier short stories (see especially his 1953 novella "Death's Eye View") and its protagonist's primary motivation is not redemption but revenge. Yet it's the setting and the secondary characters that bring this tale alive, as well as the interesting, gradual way JDM reveals the past in a series of disjointed flashbacks. And while said protagonist is a MacDonald prototype -- big, athletic, rugged, hardworking, an expert in his field of work -- he is imperfect, in ways that the author had rarely touched on in previous works, with the notable exception of his early novel Weep For Me. Indeed, The Empty Trap reads a lot like a reworking and a kind of penance for Weep for Me, one of only two novels the author didn't ever want reprinted. Gone is the Cainsean sin of fatal impulse, replaced by a nobler imperative, equally mistaken but morally (as MacDonald defines morality) more acceptable.

That's not to say that the book doesn't have problems. The plot itself is rather fantastical, full of all sorts of improbable occurrences, happenstance, near misses and circumstances that beggar belief. The device of using radical plastic surgery to completely fool otherwise intelligent people is laughable at points. And the author's treatment of Mexican Indios as noble creatures, full of ancient wisdoms and without any faults borders on worship, to the point where the reader may begin thinking they are reading some hippie primer from the 1960's. (It brought to mind the old Firesign Theatre bit where the earnest young stoner assures an old Native American: "There's a lot of young people in the country, just like myself, who really know where the Indian's at. And don't worry. Soon we're all gonna be out here on the Reservation, livin' like Indians, 'n' dressin' like Indians and doin' all the simple, Beautiful Things that you Indians do. Hey -- got any peyote?") But these faults are far outweighed by MacDonald's trademark narrative drive, and the novel, once started, really is almost impossible to put down.

And with the exceptions of Weep For Me and Judge Me Not, it's probably as close as MacDonald came to writing noir up to this point in his career, and by that I mean true noir, the form defined by Otto Penzler as "...bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers-people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin." In Weep For Me the protagonist fits the classic mold more so than in The Empty Trap, with Kyle Cameron starting from a place of comfort and, because of one really bad decision, sees his life spiral down into the pits of hell. Technically the same could be said for The Empty Trap, but here the author plays with time in his telling of the tale, and we begin the story where the fruits of his misdeeds are punished, then flip back and forth through flashback to see how he got there. He also uses introspection a lot more here, where the hero examines his past and his motivations, never really understanding them but realizing how he came to be where he is. And Lloyd Wescott, The Empty Trap's hero, is no Kyle Cameron, no listless soul stuck in a low-level job waiting for life to happen. He's a success in his trade, one of the top men in the industry, making his decent into the noir underworld all the more bracing.

The Empty Trap was MacDonald's twenty-first novel, his seventeenth paperback original, his third of four novels written in 1957, and his fifth and last title for Popular Library, a publisher that seemed to have been losing interest in the author. In fact, The Empty Trap suffered from the smallest first run of any JDM paperback ever, with only 72,000 copies printed for a single run. Coming on the heels of Dell's huge printing of The Price of Murder only a few months earlier, one wonders what Popular was thinking. Did they recognize how different this book was from the author's previous efforts? Were they unhappy with the sales of their previous MacDonald effort, Border Town Girl? Or did somebody simply screw up? And since MacDonald was paid not on sales but on the size of the printing runs, he must have received a very modest paycheck for this great book. Perhaps it was MacDonald himself who severed the ties with Popular. The book did not see a second printing until 1967 when Fawcett brought out a new edition, and from that point forward the book went through many printings of over half a million copies.

Another interesting anomaly with this effort is the fact that, for the first time since writing You Live Once, five novels back and two years prior, there was no simultaneous magazine version of the novel published. Cosmopolitan had already printed two JDM titles in 1957, and perhaps wasn't interested in doing another only two months after The Price of Murder. (The Empty Trap was published in December of 1957). Redbook, who had published the condensed version of Murder in the Wind would have likely been put off by the tone and subject matter of the new novel. The only possible market for a book like The Empty Trap would have been a magazine like Argosy, but that didn't happen, and the novel came and went with little notice.

The story of The Empty Trap begins at what seems like the end but turns out in fact to be the middle of the story. Beaten, tortured and bound Lloyd Wescott is sitting between two mob goons in the front seat of a dark blue Chrysler with Nevada plates, riding along a remote and mountainous road in the wilderness of Mexico, en route to his death. Following closely behind is Lloyd's own car, a Pontiac, which carries the dead body of his girlfriend Sylvia. They are coming from several days of hellish treatment in a Mexican motel at the hands of these three men. Lloyd has been burned, slugged and cut, and seems barely alive, but he's luckier that Sylvia, who endured several days of repeated raping before being put to death. Now it's time to kill Lloyd and dispose of the bodies, in Lloyd's own car, over a steep and high cliff where they will likely be found only by the locals, poor Indios who will be more likely to scavenge the wreckage than to call for the police.

Lloyd himself is no mobster but one of MacDonald's best-of-breed professionals, a hotel manager at the top of the industry. In a flashback midway through the novel we learn how Lloyd, already a success in a variety of different hotels, is approached by a guest named Harry Danton. Danton wants to build his own hotel, a gambling resort in Nevada, and he is so impressed by Lloyd's work that he offers him a job: not just to manage the resort but to design it from the ground up. When warned by Lloyd that such an endeavor could easily fail, Danton responds "I'm in a lot of things. People can go broke in any one of them, Wescott. I don't, on account of I always get top people and give them their head." Lloyd has already been warned by a knowable associate that Danton is a mobster, so despite the offer of a relatively free hand and a huge increase in pay, he refuses. But a year later, after changing jobs for the winter, Danton asks again and Lloyd accepts.

At that point Lloyd has fallen into the "trap" of the novel's title. Thinking of himself as "one of the good guys" in the "script" of life, he can't imagine himself becoming involved with the mob or being sullied by his association with a known gangster. Losing himself in nonstop work helps this conceit, and it's not until he has a conversation with someone long after the Hotel Green Oasis is up and running and a roaring success, that he recognizes the freedom he has forever lost. It begins when Danton decides to move his headquarters from Detroit to the hotel, living in a small bungalow beside the main building. He brings with him three hoodlums, the three who eventually are sent to kill Lloyd, and later he brings a new wife, Sylvia. Unlike most of the brain-dead bimbos that Danton previously had hanging around him, Sylvia is different. When told that she is a lounge singer Lloyd imagines "a brass-haired blonde going to seed, with the gutter voice of the blues shouter," but when he actually meets her she is anything but:

"She was a long-bodied girl, medium tall, narrow of waist, sleek of leg. Her black hair was of a soft texture and it was pulled back into a bun...Her eyes were a deep brown, almost black, her face well-cut and delicate, her smile warm and personal...Her voice was low, well-modulated, her diction precise."

Danton asks Lloyd to show Sylvia around the hotel and the two end up in one of the establishment's many drinking holes. An initial air of courtesy quickly gives way to animosity as Lloyd admits that he and Danton's mobsters were surprised at how classy Sylvia turned out to be. There follows an amazing piece of JDM backstory as Sylvia, in an attempt to shock and anger Lloyd, tells her the background of her life. It's one of those short-story-within-a-novel bits that MacDonald had mastered early in his novel-writing career and did better than almost anyone else. Speaking of herself in the third person, she begins:

"So take Sylvia at fourteen. She looked eighteen. A kid from Hell's Kitchen. A tough bastard of a kid with a whore mother and an unknown father. She was tough through and through and you don't lose that kind of toughness, my friend... She knew every filthy trick in the books and got picked up helping the other kids roll a lush, and got sent to one of those schools and got out by knocking out a matron with a Coke bottle. That was twelve years ago, Lloyd. How am I doing?"

He was shocked by the whispered vehemence of her words. "You've come a long way."

"Before I was fifteen I was traveling with a syndicate car thief named Joey Tower. He got hot so they transferred him to the west coast and I went along. My hair was bleached white. I wore sweaters two sizes too small. I talked with a whine and the language would make a truck driver shiver. But Joey's boss saw something in the slut, and cut Joey out, with a little help from the slut, who was a very greedy child, and still is."

"Sylvia, I--"

"You started the needle job, and you're going to listen..."

And on it goes for three densely-packed pages as we learn how this tramp became a lady, working her way through one gangster after another, dealing dirty and getting people killed, until she ultimately ended up a singer in a "sour little club," billed as "the ex-darling of mobland," doing a routine that contained "some very blue material." (A sure sign in MacDonald's moral universe that she had indeed hit bottom.) After she goads Lloyd into telling his very dull life story, she is nearly brought to tears.

"I need to stop feeling so damn sorry for myself all the time. I've felt that way for years. I wanted to shock you. I wanted you to come up with a lot of asinine questions. But you put me very neatly in my place. I thought I was being dramatic. I guess I was being silly."

"Just a little bit silly. Not enough to count."

"All I ever really wanted was a guy with one drug store who could maybe build it up to three. You're going to be good for me, Lloyd. You have...balance."

The new marriage quickly sours and Lloyd finds that he can't get Sylvia out of his mind. When he sees her a week after their initial meeting, she is morose and withdrawn. They talk for a while and the subject turns to Lloyd's relationship with Danton.

Lloyd: "He's left me alone."

Sylvia: "Try to leave and see."

He stared at her. "I could give notice and leave. Why not?"

"You could be desk clerk in a flea bag. You'll never get a good job managing a good hotel. Not for long. Not in this country. And I know just how he'd fix you. Through the unions. Hiring you would be a guarantee of a walkout on some other pretext. Harry never lets people go. He likes them to try it, though, because he likes to have them crawl back."

"He's no monster!"

"Of course not. In his business there are certain rules. He's carried those rules over from the rackets to the legit enterprises. Nobody leaves. No top people. You're in for life. But don't kick about it. You have it good."

Lloyd is astounded (he's apparently never read anything about the mob before!) and he tests Sylvia's assertion by going to Danton, who, in a fairly nice way (for a mobster) confirms the claim.

Lloyd: "What you're saying is, I work for you from here on in."

Harry stood up. "Is that so bad? Am I some clown? Isn't the pay right? Listen, I'll tell you something. In every business they got key personnel, right? Okay, you're key personnel. In a lot of businesses they got a turnover problem with key personnel. G.E. has it. General Motors has it. Even the Air Force has it. But you know what ratio of turnover I run on key personnel? None. No ratio at all. I don't want you trying to spoil my record, kid. If right now you got an itch, that's okay. It's letdown. You've worked like a dog. Tell you what you do. Draw a thousand and take off for a week. The house won't fall down. Go away someplace. Go get laid."

"Thanks, Harry. I'm not that restless. I was just thinking."

"Don't think too much."

It is at this point that the novel begins to borrow heavily from the plot of Weep For Me, as Lloyd and Sylvia fall in love and decide to run away together. They plan a massive theft from the hotel's casino, and it comes off without a hitch. They jump into Lloyd's Pontiac and head to Mexico, making it to Juarez in three days. Their plan, right out of Weep For Me, is to use a portion of their stolen loot to purchase citizenship in an unnamed South American country, far enough away from Harry Danton to finally feel safe. But Sylvia will never feel safe.

The increasing distance had not given her peace of mind. Rather she had seemed to grow more frightened, day by day, pale, nervous, irritable.

"We're safe now," he told her.

"We'll never be safe. We shouldn't have done it. We shouldn't have tried to do it, Lloyd. We were crazy to try it. We were insane to even think of it. You don't know what they're capable of. You don't know how he'll feel about this. He can't let a thing like this go. We'll never be safe."

"Don't worry about it. Let me take care of things."

"You can't take care of things. You don't understand them. You don't know how they are."

Her fear is real enough for Lloyd to take one precaution, a move that will further the plot along later in the novel when it's time for revenge. He takes a portion of the loot, forty thousand dollars, stuffs it in a peanut brittle jar and hides it under the floorboard of the motel room.

Of course they are caught -- Danton's three mobsters have located them fairly easily -- and they suffer at their hands for several days in a locked motel room. It is at this point that "boy scout" Lloyd Wescott realizes the truth of the world, that there is no good or bad, no cosmic justice, no moral compass, only strength and survival and the white-hot emotion of hatred.

"Lloyd sat with his chin on his chest, the tears running out of his eyes, breathing hard, sobbing against the gag. He could smell the rich stink of his burned chest and belly, his burned feet. He knew he could never be the same person again. He knew he could not go back to what he had been before. He had learned, abruptly, a special kind of hatred. He thought he could not hate any more violently than he did in those moments. Yet an hour later the hatred was stronger. The next hour tempered it, like a cherry red blade thrust into the quenching oil...

"The script was wrong. There were always the good guys and the bad guys. And the beautiful woman. Lloyd had known all his life that he was one of the good guys. That made it simple, because then you always knew how it came out. The good guy and the beautiful girl would always get into one hell of a mess, but something always happened just at the very last minute, just when they both seemed doomed. Something happened. The bonds were worked loose, and you felled the bad guys with a chair. Or the cops came. Or the cavalry. It usually happened just when they were getting set to torture you. But something was wrong with this script and they went right ahead and did it. It didn't happen in the nick of time. The nick of time went right on by while you screamed and screamed on to a bloody towel. And always the beautiful girl was threatened by a fate worse than death. And they never quite got to her. They made some error in timing, or they left a gun around loose. But this nick of time went right on by too."

And soon thereafter we arrive at... the beginning of the novel. Lloyd's push off of the Mexican cliff nearly kills him but of course it doesn't. He is thrown from the car and lands on a convenient tree sticking out the side of the cliff. His efforts to get his already-tortured and now broken body off the tree and safely down to the bottom where there is a small river are painstakingly detailed, as MacDonald ventures into Jack London literary country. And this is how much of the beginning of the novel is told, with the backstory haltingly revealed in sporadic flashback. Lloyd is eventually rescued by a Mexican Indio, a member of a small and remote village, whose people are victims of some sort of tribal warfare that has left them outcasts. This allows MacDonald the time and the solitude to have Lloyd slowly heal without any news of his survival getting back to Danton. It also gives the author a chance to revel in his knowledge of Mexico, a country he took his family to live when he was a struggling pulp writer, and more importantly, to express his singular love of the people of this country.

As we are shifted back and forth in time, from the "present" of Lloyd's reoperation to the past of the events that brought him here, we slowly learn about the people of this village, their nobility, their simplicity, their open caring for a stranger in distress. And naturally there's a girl, just as there was a girl in Weep for Me (Adela) and a girl in "Border Town Girl" (Felicia). Here she is named Isabella, but she might as well have been either of the other two named characters, for she serves the same purpose and is essentially the same character. Not as strikingly beautiful as Adela, Isabella is described as a simple girl, one Lloyd wouldn't have looked twice at in his former life, but here she is pretty enough to strike a chord within him.

Usually it was the girl who took care of him. Her name was Isabella, and often they called her 'Bella or 'Bellita. She seemed to be seventeen or eighteen, a sturdy girl with a broad brown face in which he saw a family resemblance to the three boys, with black thick brows, black braided hair coarse and shiny as the tail hair of a black horse. She came to feed him and care for his needs during the day when the others worked, came to him smelling of sun and the fields and of sweat, impersonally gentle, sometimes crooning to him with the reassuring sounds you make to a small child. He knew she was not directly of this family, yet somehow related.

It is Isabella, young, unmarried Isabella who nurses Lloyd back to life over the many months it takes for him to recuperate, and eventually they couple and produce a child. But Lloyd cannot stay here in this bucolic setting, a place where he has been accepted and where hard work in the fields under a blazing sun has helped bring him back to life. He explains it to the villagers one evening, and they understand completely.

"I feel it is necessary [to tell you all]." He found himself looking at Isabella. She was looking down at her clasped hands. "The money and the woman. They were not mine. I took them. I was followed." He looked around at impassive faces. "But a thing cannot be black or white. I was a thief when I took the money, but that money had been stolen from others. I was a thief when I took the woman, but she was gentle and unhappy and often beaten. She asked me to take her away, and I wished to give her happiness. The men found us. My actions were not honorable, perhaps. But their actions were the actions of animals. With me and with the woman. Most of all with the woman, before one of them killed her. That is why it is necessary to kill them.

I will not be a man again until that is done."

It was not something he could have said in his own land in his own tongue without feeling ridiculously melodramatic. And he wondered whether the need to kill would have been as understandable even to himself in another place and time. Yet here it was perfectly clear, and he could see that [they] accepted it.

Here there was no talk of the futility of revenge. This was a mission of honor.

And so Lloyd leaves, first to reclaim the hidden stash of loot in the motel room, then to a plastic surgeon in Mexico City to repair his horribly damaged face. Then it's on to the Hotel Green Oasis...

I wish I could better explain why it is that I love this novel so much. It's certainly not the simplistic revenge plot, or the naive and romantic portrait of a more primitive people, or even the redemptive love experienced between Lloyd and Isabella. I think it has more to do with MacDonald's telling of the tale, his experiments with time, revealing two sections of Lloyd's experience in alternating chronological order. And the revenge part is pretty satisfying, I have to admit, even if it is tempered to an extent in the end (read it yourself to find out what I mean). But what I think I really like about this book is JDM's attempt to improve on a failure, or at least what he perceived to be a failure. He obviously loved the idea of escaping to Mexico with a beautiful babe and a stash of stolen cash, and he does tell it much better here than he did in Weep For Me. And I love the idea of redemption, of taking what even MacDonald must have realized was becoming a kind of archetypal hero in his own fiction and making him more flawed than perhaps even he as the author was comfortable with. The background of Sylvia, for example, would have consigned her to an early and deserved death in one of his earlier short stories or novels, but here -- even though she does pay the ultimate price -- is dealt with compassionately and with some degree of understanding. MacDonald was indeed growing as an artist.

And I really, really love the ending of this book, which according to my own rules of this blog I can't discuss. It's a decent into a noir world that eventually leads to.... no, I can't. You have to read this book.

As far as I can tell, and as best as bibliographer Walter Shine could research, there was only one contemporary book review for The Empty Trap when it was published in December 1957. Not surprisingly it was by MacDonald champion Anthony Boucher, who wrote in his New York Times column Criminals at Large:

"In John D Macdonald's The Empty Trap, a man left for dead by gangster assassins is nursed back to life by an isolated Mexican community in the mountains of Queretaro. Recovered, he is pulled in various directions by the kingdom concept of revenge-killing, by the local code of manly honor, and by his own upbringing which makes killing impossible. MacDonald has taken some familiar elements of the gangster novel, developed them brutally and even shockingly -- and looked behind them to write a book that is a novel rather than a shocker."

When Fawcett reprinted the novel in 1967 the book got a lot more press, much of it very favorable. The Toledo Blade said "Like all MacDonald novels of recent years, this is absolutely top-notch and eminently readable. In our opinion, the man can do no wrong." (I'm guessing the reviewer didn't bother to look at the original copyright date.) The Springfield Journal and Register wrote "Let's face it, there just isn't anybody around today turning out suspense-sex-adventure stories like MacDonald... [He] has been increasingly prolific and amazingly consistently good for the size of his literary output. This brisk, crisp and often downright brutal tale is one of the better ones, even for him." And the Montclair-Piedmont Spectator out of Oakland, California went completely overboard, stating that "MacDonald may be the very best story teller in American history." (OK, I won't argue with that one.)

The first edition cover features two scenes that give the would-be reader a clue about the dichotomy of worlds featured in the story. To the right and largely filling the frame is a sultry blonde with a trio of grinning thugs behind her. If this is supposed to be the motel scene it has some curious features, including a blonde Sylvia (she was brunette) looking very unlike anyone who is about to undergo what she is about to. Below that the smaller figures of an injured Lloyd being nursed by Earth Mother Isabella. Above the art is a quote from Real Magazine which may or may not be "real," as Walter Shine was never able to uncover a copy of the review it came from. The artwork, which has an almost seedy, unfinished quality to it, was uncredited.

And the cover for the first Fawcett version of the novel, published in April 1967, was also uncredited. It's a somewhat unremarkable illustration of a woman carrying a hat bag and an overcoat walking away from the viewer down a very wide hotel lobby. The green carpet looks almost alive.This cover was retained for Fawcett's second printing in 1969, but by 1971 it had been dispensed with and replaced with a Robert McGinnis lovely wearing a bikini and standing in front of a large Aztec sun. This version was retained for a total of five printings, through 1980. Finally, in 1982 William Schmidt created one of his best paintings for the final four printings, featuring a large vulture sitting on the makeshift grave of poor Sylvia, her arm sticking out between the stones.

Just as John D MacDonald wasn't through with the themes and plot devices he had begun to explore in Weep For Me, so too was he not finished with the doors he had opened with The Empty Trap. Three years later he came back to the world of hotel management in the darker, more mature The Only Girl in the Game. It's an amazing job of plot reconstruction, taking a similar tale with similar characters (the mob is again involved) and leading it down a completely different path. It will be quite some time before I get around to dealing with that wonderful novel (there are ten JDM books between these two) but Jared Shurin, who helps write the great Pornokitch blog, has recently published an insightful piece at Tor.com comparing the two novels. It's highly recommending reading, which you can find here.

The Empty Trap, long out of print, is is readily available from all the usual used booksellers on the web.

JDM: War Remembrance

2011-10-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

It is 1944 and I am atChabua in Assam, up in northIndia, trying to hitch aride in a cargo C-46 or C-47 over the hump to Kunming. A major of engineers asks me if Ican help him. I am a captain in the ordnance department. He explains hisproblem and I go with him in his jeep through the stifling heat to a big fieldwhere hundreds and hundreds of trucks sit rotting and rusting in the tropic sunand rain.

Madame Chiang had addresseda joint meeting of the House and Senate and steamed them up about sending morehelp to China.All these new vehicles had been coming up the funny railroad from Calcutta as part of theresult of her plea. The Burma Road was not finished.They were too big to be sent into China by air. So there they sat, agiant khaki-drab, depressing used-truck lot. We went to the oldest sector ofthe field, where the staunch and familiar 6 by 6 trucks had been parked for ayear.

Jungly green was growing upthrough them and around them. The rubber was pulp, the insulation slime, thegears rusted shut.

"You want towhat?" I asked.

"Up near Hell Gap, wegot this damn bottomless hole. Been having them Kachins head-carry tons of rockin them little baskets. Sinks out of sight. We hook onto a couple dozen of thisjunk and haul them up and push them into the hole, they'll sink down in thatswamp and get wedged and we can build the road across them."

"Why me?"

"Is this stuffworthless junk?"

"Certainly."

"Can't get any of thesesupply-wallahs to authorize a thing. Had a requisition in for weeks. Got to geton with the road. You're up from Delhi.They'll buy any headquarters signature. Just twenty of them. What do yousay?"

I hung around and watched themyank the first two out of the vines and mud, onto a big flatbed. There was adisconsolate look about them. We weren't meant to be under the road, they said.

In the late afternoon Ihitched my ride. We went way above the operational ceiling of the C-47 to avoidbad icing conditions, but when we came back through it for the Kunming landingat 6000 feet, we iced up heavily and I thought I was about to be punished forfavoring logic over protocol, but we landed like a giant chandelier, and I feltI had been forgiven, or at least given a remission.

from "Farewell, MyLovely Machine," a piece about automobiles that was published in the July1982 issue of the JDM Bibliophile.

JDM: Meyer or McGee?

2011-10-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Almost from the moment JohnD MacDonald created his famous series character Travis McGee, he began gettingasked if McGee was in fact the author's alter-ego. It seems like an unlikelyquestion to me, comparing a beach bum to a guy who sits in a room typing allday, but McGee's characteristic asides on the nature of modern civilization areprobably what drove people to assume that McGee and MacDonald were --figuratively -- one in the same. MacDonald denied it, of course, and he evenwent as far as to proclaim that McGee's asides were not necessarily his (JDM's)own opinions. "His opinions are notmy opinions," he wrote. "In some, they are -- though in varyingdegrees of strength and conviction."

As the character of Meyerwas gradually introduced into the novels, another strain of author-charactercomparisons were begun, with readers assuming that Meyer was MacDonald. Again,JDM said no, although he admitted that his own personality was closer to Meyer'sthan to McGee's. Once, MacDonald's wife Dorothy, when asked by reporter EdHutshing if Travis McGee was based on her husband, reportedly laughed and saidno, that if John was anyone in the McGee saga he was Meyer. And in a 1990speech at the Third JDM Conference in in Ft. Lauderdale,son Maynard MacDonald said:

"Someone said thisevening, 'Did my father know a person -- was there someone in his life -- whowas like Meyer was to Travis?' I said 'No, actually Travis McGee really wasvery representative of my father with that tremendous sense of rightness andjustice -- but Meyer is also like him. If you put Meyer and Travis togetherthen you get someone who is very like John D.'"

In 1986, the last year JohnD MacDonald was alive, he was approached by psychologist Raymond J. Fowler, a professor-emeritus atthe University of Alabama and the presidentof the American Psychological Association. Fowler, who must have been a TravisMcGee fan, proposed an interesting experiment. MacDonald would take the MinnesotaMultiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a test that was designed to provide areasonably accurate idea of the personality of the taker. He would take it onceas John D MacDonald, then again as Travis McGee, and finally as Meyer. Theresults would be compiled through "an elaborate system of computeranalyses and interpretations," allowing Fowler to come to some sort ofconclusion as to which character MacDonald resembled.

In an article published inthe November 1986 issue of Psychology Today titled "The Case of theMulticolored Personality," Fowler made these conclusions:

Meyer and MacDonald are somuch alike that a clinician looking at the two profiles might assume that theywere the MMPI's of the same person a few years apart. Both are dominant, self-confidentindividuals who are able to define their goals and to move resolutely towardtheir attainment. They are self-assured and likely to be demanding in theirexpectations of themselves and of others. They are intellectually aggressiveand somewhat self-centered. Both prefer thought to action, and theiraggressiveness is more likely to be verbal than physical.

Neither Meyer nor MacDonaldfeels much need to change. Neither is troubled by anxiety, depression orsomatic problems. Both are accustomed to being viewed as competent and bothfeel that they deserve the respect they receive from others. Both are dominantin a positive sense. Neither is a shrinking violet; neither is dependent orbitter. Both are survivors; that is, they feel that they have the intelligence,competence and resilience to cope with tough situations and to deal with lifeeffectively.

McGee is an entirelydifferent person from Meyer or MacDonald. He is tougher, more aggressive andmuch more physical than either. He is no intellectual -- Meyer refers to himaffectionately as an illiterate -- but he is much too complicated to beconsidered a dumb jock. He has almost as much need for status as Meyer andMacDonald, a bit more anxiety, and is much less satisfied with himself.

McGee is a creature ofMacDonald's imagination who has almost no similarities to MacDonald inpersonality, behavior or life-style. Meyer, on the other hand, could well becalled MacDonald's alter ego. Intelligent and thoughtful, with a great store ofinformation and an ability to stand back and consider before acting, Meyerplays a vital role for McGee and perhaps for MacDonald as well. Meyer providesMacDonald with an opportunity to enter McGee's life, to talk with him, advisehim and react to him. Although McGee is the narrator, it is through the eyes ofMeyer, and therefore MacDonald, that we see Travis McGee's world.

Dorothy MacDonald knew herman... or men.

"Pickup"

2011-09-25T01:51:00.000-07:00

Of all of the numerous andvaried magazines that published John D MacDonald's short fiction over theyears, two hold the record for "most appearances." The first, notsurprisingly, was a pulp: Dime Detective, where from 1946 to 1952, thirty-nineJDM stories appeared in 36 separate issues. The other may be a bit of a shockto modern readers (but not to faithful readers of this blog), especiallyconsidering the current personality of the magazine in question. From 1947 to1975 Cosmopolitan magazine published 36 issues containing MacDonald's fiction,fiction that spanned the gamut from short story to novella to"full-length" (read: condensed) novels. The numbers break downthusly: 13 short stories, five novellas and a whopping 18 novels. The short storiesinclude two of his very, very best work ("The Bear Trap" and"Hangover"), while his novellas include "The Impulse,"which was adapted for television as an first-season episode of Thriller(re-titled "The Fatal Impulse"). The novels were all works that werepublished in concert with their appearance in book form, eithercontemporaneously or several months prior to hitting the bookstands.

Aside from the fact thatCosmopolitan paid substantially more than the two-cents-a-word rate common inthe pulp world, it afforded the author a significantly larger audience, and --believe it or not -- a more upscale audience, a fact that must beggar belief toanyone looking at the covers of recent issues of this woman's magazine. Withheadlines such as "Guys Rate 50 Sex Movies," "How to Outsmart aBitch." "50 Things to Do Butt Naked" and the highly doubtful"The Sex Article We Can't Describe Here!" it is completelyunderstandable that most modern readers have difficulty wrapping their headsaround the fact that Cosmopolitan began life as a premier fiction magazine, andthat it once led with fiction, and even that it once marketed itself withoutprejudice to either gender. Helen GurleyBrown changed all that when she took over as editor in 1965, but even then thechange was gradual. Back in its heyday Cosmopolitan was a highly respectedpublisher of fiction -- popular fiction, to be sure -- but fiction nonetheless,featuring authors of every level of the business, including Ernest Hemmingway,Ambrose Bierce, Sinclair Lewis, Damon Runyon, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton andA.J. Cronin.

After World War II themagazine shifted slightly and began including many popular writers, somegraduating from the then-dying pulps, and including names like John Cheever,A.A. Milne, Mary Roberts Reinhart, Agatha Christie, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,Patricia Highsmith, Ian Fleming and, of course, John D MacDonald.

MacDonald's first sale toCosmopolitan took place in 1947 with the publication of his crime tale"The Pay-Off". It was the author's third sale to a large-circulationslick magazine, following appearances in Esquire and Liberty. "Pickup" was published thefollowing year, in the February 1948 issue. It's not a mystery and contains nocrime whatsoever, unless one considers a tired premise and an artificialsituation as crimes. It certainly has the feel of the author "writing tomarket," despite his protestations that he never did such a thing. Worstof all, it features a female protagonist -- thankfully revealed in the thirdperson -- who is dealing with decidedly female problems, and if MacDonald hadany weakness, it was getting inside the heads of women. Not that he couldn't doit on occasion, usually with secondary characters, but the author's singularability to create fictional people who seem uncannily real seemed to fail himwhen it came to the ladies. Examples include Alice Furmon in Contrary Pleasure,Judy Jonah in All These Condemned or Ginny Sherrel in Murder in the Wind. (Hisbad girls, on the other hand, are usually marvelous creations.)

There's nothing really wrongwith MacDonald's depiction of Catherine, the subject of "Pickup," butthen there's nothing really deep about her either. JDM's attempts at meaningfulintrospection in Catherine are done so with overly-florid language that makesit seem like a smokescreen, covering up something the author really didn'tunderstand. In the end "Pickup" is unsatisfying and almost trite,although it's subject matter is anything but, and one gets the feeling that inmore competent (and female) hands, this could have been a deeper story.

Catherine Hazard is a younghousewife, the mother of two young children and married to Carl, a man twelveyears her senior. The family lead a seemingly happy and fulfilling life in amidsized city -- Carl has a good job as an accountant with a buildingcontractor and Catherine is a stay-at-home mom (this is, after all, America in1948). But something is not right, at least with Catherine. A darkness iscreeping into her soul, an emptiness whose cause she is unable to identify.

"[She] looked out thewide front window, saw the street distorted by the large wet flakes that meltedagainst the glass -- and something in the wet asphalt's shining, somethingabout the yellow of the early street lights, the soggy fall of snow, called upthe feeling of emptiness, of strangeness that had haunted her for over amonth."

As she awaits the arrival ofher two children from grade school, she contemplates her husband Carl's returnfrom work at five and it brings another dark shadow across her mind.

"Thinking of himbrought back the new dark feeling of aloneness, and she knew that it was tiedup with him somehow, but there was no way for her to find out. The new feelingwas something restless within her that receded as she tried to grasp it, tofind its component parts, its chemical analysis."

She wonders if this firstautumn with both kids out of the house during the day has brought about herfeelings, with the silences offering more time to think about herself.

"[As she looked aroundthe house, it] looked different. She saw frayed edges where before she had seennewness and adequacy. She felt the smallness of the house; the constriction andtension building within her was like a spring, which, if released, wouldflatten the walls, send the roof sailing off, open the square rooms to the graysky above."

This foreboding fades awayas the kids come in and, later, Carl arrived home. This is the typicalMacDonald family unit, one he used in virtually all of his early This Weekstories, where there was never any gloom or feelings of doom, and here we arepresented with the hardworking husband, weary from work but shrugging off thatweariness once he sees his wife and kids. And MacDonald is at pains to depictCatherine as a good wife, loving, supportive and properly domesticated. Afterdinner she has more housework to do, but with the kids put to bed all shewants to do is "sit and look at Carl's strong square hands holding the[newspaper.]" When Carl gets up and announces that he has to return towork for a few hours, Catherine sees the weariness in his eyes "and she[wants] to hold him tightly, somehow to rest and restore him." Even atroubled housewife in 1948 couldn't resist her innate impulse to be an EarthMother.

Carl senses something wrongwith his wife and asks her about it. Catherine deflects any idea that theremight be something wrong, but when Carl shrugs off his concern by blaming"the old differential" --their pronounced difference in ages -- Catherine inwardly wonders if he has puthis finger on exactly what ails her.

"There had been dancingand music and brightness, and in the middle of it all Carl had come along, withhis steady eyes and gentle hands, and before long the world had become a placefull of grocery bills and washing and cleaning and formulas and bitter fightswith the man from the diaper service. Maybe the sense of loneliness came fromthe thought of time going by, each second a knife that neatly sliced off asmall chunk of the only life given her."

A few moments later thedoorbell rings and it is the babysitter, arriving on the wrong night. ButCatherine urges her to stay and watch the kids anyway so she can go out for along walk, to be by herself for a while and contemplate her feelings. Herefollows many column inches of prose as Catherine wanders the snow-coveredstreets, looking at life going on around her. She spends a few minutes in ahotel lobby, imagines herself to be an actress in a movie, fends off a would-besuitor who offers to buy her a drink, and without realizing it, begins to weep.

On her way home she iswalking down her street when a car comes up behind her and follows. Catherinebegins to walk faster, but the horn beeps a familiar beep and she turns to seeher own car with Carl behind the wheel.

Carl: "You going myway, lady?"

Catherine (affectingcoyness): "And what way would you be going?"

Carl: "Oh, I thought Imight go out on the turnpike and buy a beer or two. Come along. I'mharmless."

Now if this were a reallycool John D MacDonald pulp tale, Carl would be someone else -- a "sexmaniac" or something -- and Catherine would be in a in a mood to expiateher depression with a mad fling, only to be terribly sorry for doing so onceshe got into the car (see "Jail Bait"). Or even better, Carl would behimself, but suffering some sort of psychotic reverie, and it's later revealedthat he has been secretly trying to kill Catherine since last year! ("Mr.Killer") But no, this is a JDM social tale, so the reader has to sufferthrough an extended scene of this married couple pretending to be strangers,the only way -- apparently -- that they can reveal their true hearts to eachother. The ending of "Pickup" is as glib as anything MacDonald was ever guilty of writing.

MacDonald continued to penthese kinds of "women's stories" throughout his career, and the pagesof magazines like McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion andRedbook are full of them. He got better as he went along, and some of thesestories are incredibly well done. It should be remembered that "Pickup"was published only nine months after he had his first story published in a realmagazine, so I suppose I should cut him some slack. Yet when the ultimate JohnD MacDonald short story anthology is finally published (yes, I'm dreaming),"Pickup" shouldn't be included.

MacDonald was rarely whatone could call a pretentious writer. He dealt straightforwardly with hissubject matter and told a tale as well as any writer who ever lived. Yet hisinvention of story titles reveals a side to him that the general reading publicdidn't see. In the case of "Pickup," MacDonald should have gottendown on his knees and thanked fiction editor Dale Eunson for sparing him theembarrassment of his original title: "A Soupcon of Despair."

The MacDonalds were livingin Clinton, New York when JDM wrote this story, and werestill there when it was published. He wrote a column for the local paper duringthose day, and he mentioned "Pickup" in one of his rare moments ofself-revelation. Under the headline "ADVERTISEMENT" he wrote (usingthat annoying royal "we"):

Strange things happen inthis business of putting words on paper, and in the interests of breaking awrist, slapping our own back, and in order to bolster the sagging newstandsales of our major masterworks, we herewith record this one.

This is the month in whichwe became the composite author, the cross section of American scribblers. Allat the same time, and all on the same newstand we were shocked to findourselves published as follows:

One gentle little love storyin Cosmopolitan entitled "Pickup."

One humorous story in BlueBook entitled "The Pastel Production Line."

One sports story in SportsFiction entitled "Punch Your Way Home".

One story of politics andmurder in New Detective entitled "One Vote for Murder."

One psychological crimestory in Dime Detective entitled "High Walls of Hate."

One worlds-of-the-futurestory in [Astounding] Science Fiction entitled "Cosmetics".

The thing which gives uspause is the fact that not yet have we ever written a story of which we arecompletely proud. We are serving an apprenticeship to the Angry Gods of theTypewriter, but we can't bury our lesser efforts. We have to sell them for grocerymoney. It's a good thing they don't let doctors practice this way.

Any one of those otherstories sound better than "Pickup," a JDM effort that has never beenanthologized.

Story art by Tom Lovell

Schmidt on JDM and Dorothy

2011-09-18T02:22:00.000-07:00

The only time I ever sawJohn lose his temper was in defense of [his wife] Dorothy. We were covering theCoppolino trial in Naples [Florida], and at the trial was an actor bythe name of Brad Dexter. His claim to fame was that he had appeared in a moviewith Frank Sinatra called Never So Few [sic]. In the process of this movie,when they were filming -- it was a World War II movie -- they were storming thebeaches. Sinatra and Brad Dexter and all the actors were disembarking from theLST, and Sinatra happened to fall into a sink hole and was about to drown.Dexter was a much larger man, and he reached over and pulled him out by thecollar, saved his life. It was a matter of weeks that Dexter was a producer in Hollywood.

He happened to show up atthe Coppolino trial in Naplesbecause he was producing a movie called The Lawyer, based loosely on the SamShepherd case. That eventually evolved into a TV series called Petrocelli.

Anyway, during one of thebreaks in the trial, John and Dorothy and myself, along with other reporters,were gathered around the coffee bar. Dexter and F. Lee Bailey had come backfrom a three or four martini lunch. Dexter was using some really foul language,and John cautioned him not to do that. Not only was Dorothy there, but TheoWilson, a [female] reporter for the New York Daily News among other women[were] standing around. He persisted, and you could just see John starting toturn red. Finally he challenged the guy. Doc Quade, a reporter for the UnitedPress International and myself had to physically restrain John from going afterBrad Dexter because he could not tolerate that kind of language or thatdisrespect. Dexter backed down; he left and he never came back -- he didn'tappear in the courtroom after that. In fact, I never saw him again after that.

Dorothy was a veryimportant, a very important part of his life. After every session of the trial,we would go back to the apartment. We stayed at the Edgewater Beach Hotel.Dorothy was always there with cherry tomatoes and cashew nuts, and all thesecheeses and snacks; and we would sit and rehash the whole day's trial. Shewould give her input and she was part of the whole creative process. She was awonderful, wonderful person...

John was very high on JackLord [portraying Travis McGee in the movies]. Jack Lord in his early careerplayed in a very short-lived TV show called Stoney Burke. John and Dorothy wereboth fans of the show, and we thought that Jack Lord had expressed an interestin playing Travis McGee. I remember John telling me he had all the moves. Hehad the look of a sailor. He would probably be good for the part, and thenLord... started appearing in Hawaii Five-O. He was still interested in TravisMcGee, but Dorothy watched his performance and she finally said, "John,all he does is act with his teeth!" And that was the end of Travis. JackLord, he lost his chance to play Travis McGee. She was a wonderful person; Johnwas a wonderful man. I was fortunate in knowing them when I was in my earlytwenties, and... he was a very fatherly figure.

-- Journalist John PeteSchmidt, JDM friend and collaborator, reminiscing at the Sixth JDM Conference(November 1996) in Sarasota, Florida. A transcription of thepanel discussion appeared in the 59th issue of the JDM Bibliophile. Schmidtworked with MacDonald on his 1968 Coppolino book No Deadly Drug.

"Spectator Sport"

2011-09-12T03:22:00.000-07:00

John D MacDonald's"Spectator Sport" originally appeared in the February 1950 issue ofThrilling Wonder Stories. Often cited by critics as one of MacDonald's verybest science fiction efforts, its subjects include time travel, virtualreality, an impersonal bureaucracy, human ambition, and a decaying society, alldone nicely in the relatively short space of 2,200 words. It was included inthe author's 1978 SF anthology Other Times, Other Worlds, where editor MartinH. Greenberg referred to the story as "a minor classic," and it hasbeen included in at least three other SF anthologies, beginning in 1952, onlytwo years after it was originally published. What's more, in the sixty-oneyears since the story was written it has proven to be incredibly prescient, anticipatingthe invention, popularity and enervating effects of video games, although weare (thankfully) no where near the stage they exist in "SpectatorSport." Best of all, this is a great yarn, as enjoyable and as readableas anything MacDonald ever wrote, with an ending that -- for the lovers of thewritten word -- takes one's breath away.

"Spectator Sport"begins in much the same vein as another, earlier JDM SF tale, "The Miniature," although in this story the protagonist has arrived in thefuture by his own design and knows exactly why he is there. Dr. Rufus Maddon isa scientist who has studied and written on the physics of time, and who --along with a group of other like-minded experts -- has finally perfected ameans to travel into the future. Maddon is chosen as the first to try this newdevice, and he transports himself 400 years into future America, intothe same city from whence he came. Expecting to appear to the inhabitants of2350 as a barbarian, he is astounded to find things relatively the same.Relatively.

"There was a generalair of disrepair. Shops were boarded up. The pavement was broken and potholed.A few automobiles traveled on the broken streets. They, at least, appeared tobe of a slightly advanced design, but they were dented, dirty and noisy... ashe reached the familiar park... his consternation arose from the fact that [it]was all too familiar. Though it was a tangle of weeds the equestrian statue ofGeneral Murdy was still there in deathless bronze, liberally decorated by pigeons...Clothes had not changed nor had common speech. He wondered if the transfer hadgone awry, if this world were something he was dreaming... He limped out of thepark, muttering, wondering why the park wasn't used, why everyone seemed to bein a hurry... It appeared that in four hundred years nothing at all had beenaccomplished. Many familiar buildings had collapsed. Others still stood. Helooked in vain for a newspaper or a magazine."

Dr. Maddon makes severalattempts to stop pedestrians as they hurry past him. He wants to announcehis presence as the first man to travel through time, but no one is interestedin even stopping. When he grabs one man and turns him around, he is rebuffedand told to "go get a lobe job."

But there is one change thathas occurred in this seemingly decaying future, and it is the prevalence of anumber of "low-slung white panel delivery trucks," all in good repairand all bearing the legend WORLD SENSEWAYS. Upon closer inspection he notices a smaller inscription on the vehicles. Some read Feeder Division,others Hookup Division, and one that reads Lobotomy Division. Unfortunately forDr. Maddon, one such truck featuring the latter inscription pulls up beside himand two husky men get out and force him inside.

The scene shifts and we areinside the office of Roger K. Handriss, the Regional Director of WorldSenseways. He has been informed of the detention and subsequent lobotomizationof one Dr. Rufus Maddon, and has been made aware of his claims that he had comefrom the past. Handriss has been brought the contents of Maddon's pockets, whichinclude some twentieth century change, several membership cards of the era anda letter that references a book on time travel that the good doctor hadwritten. When Handriss confirms that just such a book had been published in1950, he realizes that they have done Maddon "a great wrong." And italso serves as a literary device to allow Handriss to recall the history of theera, and of how things changed only four years after Maddon's time ofdeparture.

"Imagine what it musthave been like in those days, Al. They had the secrets but they didn't begin touse them until -- let me see -- four years later. Aldous Huxley hadalready given them their clue with hisliterary invention of the Feelies. But they ignored him... All their energieswent into wars and rumors of wars and random scientific advancement andsociological disruptions. Of course, with Video on the march at that time, theywere beginning to get a little preview. Millions of people were beginning tosit in front of the Video screens, content even with that crude excuse forentertainment... Now all the efforts of a world society are channeled intoWorld Senseways. There is no waste of effort changing a perfectly acceptablestatus quo. Every man can have Temp and if you save your money you can havePermanent, which they say is as close to heaven as man can get."

When the lobotomized Dr.Maddon is brought into Handriss' office, walking "with the clumsiness ofan overgrown child," Handriss struggles for a way to try and rectify histerrible error. Reeducating him would take to long, and sending him back mightbring a flood of others into the future. No, there is only one thing a compassionatecorporate regional director can do in this situation: allow Maddon a privilegeit takes most men all of their lives to save up for...

Despite MacDonald'sreference to Huxley's 1931 novel Brave New World, the fictional future of thetwo worlds could not be more different. In Huxley's World State,a paternalistic and all-controlling government has made all resources readilyavailable to everyone. It controls population and has eliminated the familyunit. It encourages free sex and conspicuous consumption as a means to providea stable economy and society. Yet both works feature society'srulers keeping its subjects under control with an external device: Huxley's"Feelies" and the drug Soma, World Senseways' Temps and Perms. Inthis respect the theme is the same: a future society built on the control ofits subjects through the supply of endless distractions to those same subjects.Pleasure, rather than pain, is used as the ultimate controlling device.

Yet the difference in thechoice of controlling entity -- government or private industry -- has led somecritics to use "Spectator Sport" as an example of the evils ofcapitalism. Greenberg, in his very brief introduction to the story in OtherVoices, Other Worlds, makes reference to the tale's "nature of reality,capitalism and American culture," and makes direct reference to culturalcritic H. Bruce Franklin, who reportedly "praised" the story for it's"social content." Franklin is a notedcultural historian who has taught at several big universities, includingStanford, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Rutgers. Hehas written extensively on the Viet Nam war, on prison literature, and onscience fiction. He is also a self-proclaimed Marxist. I suppose one'sworldview colors one's observations on just about everything, and so it is withhis opinions about "Spectator Sport." To me it is more than clearthat MacDonald was writing from the Huxleyan point of view, that mankind's"distractions" are a better way to enslave society than using one's fears,but Franklin sees more than that. Despite the fact that JDM was a Keynesian atbest and -- later in life -- fled from that point of view, Franklin sees in "Spectator Sport"a grand dissertation of the evils of capitalism:

"In fact the interlockingAnglo-American empires have decayed so far that they have produced some SF thatdoes indeed border on a Marxist analysis. Advanced state capitalism has nowgiven birth to a whole body of SF works that project the next stages of itsmonstrous cancer. Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, Frederik Pohl and C. M.Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, Pohl's "The Midas Plague," RobertSilverberg's "The Pain Peddlers" and "Company Store,"Robert Sheckley's "Something for Nothing," J. G. Ballard's"Subliminal Man," John D. MacDonald's "Trojan Horse Laugh"and "Spectator Sport"--all these are good projections of whatcapitalism might become if it were not destroyed. But capitalism is in theprocess of extinction, and those who are wiping it out and replacing it with adecent human society are guided by the science of Marxism."

No matter one's politicalpoint of view, I find this an utterly wrongheaded analysis of the story.MacDonald was writing about mankind's need to be distracted, and whether thatneed was met by a benevolent central government or by a global corporate entitywas immaterial to the author. The point was that man will do what man will do,and the easiest way out was the way that would be most readily supplied, be itby government or by private enterprise.

The real genius of"Spectator Sport" is it's precognitive recognition of television asthe ultimate drug. What in 1950 was akind of a novelty, a "radio with pictures," became -- as MacDonaldcorrectly guessed -- the great opiate of the masses. And its interactivestepchild, the video game, -- something MacDonald could have only dreamed up inhis wildest fiction -- is the real prescience of this short story. Anyone whohas ever played a well-crafted, involving game, or who has had a child born inthe gaming age can well attest to JDM's surmise of an outcome. And do we reallyhave to wait 400 years for the future of "Spectator Sport" to arrive?

Used copies of Other Times,Other Worlds are easy to find at relatively low prices. The other anthologiesthat include "Spectator Sport" are Omnibus of Science Fiction: 43Foremost Stories (1952) edited by Groff Conklin (reprinted in 1956 and 1963 asScience Fiction Omnibus), Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales (1963) edited byIsaac Asimov and Groff Conklin, and Science Fiction of the Fifties (1979) editedby Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander.

JDM on Mexico and Mexicans

2011-09-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

Take along your littlephrase books and take a shot at the language everywhere you go except China and France. The Chinese and the Frenchdon't care to have you trying to speak their language. Both of thosecivilizations think they are placed at the exact center of the known universe,and foreigners had best stick to their own barbaric gabbings and not sully thebest language in the world by trying to speak it, no matter how fluently.

A pretty Chinese woman in Mexico explained to me why, when I had beenstationed in Chinasome years ago, they absolutely refused to understand my phonetic Mandarin.

She frowned, trying to thinkhow to explain it to me, and then her expression cleared and she said, "Itwould not be wise to understand your dog if he asked you for a meatloaf, wouldit?" And then she realized what she had said, and blushed. A prettyChinese woman blushing is even prettier than before.

The great shame of the United States citizenry is the huge numbers ofus who go to Mexicoand make absolutely no attempt to speak the simple phrases of courtesy. Buenosdias. Gracias. ¿Como está? Muy bien. Adios.

Of all the people in theworld the Mexicans seem to me to be the ones most anxious to be tolerant ofsomeone stumbling along in their language. Anxious to help/ Never laughing, aswe so often do at the foreigners trying to speak English. It is their country,and making no attempt at all is gross and rude.

I remember being in a smallMexican Supermercado and a tourist man was in there -- purple pants, bluesneakers, yellow shirt and a fresh green palm-front hat. Evidently he couldn'tfind something he wanted and he started yelling, "Dozen no one speakEnglish in this dump? Dozen no one speak English?"

I was of no mood to helphim, and hoped the Mexicans present took me for a German. But one tall elderlyman in wrinkled seersucker went over to him and said, "Yes. Somebody heredoes indeed speak English. One person, and it is certainly not you, you vulgarlittle twit." And with enormous dignity, the Englishman left.

We have driven all over Mexico, gettingalong well enough with our pidgin Spanish, wherein all the verbs are in thepresent tense. I go yesterday. I go tomorrow. Etc. We have broken down on rurallittle roads to nowhere, and have received far more courteous help than wecould have anticipated north of the Rio Grande. It is the way to see the country and thepeople. We buy bread and wine and cheese in little towns and picnic in thehills. They are fabulous instinctive mechanics. One need only look at the ageof the busses that still lumber through the countryside.

-- from "Nice Things toKnow About Traveling" (1983), published in various newspapers throughout the United Statesvia the Chicago Tribune Syndicate.

"I Always Get the Cuties" in EQMM

2011-09-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

Back in February of lastyear when I wrote a piece on John D MacDonald's 1954 short story "I AlwaysGet the Cuties," I based my posting on a version of the story that hadbeen included in a 1998 mystery anthology edited by Billie Sue Mosiman andMartin H. Greenberg titled The Fifth Grave. I recently dug out my copy of theNovember issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine where the story wasoriginally published and was delighted to find a couple of things I hadcompletely forgotten about.

First, this was one ofEQMM's "prize" issues, an annual event where the editors (read:Frederic Dannay) awarded three stories special honors, usually first, secondand third place, along with some sort of monetary award. Back in 1950MacDonald's supremely excellent "The Homesick Buick" won EQMM's thirdprize and the author received $300. In this 1954 issue there is no mention ofany money passing hands, and the prize levels are somewhat confusing. The issueleads off with Harry Miner's "Due Process," and this story isheadlined "Winner of a Third Prize." It is followed three storieslater by Peter Godfrey's "Hail and Farwell," announced as a"Prize-Winning Story." Second place, first place, fourth? It is notclear. Finally, the eleventh story in the issue is "I Always Get theCuties" and in addition to being designated the issue's only entry in thedigest's "Black Mask Department," it is also given the headline"Prize-Winning Story." One would assume that MacDonald's tale came infirst, based on its placement in the issue, or perhaps it tied with "Haleand Farewell." Who knows and, really, who cares? Like MacDonald's otherthree EQMM originals ("Buick,' "Funny the Way Things Work Out"and "He Was Always Such a Nice Boy") it represent JDM at hiscrime-writing best, each story expertly structured, using an economy of wordsand each containing a terrific surprise at the end.

But the best thing aboutunearthing the original magazine was discovering two paragraphs of introductionto the story, presumably written by Dannay, essaying a brief background of thetale.

Here is a story that John D.MacDonald (remember his earlier prizewinner, the wonderful tale of "TheHomesick Buick"?) really wanted to write. He knew that at best it had alimited market -- he told us that if EQMM did not happen to like it, he wouldnot even know where else to send it. (This is a fine compliment to EQMM'sconstant search for the unusual, but it is also an underestimation of thestory's appeal.) In any event, Mr. MacDonald felt he simply had to write thisstory -- and any time an author feels that way, we want to see that story! Thetales that lie dormant in writers' minds for years and years, that never die oreven fade away, that keep nagging for recognition and birth -- those are the storiesthat so often have power, impact, and an unforgettable quality.

When Mr. MacDonald submitted"I Always Get the Cuties" to last year's contest, he wrote: "Isuspect that it is probably as unpleasant a little yard as you will receive forthis particular sweepstakes." No, we have had much more unpleasantentries. True, we don't buy stories that carry unpleasantness too far -- thereare limits to what can reasonably be called entertainment and escape; and thereis never any excuse for sensationalism, sex, and sadism merely for their ownsake. As we have so often said, the only taboo is that of bad taste. But whileMr. MacDonald's story concerns a particularly gruesome murder plan -- and theauthor reminds us that "murder is something that should not be prettified"-- it is interestingly written, original in its conception, and from atechnical standpoint, most artfully done. And perhaps we should warn you: itpacks a wallop...

You can read my originalposting on "I Always Get the Cuties" here.

John D MacDonald Covers

2011-08-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

Back when I first started formulating the idea for The Trap of Solid Gold my intention was to use this blog to present the cover art from John D MacDonald's paperback novels as well as the magazines where his short fiction first appeared. Very quickly the words took over, but my love of JDM pulp art has never waned and I feature as much of it as I can when writing about MacDonald's work.

I was recently made aware of a terrific blog focused on presenting the many, many covers of MacDonald's novels in their various and numerous editions. Appropriately titled John D MacDonald Covers, it was created a year ago by Chris Ogle, who obviously owns a fine and very large JDM collection. Chris peppers his postings with a few brief comments, very often humorous and always insightful. Check it out. With over 88 postings so far, it's an addictive and enjoyable way to spend an hour or two. And John D MacDonald Covers is an ongoing endeavor, so be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any future entries.

The Price of Murder

2011-08-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

The Price of Murder was John D MacDonald’s twentieth novel, published in October 1957, a mere seven years from the point in his career when he switched his focus from short story writing to novels. It was his sixteenth paperback original, his sixth Dell First Edition and the second of four original novels he would write that year. With a total run of 211,000 copies for the first two editions, The Price of Murder was MacDonald's most successful Dell to date, at least where real numbers can be verified. It was the author's first Dell novel since 1955's April Evil to enjoy an almost immediate second printing, a fact due possibly to the success of his previous DFE Death Trap, or due perhaps to the novel's stunning cover art by Victor Kalin, a vast improvement over his earlier cover for Death Trap. Or it could simply have been due to JDM's excellent writing effort, for The Price of Murder is a typical example of the author's work in what I refer to as his "Golden Age," that period from April Evil to the first Travis McGee in 1964. These amazing examples of the mid-century crime and suspense novel, sporting now-forgotten titles such as Deadly Welcome, The Only Girl in the Game, The Empty Trap and One Monday We Killed Them All, represent the very best that period had to offer. Had MacDonald never attempted a series character he would -- thanks to these terrific novels --still be remembered today as one of the major forces in mystery fiction of that era.

With The Price of Murder MacDonald returns to his favorite form of storytelling, the multiple-perspective novel, a deep, intricate and involving tale told from the point-of-view of a handful of the story's major characters. These novels, beginning with 1952's The Damned, include The Neon Jungle, All These Condemned, Contrary Pleasure, Cry Hard Cry Fast, April Evil and Murder in the Wind -- and those are just the ones written before The Price of Murder. It was a form MacDonald was exceptionally adept at and he would continue to explore ways to expand and improve on it throughout his career, even after Travis McGee took over his life. His training in the short story field proved to be perfect for this kind of writing, delving deep into each character without resorting to the first-person point of view. The back stories of each of these people are interesting and involving and could, with some tinkering, stand alone in the short form.

There is some sociology in The Price of Murder, although it goes down much easier than it did in The Neon Jungle and is addressed more through character than by examining overt forces of poverty and lawlessness. Three of the novel's characters all come from the same slum and all three have turned out differently. MacDonald's exploration of this outcome is not as simplistic as "nature versus nurture" but rests more on the free will and willingness to struggle to move past a difficult childhood environment. One of the characters has predictable become a criminal, albeit a low-level enforcer and paid-muscle for a mobster, another (his brother) has become an author and an English professor at a local community college, and the third has become a cop -- a very bad cop, and an ex-cop by the time the story begins. Each character's back-story is told in amazing detail, as colorfully and as well-written as any MacDonald had attempted up to this point, creating an overall "solidity" (Anthony Boucher's term) that characterized the novel. The author's fascination with the environmental forces that shape criminal action could be seen in his early pulp stories but really began to blossom in his mid-period novels, and it reached its apogee -- perhaps -- with his 1960 novel The End of the Night, where MacDonald had learned enough to not attempt to offer any answers or opinions as to why people turn out the way they do. And it reached its purest form in one of the author's last short stories, the amazingly insightful and deeply sad "He Was Always Such a Nice Boy," which is told exclusively through the eyes of a bystander who does not possess the intelligence or insight to understand the implications of what he has witnessed.

The structure MacDonald uses to tell the story of The Price of Murder is also one of the novel's strong points, taking a straightforward plot and shifting time and perspective in order to expand the scope of the narrative. Each chapter is titled after the character from whose perspective the reader is experiencing the story, and each chapter follows its predecessor in chronological order, yet there is enough flashback and introspection to give the story a kind of unmoored feeling, of everything happening at once. And of the seven main characters MacDonald uses to tell the story through, only three are connected at the beginning of the novel. By the end the author has masterfully woven them all together in such a way as to create both a complex mystery and a solvable crime.

The basic plot of the novel is centered around a mcguffin: nearly half a million dollars in hot cash that originated as ransom for two young children who were kidnapped, never returned and who were later found murdered. The offspring of a Houston millionaire, the young boys' kidnapping became a newspaper sensation once their bodies were found and it was revealed that all of the ransom cash -- small denomination bills -- had been recorded and was traceable, making it virtually un-spendable. This fact was unknown to the kidnappers before the boys bodies were found, and they were quickly located in a small farmhouse near Orangeville, Pennsylvania (where JDM's parents owned a summer home when John was a young boy). After a gun battle that left the three kidnappers dead, a portion of the ransom loot -- one-hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars -- was recovered, leaving the location of the remaining $327,000 a mystery. In the chaos of the gun battle a county cop grabbed one of two suitcases containing the money and hid it, afraid to try and spend or move it for over a year. Eventually he sold it to an underworld contact for $10,000, who then sold it to a Cleveland speculator who eventually became uncomfortable with it and unloaded it to a Detroit mobster for $15,000. But like all of the previous owners, the Detroit man is too scared to try and pass what has now become viewed as cursed money, and a widespread superstition among the underworld about the cash is making it difficult for him to get rid of it.

But one of his underlings knows of a respectable businessman in the city of Hancock (reading like a stand-in for Toledo, Ohio) who might be interested, a former college roommate who is experiencing a financial setback that could well ruin him. Roger Varney is an attorney who, along with a real estate developer partner, has gotten in and out of any number of Hancock deals over the years, always staying just inside the law. The pair's most recent dealings, however, may be their last unless they come up with a sizeable amount of cash -- cash that they don't have. For a mere $65,000 Varney "purchases" the ransom money and plans on laundering it in chunks overseas, where the serial numbers will take longer to be noticed. But then trouble calls.

Varney's partner, Burt Catton, was once a vibrant man full of life, "a heavy, brown, bearlike man, loud, virile, friendly, full of lusty appetites, a man of prominence and position in Hancock." At the age of 58 he was widowed and quietly re-married, to a girl half his age, Drusilla Downey, a twice-wed firebrand who was more than Catton's match. But two years later Catton suffered a heart attack, and it left him a shell of his former self, "forty pounds lighter, gray rather than brown, withered, trembly, too scared to bend over to pick up his hat if he dropped it." And it doesn't take Drusilla long to stray, into the arms of one Danny Bronson, a small-time crook who has spent most of his criminal career as muscle to a local Hancock mobster. Danny has been in and out of jail several times and is currently out on parole. Although it was expected that he would return to working for the local mobster, Danny has been forced to get a job at a local machine shop as a condition of his parole. But he still has ties to his former life, and it was at a party for a local politico that he met Drusilla, who he quickly and expertly sized up and bedded that very night.

Danny doesn't hide his past from Drusilla, who seems eager and excited by his criminal background, and it is not long before he disappears from the machine shop and his parole officer and starts hiding out at a remote cabin by a small lake, built by Burt Catton in his wilder days but now all but abandoned (and yet another stand-in for MacDonald's summer home on Lake Piesco.) Drusilla buys Danny a new car, a new wardrobe, supplies him with ample food and liquor, and makes frequent visits to the cabin, where the couple can engage in their violent brand of sex. It also affords Danny a place to plan his next big job, one he hopes will be the last and bring him the cash to live for a long time before he has to plan another. But the plan, as it turns out, comes to him.

Drusilla has learned of the money laundering plan of Varney and her husband through Burt, who in a moment of weakness told her everything, and she tells Danny, who immediately comes up with the idea to go directly to Varney and blackmail him into forking over much of the cursed loot. But realizing the danger of his position -- a parole-violating ex-con attempting to blackmail a respected attorney -- he creates himself some insurance, in the form of a confession, detailing his attempt to get himself some of the money and, of course, Varney and Catton's ownership of the hottest money in the country. He plans to leave it with a trusted ally, to be turned over to the police in the event of Danny's demise or disappearance. Danny has a younger brother, Lee, an ex-college football star and now an English professor at a local community college, but Lee is too honest to agree to hold a sealed envelope and await his brother's possible death. But Lee's wife Lucille would be the perfect candidate....

Little of this background is revealed until around the halfway point in the novel, and what makes this a brilliant work of crime fiction is the circuitous, piecemeal route that MacDonald takes to get us there.

MacDonald begins with the plot's most peripheral character, college professor Lee Bronson, "twenty-nine, a big man with wide, hard shoulders, sculptured chest, wide bands of muscle linking neck and shoulders -- narrow through waist and flank." A familiar image for a prototypical JDM hero, yet Lee will not be the story's protagonist in any conventional sense of the word. It will take the reader 75 pages to learn all of the plot detailed above, and naturally enough one assumes that Lee is the novel's protagonist. We learn about his tough background growing up in Hancock’s slum, known as The Sink, of his success at writing a modest, moderate-selling first novel and of his creative inability to get started on a second. But mostly we learn about his beautiful wife, the spoiled, petulant and very beautiful Lucille. Raised by a family who denied her nothing, Lucille has little patience in waiting for all the beautiful things that her husband's modest salary won't buy, and she feels she was duped into marrying a handsome author who can't even crank out a second book. Possessing a striking beauty and a "third-class mind," there is little the couple have in common, as Lee ruminates:

".. it was only during his rare moods of complete depression that he was willing to admit to himself that without this joy in his work [teaching], his life would be unendurable. During those times he could clearly see the dimensions of the trap into which he had so blindly wandered. A perfumed trap. A silky and membranous and pneumatic trap. A trap named Lucille."

And quite a tender trap, as MacDonald spends nearly two pages in a descriptive reverie, as Lee recalls her physical assets:

"Her hair was the coppery dark of old pennies, and coiled tightly, the coils no larger than coins, hair fitting her head closely with a look of spirit and bravery like a Roman youth. She was, Lee thought, almost unchanged by three years of marriage. Her perfect face had babyish blandness, large blue eyes set very wide, elfin snub of a nose, lips wide and heavy, teeth a bit too small and of a perfect white. She was now, as she had been three years before, one of the most provocative looking women he had ever seen. The life of her seemed so very close to the sensitive and unflawed satin of her skin. It was visibly warm in the pulse of her throat, in the lucent blue of veins at temple, wrist and ankle. Her long legs seemed to have extra curvatures, tender hollows, velvety paddings which, in other women, were but the hints of what here, in her, was almost too graphically expressed.

"Now she had her perfect summer tan, a honeyed luminescence that seemed more a glow of gold from beneath the skin than a deepening of color of the skin itself. The whites of her eyes were blued with her perfect health. There had been little change. Her waist did not nip above the sweet abundance of hips with quite such startling contrast; there was a tiny roll of fat around her middle. There was a fullness under her chin, a small pad that unfortunately made it slightly apparent that there was not a great deal of chin in the first place. Her round high breasts were larger, the tissues less firm. And there were two tiny brackets of discontent around her mouth..."

But Lucille was "the perfect delusion," as Lee realizes her true character, a type that MacDonald comes back to again and again in his work, the self-centered sociopath:

"He knew that, as a person, he did not exist for her. Nor did anyone else in the world really exist. She lived entirely for herself, and anyone who entered her life in any way existed only as a part of the frame around her. Should they fit her preconceived notion of herself, they were acceptable. If they did not fit, they were ignored."

As Lee is sitting on the screen porch of his rented house in the middle of a hot Indian Summer, grading his students' homework, he is paid a visit by one Johnny Keefler, a parole officer looking for Lee's brother Danny. Since the first chapter belongs to Lee, we first see Keefler, as we saw Lucille, through Lee's eyes. His description lets the reader know that it is likely trouble knocking at the door.

"He was a thickset man, heavy around the middle, with a lean hollow-cheeked face that did not match his puffy build. A tan felt hat with a sweat-stained band was pushed back off his forehead. His nose was bulbous at the tip, and patterned with small broken red veins, prominent against the uniform pallid gray of his face. His eyes were small and blue and the flesh around them was dark-stained and puffy. He carried his gray suit coat over his left arm. The left hand, in a soiled white glove that fit too tightly, was obviously artificial. His hard black shoes were dusty and he walked toward Lee as though his feet were tender."

In an expertly-written conversation that spans most of the first chapter, Keefler immediately establishes his dominance, even as a visitor in Lee's own home, and he soon has Lee cowed and obedient. Keefler has done his homework and knows all about Lee's background and current occupation. He uses the threat of exposure, of informing the college of Lee's criminal brother, his own long-ago brush with the law, and of smearing him by inference. It's not long before Lee, hands shaking, answers Keefler's questions.

"All I can tell you is I honestly don't know where he is, Keefler."

"Mister Keefler."

"Mister Keefler"

"Try it again, with a little more snap, professor."

"Mister Keefler."

"That's better. You saw him last on the twenty-fifth of July?"

"That's right."

"Try it again, with a sir."

"That's right, sir."

"You're coming along nice, professor. You're certain you haven't seen him since?"

"I'm positive... sir."

Lucille arrives from the local swimming pool, looking stunning in her blue swimsuit, and is questioned by Keefler as well. Neither has seen Danny since he came by a few months ago to deliver a birthday present to Lee.

The second chapter belongs to Keefler, and in the first few pages the reader learns what was behind the imposing figure on Lee Bronson's porch: a man filled with hate, vindictive, revengeful, and who has a clear-cut vision of right and wrong.

"Two kinds of people. The ones with a record and the ones without. Traffic arrests were the only kind you couldn't count. The rest of them all had larceny in their hearts."

Another product of The Sink, Keller’s background is horrific and he nearly becomes a sympathetic character before the revenge phase of his life begins. Orphaned at a young age, he spent three years in a squalid children's home before his uncle Mose took him out to live with him and his family -- a wife, two daughters "and the monster son they kept in the room in the back" -- in an apartment above a small grocery store he ran in The Sink. Keefler was nine and adored his uncle, but one day while chasing after some local boys who has stolen fruit from the store, he was knifed by one of them and died on the spot. Johnny Keefler knew them as classmates and identified them to the police. Then, after they were convicted and out awaiting sentencing, they took their revenge.

"[They] took him into [an] alley, around the corner where no windows could see. They did not kill him. Had they known it, their lives would have been easier to bear had they done so. They tied him to the iron stanchion of a fire-escape, gagged him and stripped him and worked on him for over three hours. After he was found hanging there unconscious, the interns who worked on him were sickened by what they had done to him, and marveled that he had been tough enough to survive it. They unwound the wires, and probed for the fragments of glass and the small rusty nails, and sewed ripped tissues and soothed the carefully burned initials and extracted the stumps of the broken teeth...

"A very special transformation took place in that alley on that dreary day thirty-two years before. It was not iron that entered his soul. It was a corrosive acid, and the walls of the soul were impervious to it."

Keefler became a cop, was "excessively honest," did not take orders well and was frequently censured for excessive brutality. He continued to live in The Sink, in a cheap apartment, never married, and "never had time for the casual formalities of friendship." He spent his off hours prowling The Sink, "the implacable hunter, armed and alert." And looking for his former attackers. It is with a guilty pleasure that the reader learns of the fate of the four young thugs who tortured Keefler, all adults now in various occupations, as Johnny hunts them down and manages to come up with a fairly reasonable excuse for how they died, "resisting arrest," usually, or simply disappearing. But the act of revenge doesn't bring any closure to Keefler, it only makes him harder, as he lives in his black-and-white world of good and rotten.

"'I'll get them all, Mose,' he said to himself. 'I'll get them all for you.'"

Although Keefer comes closer to caricature than any other person in the novel, MacDonald's use of sociological background does much to bring the character alive. His amazing ability to paint pictures with just a handful of words brings to life an urban poverty of violence and want, of barely surviving, one with little hope of escape. The line about the "monster son," a throwaway really, depicts a despair that is almost too hopeless to convey. And the endless grind of running a grocery store in The Sink is written with a brutal indifference like something straight out of Charles Dickens' days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse:

"The store was open from seven in the morning until eleven at night six days a week, noon to nine on Sundays. Mose drove himself, his wife, his daughters and Johnny hard. He scouted the farmers' market for half-spoiled merchandise that could be salvaged. Johnny could still remember the slime and the stink of rotten potatoes, remember squatting in the shed behind the store, sorting good from bad. The store made just enough to support the six of them. For Johnny it was school and work and exhausted sleep on the army cot in the shed. He was a small, spindly boy, subject to head colds, and with the tight, pinched, gray face of a slum diet."

Chapter Three belongs to Lucille, and we immediately learn that she lied to Keefler, a fact that her husband Lee sensed but that Keefler apparently did not. She's seen Danny as recently as a few days ago and again a week before that. It is here that we learn of the "insurance" letter, and we learn a bit more as revealed by the dutiful wife of Lee:

"It had only happened twice. But if Lee found out, it wasn't going to make him feel any better to know that it had only happened twice, and the first time it was really sort of like an accident. One of those things that can happen and it's really nobody's fault... It was one of those things that just happened. It hadn't been meant to happen either time, but maybe [Danny] meant for it to happen..."

MacDonald's ability to change third-person voice abruptly, one of his great gifts, is done here seamlessly. In Lucille we read a spoiled, self-centered, dimly aware young woman for whom self-gratification is the driving force in her life and whose disappointment with her less-than-opulent life as a college professor's wife has terminally soured her marriage. Her literary antecedent is Mavis Dockerty, the "formless," self-absorbed wife of Paul Dockerty in MacDonald's 1954 novel All These Condemned. The Dockerty relationship is similar in several other respects, in that Lee Bronson, like Paul, Dockerty knew going into the courtship that he was dealing with an intellectually inferior partner, but rationalized the conceit that he could change her, could "develop" what was obviously a fine intelligence that had never been exercised. Both these men imagined themselves delighting in that growth. Like Paul, Lee has long since realized that this was a fool's errand, that no amount of nurturing could convert a superficial intelligence without the desire of a lazy mind. And finally, like Paul, Lee is a faithful partner married to an unfaithful wife, although in this respect, Mavis -- thanks to the encouragement of her role model Wilma Ferris -- has had much more experience with other men (and women) than has Lucille.

Both visits from Danny ended with sex with his brother's wife. The first -- when Danny brought the insurance letter -- was initiated by Danny, who afterword feels guilt which he verbalizes as he's getting dressed. "He cursed her and he cursed himself. He labeled their foulness with words she had never heard before." The second visit culminates with a desperately needy Lucille jumping at Danny and locking her arms around his neck. After a brief resistance, Danny gives in. That second visit was Danny bringing $1,000 for Lucille to hide for him in case he needed to get out of town quickly if his plans backfired.

When Lee confronts Lucille with his suspicion of her mendacity, she quickly decides what to tell him and what to keep secret. As she calculates this admission her third-person interior monologue does much to reveal the personality of the character.

"[She had to tell him] enough detail to make it sound right. She felt, for the first time, a really sharp stab of guilt for what she had done with Danny. It was really a terrible thing. It was his own brother. You couldn't twist it all around like in a movie and make it seem better. It was something she hadn't done before, and hadn't planned to do... It a way it was Lee's fault it happened. He seemed to think that he could stick her in this crummy little house on Arcadia Street and keep her on a silly budget and have her be happy forever. When you were used to a lot of things going on, a lot of laughs and so on, you couldn't be expected to adjust to a life where a faculty tea was a big deal."

Lucille tells Lee only of the first encounter, and wisely leaves out the sex. But instead of revealing the letter as the reason for the visit she tells Lee about the money.

Danny Bronson's chapter reveals him to be a cold-eyed, ruthless criminal, one who has served a certain master for many years and who has done time for that man, but who now feels the need to get away on his own. It is here the reader learns how Danny met Drusilla, how she set him up in her husband's lake house, how she coyly revealed her husband's big-money plan, and how he ultimately extracted the details from her.

"It did not take him very long. Nerve centers and pressure points are much the same for a woman as for a man. With the flood of genuine agonizing pain came a fear that oiled her face and turned it gray. He had her in a corner and he made the words tumble out of her, a gasping torrent. Then, holding her arm, he walked her gently to the big bed. She walked with the feeble fragility of a very old woman."

Danny's character is fairly straightforward and serves more as a device, the person whose actions set the plot in motion. His background is interesting and his dialogue is predictably terse and tough, and MacDonald brings him to life nicely, but his purpose in the novel is structural. When he finally makes the move that begins the real plot, it introduces the reader to the true evil of the book, Paul Verney.

Where Lucille's self-absorption is almost childlike, Verney is one of MacDonald's archetypal sociopaths, a man for whom self is everything and everyone else a means to the end of satisfying self. As a respected attorney and businessman in the community, he's not the deep-end kind of villain like Dead Low Tide's Roy Kenney or Ronnie Crown in April Evil, but more akin to You Live Once's bad guy, a name I won't reveal in case you haven't read the novel. His chapter contains his recollections of a meeting with an old friend, his college roommate, who is now a disbarred attorney and the person who comes to him with the offer to purchase the poisonous ransom money. This character serves a structural purpose, but is also the author's device for revealing to the reader the dead soul that is the anima of Paul Verney.

"You don't care and never have cared what happened to anybody else in the world... Maybe nobody else ever got behind that facade, but I did. I don't know what it was that twisted you. It must have happened real early. Because by the time we met, you were solidified... emotions were left out of you. I watched you go after everything you wanted. Cold as a machine. No mercy, no scruples, and no ethics... When anybody got in your way, you bulldozed the obstacle aside. I've never seen such cold-hearted, cold-blooded, frightening ambition. You didn't make one friend. I was the poor, warm, stupid slob who tried to be your friend. I even tried to understand you and find out what made you what you were and what you are... I should have caught on quicker. Absolute greed plus perfect selfishness plus a ruthless and methodical intelligence. I should have caught on and stayed away from you..."

Based on such an assessment Danny would have been wise to rethink his blackmail plan, but he didn't know anything about Verney when he hatched it. In his initial meeting with Verney Danny uses his threat of the insurance letter as a bargaining chip. When Verney manages to stall Danny for a few days, his computer-like mind begins thinking of possible options and after a few phone calls he realizes his best bet. A call to Danny's parole officer, Johnny Keefler, and, ultimately, a realization of who the most probable recipient of that letter was...

Based on the title of the novel, I don't think I am giving away too much of the plot to say that a murder is committed. This brings in the police, and the bulk of the remainder of the story is put into the hands -- and narrative voice -- of Ben Wixler, one of MacDonald's "good cops," a hardworking family man who struggles with the demands of both his job and his young family. The "whodunit" becomes a "howdunit" as Ben takes over the narrative flow of the last third of the book. It's interesting and well-written, but without the brilliant revelations of the plot points, it would have been standard pulp fare.

The Price of Murder received a respectably adulatory reception, at least in the relatively small world of paperback originals of the time. Number-One cheerleader Anthony Boucher wrote in his New York Times column:

"If there are any readers left who read only hard-cover mystery novels, they are urged to break the habit with John D. MacDonald's The Price of Murder and then go back to all the rest of MacDonald's original paperbacks. For here is one of the first-rate craftsmen of crime, whose skill and ingenuity are particularly marked in this latest. For the first part of the book he details the background to a murder in a series of narratives from different viewpoints, building gradually and convincingly to a situation in which killer and victim have no previous connection.

"Then he shifts to a procedural story of police detection starring Sergeant Ben Wixler (who deserves further acquaintance, despite the author's aversion to series characters) and tidily demonstrates that competence plus hunches can rapidly penetrate even such a formidable problem. Strong motivation and character give this the solidity that characterizes MacDonald's work."

Boucher was not alone in his praise of the novel. Saturday Review published a brief opinion of the book, stating that "the see-all technique [is] well handled; some characters overdone but not disastrously; pace accelerates sharply in wow climax."

When Fawcett republished the book as part of their purchase of MacDonald's back catalogue in the mid-sixties, several more favorable reviews appeared, including one in the Springfield State Journal-Register ("... head and shoulders above the general nondescript crowd of current fiction...") and in at least three British papers. The London Observer called The Price of Murder a "powerful triple-murder story. The characters, far from paperback cut-outs, are introduced with clarity and understand. A brutal mixture of murder and blackmail,"). The Northern Dispatch ("...the best of American crime fiction...") and The Weekly Scotsman ("... a neatly drawn tale... the characters are cleverly presented and the tale never lags...") liked it as well.

The cover for the first edition of The Price of Murder was illustrated by the great Victor Kalin, whose relatively lackluster art for MacDonald's previous publication Death Trap gave no hint to the raw talent of this artist. The somewhat generic female character depicted (who can't be said to resemble any particular character in the novel) is both arresting and memorable. It is one of my favorite JDM covers of all time, with the dark green background contrasting nicely with the blue dress and the dark skin tones to create a feast for the eye. This amazing illustration appeared on both of Dell's two printings of the novel.

Fawcett's first reprint appeared in December 1965 and featured a cover by an unknown artist, depicting a desperate woman in the clutches of a man whose face is not visible and who is about to smother her in his large, bare hand. This memorable art, with its broad, blue background strokes, was featured on Fawcett's first five editions, through 1973. The great Robert McGinnis was commissioned to illustrate the subsequent Fawcett reprints, editions six through 13, with an imagining of... well, take a look at it. It reveals a bit too much of the plot. The book's final two printings, in 1984 and 1985, featured a design by William Schmidt, who re-did nearly all of MacDonald's mid-eighties re-releases under the Ballantine imprint. It depicts what can only be the murder of Johnny Keefler’s uncle Mose.

Six month prior to the first edition release of The Price of Murder the story appeared in a condensed form as the featured "Complete Novel" in the April 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan, under the author's original title "The Heat of Money." It was part of the issue's focus on "Fabulous Florida," containing fifteen different articles and photo essays on the Sunshine State, including one titled "Sarasota Genius Belt." It documented the artist community of that town and included photos of some of its members, including authors MacKinlay Kantor and Joseph Hayes, Budd Schulberg's lovely wife Victoria, and a couple of magazine illustrators who worked on several of JDM's stories over the years: Thornton Utz and Al Buell. Mrs. Buell is shown arriving by boat for a party at artist Syd Solomon's house, and yes, John D MacDonald is pictured, showing off two items from his gun collection to Utz and Buell. If you look closely at the photo you can see Buell leaning over the original artwork for "The Heat of Money," an illustration that would likely be worth thousands of dollars today. It was probably discarded by Cosmopolitan after it was used.

"The Heat of Money" is a straightforward condensation of The Price of Murder, with none of the dramatic focus-shifting MacDonald used in "Hurricane," his magazine version of Murder in the Wind. There are a few minor changes, all to the story's detriment, including a curious coda to the novel's ending, an alternate method of death for Keefler’s Uncle Mose (heart attack, not stabbing) and the complete omission of any sexual acts between Danny Bronson and Lucille. The first time Danny arrives with the insurance letter Lucille throws herself at him and he kisses her violently before shoving her aside and calling her a slut. The second visit doesn't even contain any heavy breathing. Could anyone imagine Cosmopolitan in its current incarnation excising these scenes?!

Like most of MacDonald's work The Price of Murder is long out of print, and like most of MacDonald's work it is more than easy to locate in used form for relatively little cash. Well worth it, at any price.

More Art

2011-08-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm working on the next blog posting, a piece on the 1957 novel The Price of Murder, that -- for a variety of reasons -- is taking much longer than it should. In the meantime, please enjoy some great old story art I've added to some of my older posts, art I either didn't own at the time I wrote the pieces or wasn't able to digitize.

"Shadow on the Sand"

"Hit and Run"

"Betrayed"

The artwork for "Betrayed" was done by the great Thornton Utz, a JDM Sarasota neighbor and friend.

Travis McGee Book & Dining Club

2011-07-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

Trap of Solid Gold readers who happen to live in Florida -- specifically in the St. Petersburg area -- will be interested to learn that a Travis McGee Book and Dining Club is in the process of forming. Established by Debra Davies, who in her organizer role is calling herself "Miss Agnes," the group plans to get together periodically at a local restaurant or bar similar to the kind McGee himself would have frequented and discuss the canon in the order of publication. First up -- of course -- is The Deep Blue Good-By.

Debra has set up a Meetup page which you can reach by clicking the link below, and would-be members are asked to come prepared by reading Blue in advance. No specific location for the first meeting has been chosen yet, but let's hope place is well stocked with Boodles gin!

Wish I could be there... here's the link:

TRAVIS MCGEE BOOK & DINING CLUB

Dear Karen...

2011-07-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

Family Weekly was a Sunday newspaper supplement that began publication in 1953. Like its competitors Parade and This Week (where many JDM stories were first published) it commanded a huge readership by the very nature of its distribution model. At its high point it was carried in over 350 separate newspapers in the United States and claimed a circulation of nearly 13 million issues per week. Editorially it was little different from the other supplements, although as its title implies it attempted to swing to a more family oriented direction. In 1985 it was purchased by the mind-numbing USA Today and began appearing in all of the Gannett newspapers throughout the country -- typically small town newspapers that had been acquired by the publisher. They changed the title to USA Weekend and it still appears each week in hundreds of papers throughout the US.

In 1973 the editors of Family Weekly received a letter from one Karen Landoll, a housewife and secretary from Galion, Ohio. They deemed it special enough to run as a featured item, calling the letter "poignant." Judge for yourself below.

Appearing in the April 29 issue, the letter drew a heavy response from the magazine's readers, "some containing advice, some criticism, some offering help." Among the responses were two from celebrities, one from Vikki Carr, whom Landoll specifically mentioned in her letter, and another from author John D MacDonald. JDM was not mentioned in the letter but his friend Dan Rowan was, which may have been the impetus behind his response.

What he wrote is typical MacDonald: scathing, instructional, name-dropping Calvinism that leaves no doubt as to his frame of mind. At times MacDonald's rants could prove tiresome and even vindictive, but one gets the sense here that Landoll deserved every bit of the author's disdain.

First Landoll's letter, then the responses, which appeared almost three months later in the magazine's July 22 issue.

Dear Family Weekly,

I suppose I'm writing to the wrong place but I feel that a person in your position could at least advise me on my problem anyway. If I don't hear from you, I'll understand because I wrote to Dan Rowan and Dick Martin and I never heard from them. I also tried getting through to Mike Douglas in Philadelphia two years ago and because I wasn't someone big, I couldn't get through. I can't blame them though because they made it big and they don't have time to held a little person. I would write Vikki Carr but I don't know her address, but I believe she would help me because she has a heart.

Ever since I was five years old, I've wanted to be a professional singer. I sang in the church choir from age five to age 17. I also sang in school choirs and school plays. I love singing and I'm very good at it. This is not just my opinion but everyone's opinion who has heard me sing.

How does a person get a chance when they don't have the money? I just need someone big to hear me so I can prove what I'm saying. It's hard for me to be married, work a secretarial job, and not be doing what I really want. It's like my husband and I have a big secret that would surprise the world but we don't know how to let them know. My husband wants me to be a singer because he knows that it means the world to me. I'm tired of singing in my house. I want to sing to the world. I have been praying for this dream to come true for so many years but no one hears, because no one cares.

I'm 23 and my husband is 25. I work for a car dealer and my husband is an insurance man. You can tell by that that we don't have much money. We've been married four years and we don't have any kids.

I just need someone to listen and someone to care. I want to be a singer so bad that I dream of it, pray for it and cry over it. I'm tired of going through life and always wanting to do this but never achieving it. Please advise me what someone can do when they know they can do it but they need someone to listen! Who do I go to? Who would listen to me? I'm no one! I do want to be someone!

Sincerely,

Karen J. Landoll

Sarasota, Fla.

Dear Karen,

Your letter has been a subtle irritant in the back of my mind for this past week, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

Please try to understand when I say that your letter seems to me to be arrogant rather than, as Family Weekly labeled it, poignant.

It is not your fault that you have this warped image of the real world, that you have the belief that somehow the world owes you the chance to start at the top. The Cinderella myth has always been overworked by the flacks of all branches of the entertainment world, because it is far easier to make a Cinderella story interesting than a story of years of hard labor in the boonies. But young people like you, who have an unmeasured, untested talent, believe that if just given a chance, you can prove your right to become an instant Star.

It is not done this way. Rowan and Martin, Mike Douglas and Vikki Carr are not going to open magic doorways for you. I can tell you why. I am privileged to count Dan Rowan as a personal friend. He is a sensitive, decent, sympathetic man. Before he and Dick were "discovered," there were 18 years of gigs, club dates, saloons, squalid motels and small money.

I have a neighbor here in Florida named Joy Williams, whose first novel has just been published by Doubleday with much fanfare. It is called State of Grace. Behind this "discovery" of her talent is an eight-year period of writing, writing, writing, until, within the past couple of years, she acquired sufficient competence to sell shorter pieces to good magazines.

Do you, in your innocence, think that Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, Eyde Gorme, Vikki Carr, Ella, Streisand, Billie Holliday, earned their right to "sing to the world" by writing plaintive little letters to top entertainers? When each one was "discovered," it was because each one had made herself visible by years of hard, tough work.

Let me tell you what other young women are doing, women who perhaps have a stronger motivation than you. They are singing. They are haunting the local radio and television stations, the lounges, fairs, benefits, clubs, churches, funeral parlors, grabbing at each and every chance to sing for the people, whether it be for a ten dollar bill, a box lunch or two lines in the paper. Each time they sing, they learn things that cannot be learned in 12 years of singing around the house. They learn more about the professional requirements of timing and phrasing, of fitting the voice to various kinds of mikes and speaker systems and dimensions of the halls, of enduring drunks and fools, and jackhammers in the street outside.

These young women do not seek the opinion of friends to learn if they are "good at singing." They learn that the best way, by being asked back, by being given fifteen dollars instead of ten, by being applauded by total strangers.

That's how it really happens, Karen. From no one to someone is never an overnight thing, and writing letters won't do it. I am astonished that you could live for 23 years and love singing, and not know this already. There are many valid biographies and autobiographies of singing stars available. Have you not been interested enough in how it is done to even read these stories? Right now, you have wasted four or five years in an empty yearning to be famous, in "praying for this dream to come true." Can you imagine the wry and amused bitterness in the minds of the girls who have been singing for the people in small places for these five years, trying to make their dream come true, too, when they read of your petulance at having your letters ignored?

I get poignant letters that begin, almost invariably, "I have always wanted to write." Me too, pal. My first two short story sales brought in a grand total of $70. They cost me one million words of manuscript, untold hundreds of hours, and over $100 in postage, mailing my stories out. I answer those poignant letters by saying in return, "If you always wanted to write, and wanted to badly enough, you would be writing, regardless of whether or not you are selling."

Karen, have you always wanted to sing with such aching need that you were willing to start at the bottom? Or do you just have this romantic image of yourself as a frustrated potential celebrity?

Get out and work for peanuts, or work for free. Or give up the notion.

Sincerely yours,

John D. MacDonald

Beverly Hills, Calif.

Dear Karen,

After reading your letter which was recently published in Family Weekly, I was honored by your kind thoughts, and would like to reply.

As you have already begun to learn, being a singer, or just breaking into the entertainment business itself, is pretty difficult. I don't have any information about what you would like to do in your career, and don't know how much help I can be, but I would appreciate your sending me more information, perhaps including some demo records or tapes.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Warmest regards,

Vikki Carr

I can find no evidence that Karen Landoll ever recorded anything, at least under her own name.

"What About Alice?"

2011-07-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

The Sign was a national magazine that first began publication in 1921 and which published its final issue in 1982. Billing itself as the "National Catholic Magazine," it was produced in Union City, New Jersey by an order of priests and brothers known as The Passionist Fathers. Much like similar endeavors with a narrowly focused audience -- magazines like The American Legion Magazine and The Elks Magazine -- The Sign was modeled on the general circulation magazines of the day and featured everything from news articles; book, radio and movie reviews; sports articles; columns, and -- yes -- fiction. Before television took over our lives, nearly every magazine featured at least some fiction. And with articles bearing titles like "Why I Became a Catholic," "From Confucianism to Christ" and "The Evil That God Permits," The Sign would be the last place one would expect to find a short story by John D MacDonald. Yet in the early winter of 1947, in the magazine's December Christmas issue, MacDonald's "What About Alice?" appeared. It was the only time the author would grace the table of contents of this religious periodical, just as he would do with his one-time appearance in The American Legion Magazine.

Of course MacDonald was not a Catholic -- his heritage was as Waspy as a WASP's could be -- and his religious views could be charitably defined as agnostic. How one of his stories ended up in a magazine like The Sign is a tale probably lost to the ages, yet it is likely the result of his literary agent finding a paying market for a JDM story and not caring about who signed the check or what bank it was drawn on. As MacDonald once put it bluntly when recalling this period of his career, "What I was trying to do ... was earn a living at 1¢ and 2¢ a word.... If I did fifteen [stories] a week (not unusual) and sold two of them, after trying them all on every conceivable market, any small increment in skill or believability could make it possible to do ten a week and sell three."

The Sign bought fiction primarily from no-name authors, writers like Roger Dooley, James B. Dunn, Rhonda LeCoq and Alice Laverick, people unfamiliar to even the most dedicated student of the American periodical. There was the occasional reprint, such as Evelyn Waugh's 1934 Christmas story "Bella Fleace Gave a Party," which appeared alongside "What About Alice?" in the December 1947 issue. Sometimes an author from the lower rung of popular fiction appeared, such as Doris Hume, whose work was published in slick magazines from 1945 to the end of the fifties, and whose novel The Sin of Susan Slade was turned into a Troy Donahue movie. The most surprising discovery was the frequent employment of pulp powerhouse Hugh B. Cave, who -- from 1946 to 1958 -- had twenty-seven stories published in The Sign, a fact that seems unknown to his bibliographers. And then there's John D. MacDonald...

"What About Alice?" contains nothing about God, religion or Catholicism. What it is is a typical JDM exploration of a broken romantic relationship: how it happened, why it happened and how it gets resolved (usually with a redemptive ending). It is similar to his 1953 McCall's effort "Forever Yours" and his 1951 Christmas story for The American Legion Magazine, "The Cardboard Star," which closely resembles "What About Alice?" in structure, theme and tone. It's sentimental -- if I may be allowed to use such a term -- but not overly so, as MacDonald grounds the sentiment with richly descriptive language and a protagonist's regret that borders on existential despair. If "Her Black Wings" showed MacDonald at his weakest when attempting to write the language of love, "What About Alice?" proves that in the proper setting the author could pull it off -- not perfectly, but he was getting there, and in the right frame of mind the reader will find both a moving and convincing story.

Bill Sanders is an ad agency "Mad Man," assigned to an account with a looming deadline. He has decided to work from home one day in the mists of a driving winter rainstorm and is interrupted by a knock at the door. It's Stan Quinn, a somewhat younger co-worker, who has come to ask for some advice, although he is having trouble spitting out the question. Over a couple of beers he finally comes to the point, and it surprises Bill:

"How about the scoop on Alice Kelsey, Bill?"

The question brings a suppressed anger in Bill, one that quickly turns to "a kind of sadness -- of regret." Alice is Stan's girlfriend, but before that she and Bill were deeply in love. Stan wants to marry Alice, but he wants to know from Bill if it is the right thing to do. He doesn't make a lot of money at the agency and won't for years, and he is worried that Alice's love might sour after several years of meager income. Stan confesses that it is an odd thing to ask of a former beau, especially when Bill and Alice don't even speak to each other any more. Bill pauses to think of an answer, and as he stares out into the "gray rain," he recalls the first time he met Alice in a small cafe, how they instantly clicked, how "every bit of her had snapped into place in his heart."

"She was both plain and beautiful -- something about the line of her brow, cheek, jaw, throat -- gray eyes bright with laughter. Before they left the booth they were in love. He recalled the way she walked out of [the cafe] ahead of him, his first realization that she walked with the instinctive grace and appealing awkwardness of a colt.

"Bill wondered how many miles they must have walked, her stride free and swinging, her hand warm and firm against his palm -- walking the streets of the city by day and night. The line of her throat, the tilt of her head, filling him with a dazzling sweetness. Beside him on the bench by the river, with the moist breath of the river mist, and the freighter shadows shouldering their way out to sea...

"She had been mocking in the midst of emotions, and suddenly emotional in the midst of laughter -- and all the days with her were short, so short. Under the gay surface she had a streak of peasant -- with warm lips and husky voice. Earth and fire, beauty and movement, he was thinking -- a bit of all that breathes is in her, and part of her is in everything that is beautiful."

When Bill finally answers, the response surprises Stan. "She's a sensitive woman, Stan... Easy to hurt. Don't fall into the habit of hurting her just because it's so easy."

And because it was easy, it had happened. Bill recalls to himself how he began to hurt Alice, how he learned the methods that would evoke the desired response, seeing the uncertainty in her gray eyes as he practiced his "emotional sadism." At first it was done to evoke a response, "to taste the joy of reconciliation," but it grew to the point where Bill was unable to stop, and it gradually killed the relationship.

"He had seen her sparkle fading, the cloud behind her eyes becoming more evident. But he had not been able to stop, even when he knew he must, and he couldn't stand it to watch her cry. It was easy to walk out, in time to let her save herself. Easy, that is until the realization came that all the rest of the days would be empty. And now -- now she was mending and here was Stan to help her. Yes, Stan would probably be right for her -- and he knew that no woman would ever be right for himself, now that Alice was gone."

Bill finishes by telling Stan that Alice is one in a million, and warns him against ever hurting her. Stan thanks him and returns to work, leaving an emotionally exhausted Bill ruminating on his past stupidity. Stan's questions had "torn away the protective scar tissue, and the wound was new again." Unable to sleep, Bill goes outside for a walk...

Many of MacDonald's mainstream stories -- especially the early ones he wrote for This Week magazine -- tend to be light, forgettable pieces that contain no more serious emotion than embarrassment and wry amusement. But the author's tales of love gone wrong -- of relationships that have broken because of the active commission (rarely the omission) of one of the (usually male) members of the couple -- while outwardly predictable and conventionally structured, typically contain aspects of darker themes that are not usually seen in this kind of writing. It's an almost noirish impulse on the part of the man to destroy, unable to stop, "even when he [knows] he must." MacDonald's ability to convey this malady in a common setting, to tell it in so few words, to create a deep, believable and recognizable character in a couple of sentences, is a gift that lifts these kinds of tales to a different level. And if their endings are typically "glib" (MacDonald's own characterization), the road to that glib ending is usually through the dark woods of an emotionally complex, far-from-perfect protagonist.

"What About Alice?" appeared once and has never been anthologized.

"Her Black Wings"

2011-06-30T03:01:00.000-07:00

Pulp stories don't come with better titles than "Her Black Wings," a 1948 tale by John D MacDonald. It reveals so much to the reader, even before looking at the first sentence or turning the brittle page to view the story art. There's going to be an air of foreboding mystery, a bad, possibly supernaturally evil female, a hero who is helpless in her thrall, and strange, enigmatic questions at the end that never get answered. It has the ring of a story from the pages of Weird Tales, or from Willis O'Brien's classic radio series, Quiet Please. In the hands of a writer like MacDonald, it should be superlative fiction, even if this was a field he rarely ventured into. The student of JDM immediately thinks of the brilliant 1950 tale from Fifteen Mystery Stories, "Miranda." Is the protagonist telling the truth? Is he crazy? Is the female real? It's the epitome of great pulp fiction, the kind that keeps you up at night.

Except in this case, "Her Black Wings" was an editor's choice of title to replace the author's lame original, "Help Me Find Judy," a title that sounds like it belongs in the table of contents of an early issue of McCall's or Woman's Home Companion. And as for the quality of the writing, well... I knew "Miranda," "Miranda" was a friend of mine, and "Her Black Wings," Senator, is no "Miranda."

The plot is interesting, containing all of the great elements listed above, but its execution is poor, marred in places by sloppy writing, careless characterization and the occasional turn of phrase that rings completely foreign to the ear of an experienced JDM reader. It seems rushed and overly formulaic, the kind of thing one could find in the pages of any number of pulps throughout the golden age. Still, it is a quick and enjoyable read, with a neat twist at the end, followed by an element completely out of left field that leaves the reader wondering if the protagonist is the king of all unreliable narrators.

The story appeared in the first issue of the pulp Shock, "The New Mystery Magazine," which hit the stands in March 1948. If you've never heard of Shock before, don't feel bad: it lasted only three issues before disappearing into the ether. The magazine's focus was on "Shock-Mystery" stories, a rather ill-defined category that could mean anything, since many existing pulps contained tales that could fit that description. Shock was published bi-monthly by New Publications, one of the many imprints of Popular Publications, Harry Steeger's vast pulp magazine empire. Shock may have been an attempt at reviving the shudder pulp genre, albeit in a form more acceptable to postwar readers, or it may have been a stab at combining that genre with mystery stories. It's hard to tell from the first issue, as it contains no editorial comment whatsoever, not even a masthead. The best indication of the tone of the magazine comes from the stories' taglines supplied by the editors:

"Homicidal Homestead" by Bruno Fischer: "Luscious Della's scarecrow husband bought a knife -- and brooded on slaughter."

"Death is a Dame" by Frederick C. Davis: "Was she really his wife? Or was she evil-souled Zelda -- biding her time until her next murder?"

"Nightmare Man" by John C. Harbaugh: "His hog-fat wife jeered little Herman's dream into a hideous nightmare."

Clearly there's a theme here...

John D MacDonald supplied stories for each of the three issues of Shock, one for the premier issue and two each for the second and third. His second stories in the subsequent issues appeared under the house name Scott O'Hara.

The tagline for "Her Black Wings" provides a good synopsis to the story's plot: "Three men had loved her -- and died violently. I was next..."

Told in the first person, the story opens as Joe Brayton, a World War II vet, is standing on the 34th Street subway platform in New York City, waiting for a train to take him up to Columbia University where he hopes to enter graduate school. As the train approaches the crowd moves toward the edge, followed by a sudden commotion.

"He didn't yell. I saw him go over the edge, half turning, his mouth wide open and silent, his fingers working fast on the empty air. His shoulders looked square and solid under the brown gabardine. They weren't solid enough. He hit the rails a split second before the steel wheels of the express ground him to blood and paste."

As the shocked crowd mills around the messy accident, Joe spies a girl standing next to him.

"She was tall, dressed in a sleek gray suit. Her pocketbook was a wardrobe trunk for the Singer midgets. Her black hair came down lush and thick on one shoulder. She had that city anemic look -- cheekbones pushing against the pale flesh; a thin, patrician nose. Not the lips. Full of life and vitality. Her eyes were gray with a strange unfocused look."

Joe's attempt at a casual remark goes unanswered, and he looks down at the girl's hand and sees blood. She's squeezing her wrist so hard her long nails have pierced her skin. When she finally speaks it's in an a blank tone: "I told him he would die. I told him."

Joe wipes the blood off with his handkerchief and leads her away to a nearby drug store so he can treat her wound. Then it's off to a bar for a stiff drink. Joe orders the silent woman to down the slug of whiskey he had ordered, and once she does she seems to emerge from her catatonia and comes apart at the seams. Joe moves over to her side of the booth and comforts her, "murmuring a lot of nothing" until her hysterics cease. Then they talk.

The girl is named Judy Dikes and the platform victim was Ralph Lortz, Judy's boyfriend. Although there is no reason to suspect any foul play involved in Lortz's death, Joe asks if anyone knew if Judy and Lortz were together earlier, and when told no, he checks with Lortz's place of employment to see if anyone there knows where he is. They don't.

Judy was "nice and easy to be with," and Joe begins to feel like "a boy scout on a mission." He comforts her, reassures her and gets her to cheer up. They spend the rest of the afternoon at the bar, then head up to the Village for dinner. By two in the morning Judy begins "to look like the nicest thing that had ever happened to me." But when Joe hints at a deeper relationship, he is warned away.

"'You're nice, Joe,' she said. 'Pick up your marbles and run, Joe. Run like hell... run while there's still time... Ralph Lortz was the third one in two months. The third. Bill Graff fell in front of a taxi. Stanley McQuade fell out of his apartment window. Get away from me, Joe. I like you. You don't want to be the next one, Joe. Do you?' She laughed and the sound of it was like small, sharp white teeth nibbling at my spinal cord."

Joe takes her home, where she collapses the minute they enter her apartment. He puts her to bed and upon exiting the place is confronted by a man who immediately throws a punch at him! The attack is clumsy enough for Joe to dodge and counterpunch "harder than I wanted." When the guy comes to Joe learns his name is Michael Burns and that he lives in the apartment across the hall from Judy. He claims to be an industrial designer who is in love with Judy, an unrequited love that he is waiting to be reciprocated. He's also "keeping her going until she gets a job."

Joe immediately suspects Burns of being the guy who is causing all of the "accidents" involving Judy's boyfriends. He questions him, then tries to trick him, but it seems as if Burns has an alibi for each mishap. Still, Joe is suspicious enough to begin carrying a gun with him, a "little Spanish automatic [he] had won in a crap game in Paris." He keeps it in his jacket pocket as he continues to date Judy, and as time goes on he begins falling in love with her.

It is here where MacDonald's prose goes off the deep end, as he writes some uncharacteristically bad and florid sentences that must have truly embarrassed him if he ever had the chance to re-read them later on:

"It was tough to take my eyes off Judy every few minutes and take a look around. There was color in her cheeks and her lips were made for laughing. Once when we got behind a stack of shrubbery, I pulled her close and kissed her. She was laughing at the time, but after the kiss she stood close to me and I looked down into her eyes and everything was very solemn between us -- like a chord of organ music you overhear as you walk by a church.

"'You better not see me again, Joe.' she said. 'I'm bad luck.'

'"It's too late, now. Isn't it?' I said softly.

"She didn't answer. She nodded her head quickly and lifted her face to be kissed again. It would always and forever be too late to ever leave her.

"May [is] the month to be in love in Manhattan. You can be in love almost any month anywhere else, but it's good to save it until May when you're in the big town. We went everyplace that people go and did everything that people do and there was nobody in Manhattan except the two of us...

"I tried to make plans for us, but Judy always steered me away, saying, 'Oh, Joe. Don't be dull. We've got a million tomorrows with sunshine every day.'"

Things seem to be going swimmingly in Loveland for several weeks, but then Judy starts to become 'jittery." She begs Joe to take her back to the place in the park where they first kissed, and Joe agrees. As they sit down on the same bench, a cool breeze blows and Judy shivers, shoving her cold hand into Joe's jacket pocket. "What on earth have you got in that pocket, Joe?" she asks...

MacDonald doesn't seem to know exactly how he wants the story to end, so he steers it one way, then another, and leaves the tale with an unanswered question. "Her Black Wings" contains the germ of a good, if overused pulp plot, but it would take the author a few more tries to perfect it. As these kinds of tales go, it's an enjoyable reading experience, as long as you aren't expecting too much from a writer who could do much better.

"A Dark People Thing"

2011-06-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

In the first three or four entries I posted to this blog, over a year and a half ago, I went into the background of how I was introduced to the works of John D MacDonald. I wrote about how I sold his books when working in a department store, how I became a subscriber to the JDM Bibliophile, and ultimately how I became involved in the work of compiling a complete bibliography of the author's many published works. Although I came late to the party and operated on the extreme periphery of the real action, I was able to supply information that had not yet been obtained by MacDonald's many bibliographers. It was a minor blip in the history of JDM but a huge formative experience in my own life and it introduced me to the world of bibliographic research, a hobby I have loved ever since. It also introduced me to the vast wonderland of John D MacDonald's short fiction, an incredibly rich body of work that seemed to me to be a kind of Rosetta Stone that explained the singular skills he later possessed as a novelist. That experience is detailed in my third post.

I had answered a call for help from Walter Shine, a JDM fan and bibliographer who, along with his wife Jean, wrote a column in the Bibliophile. The couple had just published their first book, the most complete listing of all of MacDonald's writings to date, titled A Bibliography of the Published Works of John D MacDonald with Selected Biographical Materials and Critical Essays, a major event in the JDM world at the time. It was a huge expansion and continuation of Len and June Moffatt's JDM Master Checklist, which first appeared in 1969, and it remains to this day the single most authoritative source of information on the writings of MacDonald. Yet like any such work, it was imperfect and, more important, incomplete. There were a few errors that slipped through and numerous omissions, understandable when trying to track down the voluminous work of such a prolific writer. Specifically, there were ten short pieces -- nine of them works of fiction -- that MacDonald had sold, received payment for but whose actual publication could not be verified. The Shines hoped to publish a second edition of the Bibliography with these ten stories located.

It was -- and is, I suppose -- normal practice for the publisher of periodicals to supply tear sheets to the authors of works that had been published in their magazines. By definition, this happened after the magazine was actually published, when said sheets could be removed from the magazine and sent to the author as proof that the work had appeared. In the quaint old days before computers and the Internet, these tear sheets served several purposes, mainly as a way a writer could market him or herself when attempting to sell subsequent stories. MacDonald, a meticulously organized man, kept his tear sheets in a separate file, along with a "carbon" (photocopy, for those of you too young to understand that term) of the original manuscript, copyright information and any correspondence sent or received from the publisher or his agent regarding the specific piece. And while most magazines -- even the lowly pulps --followed the practice of sending these pages, occasionally they didn't, and for a writer as busy as MacDonald was in his short story days, I suppose it was easy to let something like that slide, as long as he received his check.

The finding guide for the JDM Collection at the University of Florida reveals that most publishers sent MacDonald tear sheets, but some were sloppy about it. This Week, for example, did not supply tear sheets for nine of the twenty-six JDM stories they published over the years. To a bibliographer, finding proof of publication for a story published in one of the largest circulation magazines in the world would not be hard work, even thirty years after the fact. But when a story was sold to a pulp publisher like Popular or Columbia Publications, the work of locating it could involve hundreds of man hours fingering through brittle old pulps, scanning tables of contents and even reading portions of each story. That is what was required of me back in 1981 and I jumped at the chance.

The list of the "missing ten" consisted of five sports stories, two or three mysteries, a mainstream work, a non-fiction work for the Author's Guild Newsletter, and the story I'll be talking about here. The sports stories were easy to look for, since Shine knew which publisher purchased each piece, thereby narrowing the list of possible venues to the sports pulps that particular publisher produced. The mysteries were almost as easy and the piece for the Author's Guild I wasn't going to look for. The last item on the list was known to have been sold to Bluebook, that venerable old fiction pulp that had been in business since 1905 and who had already published twelve MacDonald works of fiction. In 1960 they had purchased a JDM short story titled "Underwater Safari," but Moffat, Shine and the half-dozen other bibliographers who had worked on the Master Checklist has been unable to locate the issue featuring this story.

What these bibliographers apparently didn't know was that Bluebook stopped publishing in 1956. Four years later it was revived, not as a men's fiction magazine but as a men's action/adventure magazine, attempting to take its place among other successful ventures such as Men, True Men, Man's Life, Men in Adventure, Action for Men.... I think you get the picture. Fiction in general was gradually fading from all magazines and what was replacing it was non-fiction articles (in the general circulation magazines) and phony "true" stories that appeared in these rather tawdry men's mags. (Some were true, many were obviously not.) Bluebook for Men began publication in October 1960 and lasted until 1975, retaining its focus on fiction until it inevitably drifted into the sensationalistic "true" accounts of "Lust Orgies of Frustrated Wives" and "Bazooka Train-Buster!" In 1964 Bluebook for Men changed its title to simply Bluebook, and was still appearing on newsstands under that title when work on the JDM Master Checklist began. This may have been one of the reasons it took so long to identify the publication of this "missing" short story.

Walter Shine's plan for locating the "missing ten" was to go through the pulp magazines held in the Library of Congress, which was (and, I suppose, still is) on of the great repositories of these crumbling, fading fiction magazines. And while the Shines had lived in Washington, D.C. for much of Walter's working career, in the late 1970's he retired and the couple moved to Florida. They didn't have the time or money to zip back up to DC to spend a few days combing the stacks. Walter and Jean issued a request through their column for anyone with easy access to the Library of Congress and with a willingness to work on a great cause to apply.

I was born in Washington D.C. and lived most of my life in its nearby suburbs, so I certainly had access. I had a passion for the fiction of MacDonald and would certainly be willing to spend some of my free time in the effort of helping the cause. I wrote Shine that I would be willing to do the grunt work and he responded with enthusiasm. He did all of the interfacing with the drones at the LOC (as a former council at the Labor Relations Board, I imagine Walter still had some pull in DC), so all I had to do was show up on an appointed day and begin going through the pulps.

Boxes of them. Oh, my God, I couldn't believe the amount of work I had ahead of me. Year after year of titles such as Sports Novels, Fifteen Sports Stories, New Sports Magazine and Sports Fiction. Two years of Argosy. Eight years of Detective Tales. And, the last seven years of Bluebook from its original run, up to 1956. I had a list of the stories with JDM's original titles, the date sold, a list of known pseudonyms ("house names") and the first sentence from each story.

It took me two full days, from nine in the morning to closing at five or six, working straight through with no lunch break. Unfortunately I was unable to locate a single missing story. I wrote a six page letter to the Shines, outlining my efforts and listing each and every issue I researched. They passed the letter on to MacDonald, who responded (to Walter), "Thanks for sending me that extraordinary letter from Steve Scott. That is a lot of time to spend in the stacks. As I read it I kept hoping he would come up with something that is still missing." Needless to say, MacDonald's comments on my efforts went a long way to assuage my disappointment over being unsuccessful. Walter, ever the encouraging one, told me I had been quite successful, as he now knew where not to look.

Over the next couple of years a few of the missing titles surfaced. A mystery story titled "Devil-Head" and sold to Popular Publications turned out to have already been identified and listed under the title "Three Strikes -- You're Dead!" which appeared in the June 1949 issue of All-Story Detective. "A Good Judge of Men," which was supposedly sold to Argosy, was in fact sold to Cavalier. Then, in 1984, a librarian at the University of Florida named Carmen Russell was reading a listing from a Santa Barbara book dealer and spotted a 1961 issue of Bluebook for Men which purported to include a John D MacDonald story featuring the unfamiliar title "A Dark People Thing." She reported this finding to Walter, who was equally confused. He knew there was only one missing story that was sold to Bluebook, so he pulled out his copy of the original manuscript and, toward the end, read these sentences, spoken by a French ex-patriot:

"In some places of the worl' is called gris-gris. Some is voodoo. Some is hex. A dark pipple t'ing."

"Underwater Safari" had been found, and Walter wrote about it excitedly in his JDM Bibliophile column. Yet when he attempted to locate a copy of the magazine he was unsuccessful. He tried the bookseller but the issue had been sold. He tried several others, but Bluebook for Men was not a big collector's item at the time. He even wrote a plea in a subsequent column asking anyone who had a copy to sell it to him. To my knowledge he never did see the issue.

And neither did I, until recently, when I found an online merchant offering a copy of the issue for sale. I grabbed it and was happy to add it to my collection of old magazines featuring the work of JDM. Another one down.

So how is it? "A Dark People Thing" is a very readable, enjoyable story, a late period MacDonald tale that harkens back to his earlier work with a distinct flavor of the old pulps. It's told in the first person by a man named Joe Connolly, a Unit Manager for a television production company, and while Joe is not exactly a peripheral character, the focus of the narrative is on another person and Joe is the observer. Plus, "A Dark People Thing" contains an element of the supernatural that, while somewhat ambiguous, is definitely strong enough to place this story among MacDonald's other works of speculative fiction. The tale would be comfortably at home in an issue of Weird Tales.

The story is told in flashback, as Joe recalls how his employer, El-Bar Productions, began work on a television series to be titled Safari. Shot on location in the Belgian Congo it was to have starred Kirk Morgan, the popular, handsome and dashing star of Gunner's Mate, a series he had ended to begin work on Safari. Forty half-hour episodes were shot but never saw the light of day, because Morgan died while shooting the last episode, and El-Bar went bankrupt. The viewing public mourned and the newspapers wrote about how heroically Morgan died, but Joe is telling his story in order to set the record straight, before the "tub-thumpers" make Morgan into some sort of folk hero. For while the public loved the man, off screen he was a decidedly different person.

"I don't want to malign the deceased. But you can't get the whole picture unless you understand I despised him. In that I do not stand alone. I stand shoulder to shoulder with everybody in the movie and television industry who ever had to work with him. Also in this group you can find a couple of hundred of beautiful women who got too close to him."

As Unit Manager Joe heads to Leopoldville along with most of the crew to begin setting things up. He enlists the aid of a local Frenchman named Rene du Palais to help him deal with the locals, and things go smoothly while they await the arrival of the actors. Along with Morgan, there's Nancy Rome, the love interest who is a "shrewd, tough, talented broad" and who has already spurned Morgan's predictable advances. There's the comedy relief, Sam Corren, "a fat whiner who is scared of germs and heart trouble," and there's the actress playing The Other Woman, Luara ("no typo") who is slinky and sexy but who is also a "devout reader of the scriptures."

Morgan immediately begins wooing the clueless Luara, but when he makes his move she slugs him with a heavy historical novel and "told him to watch his language when in the company of ladies." So early in the shooting Joe knows there is going to be trouble, because tomcat Morgan "needs a conquest to mend his self-esteem." He doesn't think there will be much trouble finding some local talent for him, but he doesn't anticipate what happens next. Rene du Palais shows up on location with his 19-year old daughter. Her name was Therese, she had been educated in a convent and was engaged to be married. Her mother was was a woman of "complex racial mixtures" and the union of her parents had given Therese an ethereal beauty that MacDonald conveys masterfully:

"Therese was slender, shy, innocent, with smoky hair, huge gray eyes, skin of velvet, ivory and gold. The agents of kings used to search for just such women."

Morgan's reaction was "as predictable as tossing a fat grubworm into a hen yard." Joe reminds the reader that, despite his comic ending with Luara, Morgan was an expert seducer, and he goes into overdrive. Rene, who he had previously ordered around like a house servant, now became a personal guest of the great star, and though he had shown absolutely no interest in Equatorial Africa before, he "suddenly became a tourist in need of a guide." Therese was chaperoned by an elderly female relative, but that didn't matter in the beginning, during the set-up. Joe and others on the crew could see what was happening, but their warnings to Rene were dismissed. Therese was a "good girl" and Mr. Morgan was being very kind to her.

When a piece of film equipment breaks down and requires a three halt in production, Morgan makes his move. He and Therese managed to ditch the chaperone and they vanished. When a frantic Rene comes to Joe in order to ask Morgan about his daughter's whereabouts, he is told Morgan is missing as well. He leaves, looking "sick, tired and old." Then three days later, Morgan reappears, casually walking into Joe's room without knocking. When asked where he has been for three days, he informs him that he has been in Goma, at the Hotel du Grand Lac. When asked about Therese, he responds, "Tasty. Very tasty. But three days does it, men. A dull child at heart, you know. Once the bloom is off the blossom, they tend to get emotional." He informs him that he left the girl at her garden gate, "blubbering and snuffling." He yawns and leaves the room.

The next morning Rene appeared at the hotel to offer his resignation. He brought with him a replacement, another Frenchman named Jules Boudreau. Joe tells him how sorry he is and Rene blames himself for not heeding Joe's warnings. Yet when he leaves he refuses to shake Joe's hand.

A few weeks later Therese put on "the wedding gown she would never wear," slipped out of her house before dawn, got on her bicycle and rode down to the quays along the Congo River and jumped in. It took rescuers a half an hour to recover her body. When Morgan is told, he looks "mildly astonished."

"He licked his manly lips, fingered his sculptured throat, swallowed hard and said, 'A hell of a silly thing to do. The kid mist have been missing some marbles. She wasn't what you call real bright.'"

Surprisingly, the film company isn't attacked by the locals or kicked out of the country by local officials. Taping of the show continued, and it wasn't until they were on episode 20 when one of the actors remarked about Morgan's "strange... subdued and remote" acting. The director complains to Joe that Morgan is "going dead on me," and a producer observes that "...I get the feeling he's sort of fading away. You know what he does when he isn't working, eating or sleeping? He sits and stares at the wall, hour after hour." And later after a few drinks together, the same producer wags his finger drunkenly at Joe and slurrs, "It's a hex. Deepest Africa. Witch doctor stuff. Revenge, Joey. For the dead girl. For Therese..."

"A Dark People Thing" works well within the context of the magazine it appeared in, and it's a good, enjoyable read. After all those years of searching for it, It's nice to know that it was worth the effort, even if it isn't a lost JDM classic. The author's ability to maintain narrative and establish character with as few words as possible is evident throughout, as well it should be at this point in his career. The supernatural element was a bit of a surprise, especially coming at a time when MacDonald had long given up on science fiction (and he never did much horror), but it is handled in a way that ... well, I don't want to give away the ending, in case anyone wants to embark on their own search for "Underwater Safari."

Incidentally, this particular issue of Bluebook for Men doesn't look all that different from the earlier versions of Bluebook that appeared in the 1950's. It hadn't yet morphed into a real sweat magazine yet, featuring torturing Nazis and bikini-clad machine gun-toting babes. That would certainly come later, but in 1961 the new incarnation looked pretty much like the old. The interior is, for the most part, black and white, and what little color is employed is their characteristic use of various shades of blue, from arresting bright tones to a nearly slate gray. The artwork is uneven, to say the least, but given the budget Bluebook worked under, it's pretty good, even if it doesn't come near to Cosmopolitan of Collier's standards. The illustration for "A Dark People Thing," by Jim Infantino, for example, isn't much to get excited about, but turn one page and -- if you're a lover of magazine art like I am -- I think it's safe to say that your breath will be taken away. "Ordeal in Paradise" by Tom Bailey is a "true" story, complete with a affidavit labeled "Verified Authentic" and signed by the subjects of the story. It's the tale of a South Pacific shipwreck where only a man and a young girl survive, and after floating on wreckage in shark-infested water for over a week, end up on a desert island, where they are eventually... shot at by a Japanese soldier left over from World War II! True or not, it's an interesting and well-written piece with a somewhat predictable ending, but what I'm sure led many a reader in 1961 to bother with it at all is its incredible illustration by Ted Lewin. Done in the usual Bluebook two-tone, it is a work of art that seems to belong in another magazine. Its composition, it's limited use of light, and its astounding lifelike depiction of the female form all make it worth reproducing here, even if it has nothing at all to do with John D MacDonald.

The Difficult Birth of Travis McGee

2011-06-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

Just as John D MacDonald began his writing career relatively late in life, so did he embark on the creation of a series character late in his career. MacDonald was 46-years old when he first started putting together the ideas that would eventually lead to the creation of his most enduring literary legacy. He was already the author of 38 novels, had published over 350 works of short fiction in American periodicals and had seen several of his stories adapted for both television and film. He was a success by every measure of the word and had earned -- and spent -- over half a million dollars from the sales of his work -- serious money back in the 1950's.

He had never wanted to write a series character, although he made a couple of half-hearted attempts at it in his pre-novel days. The first was done in MacDonald's first year as a writer at the behest of Doc Savage editor Babette Rosmond, resulting in two short stories that are now long forgotten. Benton Walters was a (surprise!) ex-army officer who was having trouble settling down back in the States and managed to get into a few adventures. MacDonald quickly tired of the effort and wrote Rosmond, "Honest to God -- I'm never going to start another series. They are limiting and I hate them."

Yet only four years later he tried again, creating the very Doc Savage-like hero Park Falkner, a fabulously wealthy playboy and resident of his own island off the coast of west Florida. Falkner relieves his constant boredom by digging into the pasts of people he believes have done some great wrong and are hiding it, then devises some clever and complicated ruse to smoke them out. But like Benton Walters, Falkner appeared in only two stories before disappearing forever. MacDonald didn't even remember creating Falkner until the two stories were collected for the 1982 anthology The Good Old Stuff, and he wrote:

"[These stories] intrigued me because they dealt with the same hero, one Park Falkner, who in some aspects seems like a precursor of Travis McGee. And in other aspects he foreshadows the plots of a lot of bad television series which came along later."

Once MacDonald began writing novels in 1950, it didn't take long for his editors to start hounding him to jump on the series character bandwagon, suggesting that the hero of The Brass Cupcake -- Cliff Bartells -- would make a mighty fine version of a Philip Marlowe or a Sam Spade. MacDonald said "no" and he kept saying "no" throughout the 1950's as his publishers -- Fawcett, Dell and Popular Library -- kept at him, desperate for a marketable new hero from a writer who was already a proven seller.

MacDonald said "no" for a couple of reasons, reasons he wrote about in a fascinating article published in the September 1964 issue of The Writer titled "How To Live With a Hero," only a few months after the first three Travis McGee novels were published. As a still relatively-green author, MacDonald feared the limitations of a series character -- especially in the almost mandatory use of first person narrative -- and he feared being unable to sustain a story line, but most of all he feared being typecast and, as a result, becoming unable to sell any other type of fiction. He wanted "the maximum latitude in creative invention," something he enjoyed to the fullest extent, as any review of his publishing history will reveal. He wrote for every kind of magazine that published fiction, and did it all well. He has said that when he sat down to try and write for a particular kind of market, "the words died." He worked on whatever idea came into his head, from crime to science fiction, from sports to mainstream, and the thought that he could be limited to writing about only one particular character must have struck real fear in him.

Also, MacDonald knew enough about the problems of some other authors who had been lured into the series character snare. In a 1979 interview he explained,

"I was too aware of the sad stories of people who had gotten trapped in series characters. Editors would buy nothing from them but stuff about the series character, and I did not want to dig a grave that early. I was aware of the difficulty Marquand had shedding the Mr. Moto bit. I was aware of the fact that one man wrote a series of stories for The Saturday Evening Post. He did very well with them too. But every time he tried something else, they wouldn't buy it, and finally the poor guy killed himself. I wanted to escape from that kind of emotional trauma. Everybody is familiar with Conan Doyle and his dreadful attempts to shed Sherlock, all to no avail. So I refused absolutely."

Yet in 1962 he changed his mind.

A lot had changed by then. He had already written nearly 40 novels and 95 percent of all of the short fiction he would ever attempt. Clearly no publisher would now be capable of "typecasting" MacDonald, or forcing him into only one kind of story. Any writer who could publish a book about his two cats, or who could take a year off to cover and later write about a murder trial had freedoms few other writers did. But MacDonald was used to a fairly comfortable living and a pretty good income, and that was in danger. Even great writers back then, before the Internet and the explosion of small press publishers, were subject to the whims and caprices of the people who ran the book world. Any writer, no matter how successful, could be dropped in the twinkling of an eye, for whatever reason. Just ask Harry Whittington.

In "How to Live With a Hero" MacDonald goes to lengths to convince the reader that his motive behind the change of mind was not solely economic, yet that is clearly the impression he leaves, assuming that his ability to continue to enjoy the freedoms he did as a writer was ultimately economic. He wrote:

"In 1962, it became apparent to me that the market for my work was changing. The reduced number of magazines published less fiction. Small book sales on newsstands were being diminished by three factors: New titles in excess of rack space resulted in smaller average print orders; intensive promotion of reprints of bestsellers caused a squeeze from the top; semi-pornography by off-brand houses with larger retail margins caused a squeeze from the bottom."

He went on to explain that his primary focus at the time was a trilogy of novels that would be released in hardcover, "interrelated in the sense that they are variations on the same theme," and that his continuation as an author of paperback originals needed to offer a monetary return "consistent with the effort involved." He would embark on the creation of a series character only if he could be reasonably assured it would be successful.

"'Successful' to me meant two things. Not just a public acceptance, which would lead to substantial reissues of the titles in the series, but also a format which would give me the chance to continue to do paperbound originals as satisfying to me as A Key to the Suite, The Deceivers, Slam the Big Door, The Only Girl in the Game and The Drowner. Only in this approach could I fulfill my responsibilities to all the people who had formed the habit of looking for my name and buying the books. If I dogged it with dreary, predictable formula, I might pick up a more numerous and less demanding audience, but it would require a cynicism that would diminish my other work."

The article doesn't mention the actual impetus for MacDonald's change of mind, but he talked about it in that 1979 interview. His old friend Knox Burger, who as a fiction editor at Collier's back in 1949 had paid MacDonald his first four-figure sale for the wonderful short story "Looie Follows Me," and who pulled MacDonald over to Dell in the mid fifties and then back to Fawcett in the Sixties, needed a big favor.

"... in 1963... Richard Prather... was writing a series of [extremely successful] books about a hero named Shell Scott... Knox Burger...was his editor at Fawcett Gold Medal, and Prather, a Californian, had some extremely strong right-wing political tendencies. He saw socialism and communism crouched behind every bush, and in fact he went so far as to name one of his dire Red villains Horatio Humberts, which would indicate Dick's warped vision of Senator Humphrey. At any rate, Knox Burger infuriated Dick Prather, whose novels were selling well, by telling him to take out all that political junk and stay with the story. At that moment in time Herb Alexander, the head of Pocket Books, approached Prather... and made an offer of a million dollars to him for a ten year contract... Prather plunged at it like a hungry carp, probably figuring that he would run into an editor at Pocket Books who would be so in awe of the million dollars that he would let the political commentary stay in the stories."

[This rather fanciful story is belied by Prather's own recollections, which can be read here.]

Burger, who MacDonald claimed was singularly blamed for letting Prather go, then begged MacDonald to try a series character, "...to help [him] out of this jam."

And so he began.

This being John D MacDonald, it involved an awful lot of hard work before he arrived at a character he was happy with, one he could "live with." Remember, this is the guy who began writing by working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week for four months before selling his second story, and who, even after he was an established force to be reckoned with, worked every day at the typewriter, from morning to evening with a single lunch break, and who took little time off. MacDonald would not settle for something he didn't consider his best effort.

He worked for several months, churning out 150,000 words he later trimmed down to 70,000, and ended up with a book he "could have sold." Could have, but didn't, because ultimately MacDonald was not happy with the person he had created.

His name was Dallas McGee, named after a personal friend of MacDonald's named Dallas Dort. He loved the use of a "geographical" name like Dallas, calling it "fun" and "easy to remember, like Tennessee Williams or Vermont Royster..."

"My man [Dallas McGee] was somber, full of dark areas, subject to a moody violence. And he was fixed so firmly in a locale [not revealed] that moving him about in later books would be an additional implausibility affecting the desired suspension of disbelief."

In later interviews MacDonald referred to this first version of Travis McGee as "... very heavy handed, somber and Germanic. He was very moody and very gloomy and he had a lot of drab observations about the world..." MacDonald shelved the effort and began a second attempt, retaining a few "useable parts and fragments."

A month later he had Version Two done.

"Wary of the somberness I did not feel he could sustain over a series, I swung too far the other way and ended up with a jolly, smirking jackass for my 'hero.' Oh, he had plenty of mobility, but he was a silly fellow. The book, as a one-shot, stood up well enough and I could have sold it, but again there were useable things which I wanted to save for the man who was beginning to take shape in my mind, the man I would find it possible to live with over the life of the series."

So the third attempt was the charm, and by the middle of 1963 MacDonald had produced The Deep Blue Good-By, starring Dallas McGee, a 60,000-word novel featuring a hero with "some of the man in the first book, some of the man in the second... but all the rest of it was McGee, an individual, recognizable, independent, feisty, wry, articulate and, bless him, reasonably mature."

So after nearly 400,000 words, MacDonald finally had a hero he "thought [he] might be able to go on with."

He sent it off to Fawcett and told them to wait. Not to publish it but to wait. He wanted to to be sure he could really do this.

"I was still not certain I could make it work. Would subsequent adventures dull him down to a formula, destroying freshness? Would the quality of his observations become trite through repetition? Was my attempt to give him reasonably meaningful emotional relationships within the accepted practices of our social order, and consistent with his character and needs, a valid novelistic dimension, or would it seem a rancid device to jack up the sales?"

The only way to find out, MacDonald reasoned, was to try another one. He began work of what would become Nightmare in Pink, and it seemed simple work. It fell together easily and the result was a compelling continuation of the character, out of his element and in real danger. MacDonald sent it to Fawcett and told them to... hold on. He still wasn't sure.

His attempt at a third McGee adventure seemed to prove all of the foreboding he had been feeling about working on a series character. The unnamed novel quickly "fell apart badly" and he shelved it. Admittedly "disturbed," he began work on a fourth McGee novel, "a long one, 125,000 words," which "held together" and which he eventually titled A Deadly Shade of Gold. Before sending it off he began work on a seventh McGee adventure, which came together nicely and which eventually saw light as A Purple Place for Dying. Buoyed by two successful attempts, he returned to the fifth novel, the one that "fell apart badly," in an attempt to pull something useful from it. He "did it over, without salvaging a single page" and ended up with an acceptable novel he titled The Quick Red Fox.

But there would be one more bump in the road. On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, leaving that city's name with a "distaste" that would stay with it for years, at least until 1978, when the eponymous and incredibly successful television soap opera made people think of something different when they heard the name. But in 1963 "Dallas" would no longer do, and MacDonald began searching for another name for his hero. His friend, fellow writer and Sarasota drinking buddy MacKinlay Kantor suggested that MacDonald use the name of a US Air Force airbase. MacDonald perused a list of names and instantly lighted upon Travis Air Base in Fairfield, California. MacDonald's hero had a new name.

So, before the first Travis McGee novel was even published John D MacDonald had already written the first five entries in the series and had scrapped two novel-length "failures." He had, by his own account, written approximately a million and a quarter words about this hero. As MacDonald wrote, "It takes brute effort to achieve the illusion of effortlessness."

The Deep Blue Good-By and Nightmare in Pink were published simultaneously in April of 1964 and A Purple Place for Dying followed in June of that same year. By the time The Quick Red Fox hit the stands in October (four McGee's in a six month period!) the author already had two more TM adventures blocked out and ready to begin writing. A Deadly Shade of Gold eventually saw the light of day in February of 1965.

I have argued on this blog that John D MacDonald was, if anything, an insecure writer, made so by his curious belief that writers were born knowing that that is what they were meant to do and that all other hopefuls (such as himself) need not apply. He lived for years thinking himself an imposter, a "fraud," but it was that basic insecurity, I believe, that made him the superior writer that he was. He worked like a dog and wasn't afraid to shelve work he thought unworthy of reading, no matter how much time and effort he had put into it. This was a trait most evident in his early years while working in the lowly pulps, but it was present in nearly every phase of his career, whether he was attempting a series character, producing journalistic non-fiction or even re-publishing his own earlier work. He never though he was good enough and was consistently "abashed" when confronted with early work he thought inferior. "How To Live With a Hero" illustrates this to some degree, when he admits that of the 40 novels he had written by 1964, he was proud of only a few of them, ashamed of an equal few, and had "no strong opinion" of the remaining 30. When I re-read works like Dead Low Tide, or April Evil, or The Price of Murder, or The Damned and think that the author of these incredibly readable works of narrative fiction might have been indifferent toward them, or even dissatisfied with them, it blows my mind.

In September of 1964, when "How To Live With a Hero" was published, Travis McGee was far from a sure thing. The first two novels had sold well and the returns on the third were not yet complete. MacDonald was philosophical about the future, a luxury only a long-successful writer could afford. Yet his final paragraph in the piece reveals a lot about the man, and a lot about the writer, one to whom the act of writing was clearly more important than the act of publishing, even though he once pined that writing was like "dropping feathers down a well... one is thankful for any response one gets."

"... I am keeping an eye on McGee, and checking up on his progress. What if he doesn't make it out there? At least I shall be able to stop wondering if it was wise to attempt a series. And through 1.2 million words I have learned just that much more about my profession, learned skills and attitudes and solutions which will inevitably be valuable in other areas. No matter what I write from now on, McGee will, in one limited sense, be staring over my shoulder, pleasantly skeptical, waiting for the times when I try to make my fictional people do things inconsistent with their identities, and suddenly find them dragging their feet. His smile will be ironic.

"After more millions of words than I would care to estimate, I am still learning. And it helps to have a teacher like Travis McGee."

The original September 1964 issue of The Writer is nearly impossible to find these days, but the magazine is still being published and in July 2008 they reprinted this excellent article. The issue can be purchased from their website for a mere $6.95 (plus shipping). Well worth the expense for any lover of the craft of writing fiction, of the works of John D MacDonald, or of his most famous creation, Travis McGee, who most assuredly did "make it."

JDM on His Early Years Writing for the Pulps

2011-05-28T07:48:00.000-07:00

"One piece of advice which I came upon in texts [on how to sell fiction to pulp magazines] over and over again was the firm suggestion to read the magazines and then write for a specific market. I tried. I tried very hard. But I could not read those stories. I learned that there were some names I could read and enjoy, but I did not want to try to learn to write like those chaps. The rest of the contents of the pulp magazines seemed to me to be such godawful junk, I felt slightly edgy about appearing in the midst of it, and at the same time I felt nervous about my qualifications to be a low-level snob.

"It became my habit to write the story which bobbed up to the surface of my mind when I rolled new paper into the machine, and to write it to whatever length the substance of the story seemed to require. This is a matter of subjective taste. Were ten writers to attempt the same story, the length would vary wildly. Pace is highly individual.

"Once the story was done, I would change hats and become my marketing director. I would write down a list of possible magazines, with the most likely ones at the top of the list. I would write this list on a file card, and then start sending the story out, each time with return postage, until either it sold or the list was exhausted. In 1946 and 1947 there were twenty to thirty stories in the mail at all times. I remember meeting a fellow at that time who had been waiting three months for word on his novel, then in the hands of a large publishing house. While waiting, he was not working. I thought this a most peculiar attitude.

"My work habits accounted, I think, for not only the diversity of plot and structure and societal themes in early work, but also for the diversity of the places where they were published. All manner of pulps except the love pulps and, during 1947 Cosmopolitan, Liberty, Esquire and The Elks Magazine [sic]. When I tried to work exclusively within a specific genre, everything went stale for me. The words died."

--- from "Introduction and Comment," MacDonald's preface to a number of scholarly papers written about his work, published in the Spring 1980 issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection.

"Double Hannenframmis"

2011-05-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

"Double Hannenframmis" is the oddly-titled John D MacDonald short story that was originally published in the August 1970 issue of Playboy. It was MacDonald's fourth appearance in the famous men's magazine -- his fourth of five stories that were published there -- and it was the last of his Playboy stories that would soon become part of the 1971 anthology he titled S*E*V*E*N. In fact, four of the seven stories that made up that collection were all originally published in Playboy, and the other three were written especially for the book. Like those other stories, "Double Hannenframmis" is adult JDM, a tale featuring an unlikeable protagonist caught in an inescapable spiral of greed and lust. In fact Wyatt Ross could be nearly interchangeable with the main characters of two other S*E*V*E*N stories: D. Franklin Raymond in "Dear Old Friend" and Aldo Bellinger of "Woodchuck". Almost, but not quite. Wyatt Ross's evil is of a different degree.

In 1985 MacDonald was asked in an interview if, as a writer, he was trying to "change" his readers. His answer was revealing and goes a long way to explain his central moralistic point of view:

"I have, let's say, certain moral values and standards that cannot help but appear in my books. I am, in a sense, Calvinistic. I think that the worst that any of us can do is hurt someone unnecessarily, maybe just to prove that we've got the muscle to hurt them, to hurt them emotionally, to hurt their image of themselves. That, to me, is Sin Number One, and if that shows through in the books, if I seem to be trying to promote that as a way of life, and if a few people could be moved by it, OK."

By this definition, Ross is certainly guilty of "Sin Number One," although the reason for his being so lies not in a desire to prove he's "got the muscle," but out of cold fear and a desperation to save his own hide, even at the expense of the person most dear to him. In the "Playbill" section at the beginning of this issue of Playboy, MacDonald summarizes his character in a brief two sentences:

"['Double Hannenframmis'] is about a young man who rode the explosive bull market in 1967 and 1968, wheeling and dealing like all the Young Turks of the go-go funds and the hatchet men of funny-money conglomeration. When the times and tides change, he maintains position by turning corrupt, and sacrifices his wife along with his integrity."

As Ross's wife is depicted as a complete innocent, it is hard to imagine a more repulsive protagonist in the JDM universe.

The story opens as Ross is flying into an unnamed city (Las Vegas?), the sole passenger on his company's private jet. This corporate executive, the president and majority owner of Dallas-based Wyro International Services, usually travels with the company of his "strike force," but today he is alone. Distracted and unable to concentrate on the transcripts of his own Senate sub-committee testimony, he bears little resemblance to the "Young Turk" he has been portrayed by the press in the last six years, profiled in big-circulation periodicals such as Business Week, Forbes and Newsweek. Things were great in the "go-go" years, as Wyro International grew and prospered through a series of expertly timed corporate takeovers, but when the economy soured while Ross was in the process of acquiring Kallen Equipment, he got out the only way a man with no moral compass could: he cheated.

He didn't cheat smart, he cheated "greedy stupid." Making market moves based on information known only to himself, he "got in at the bottom and out at the top." And he pulled cash out in a way that could never be traced back to him. His actions got the attention of a Senate sub-committee and the SEC, and when he knew he was in too deep to ever extricate himself alone, he sought the aid of a fixer.

He's paying a man named Willy Russo to come up with a way to get him in the clear. Russo's plan involves laying the blame on Wyatt's innocent wife and mother of his two young children. The idea is to make it seem as if Wyatt's wife Mary Lou is having an affair, and that her lover is exhorting her to pump insider information from her husband. Just exactly how Russo hopes to lay that blame takes the reader down a very familiar road in the JDM universe.

The purpose of Wyatt's trip to this "resort city" is to meet with one Ruth McGann, an expert in vocal mimicry. Wyatt arrives with a reel of tape containing a secretly-recorded conversation between him and Mary Lou at the breakfast table, and he finds Miss McGann a formidable, independent professional, albeit one straight out of the JDM playbook:

"A tall woman, younger than he had expected. Strong-bodied, big-bosomed blonde, with a pretty and impassive face, cool blue eyes, careless hair, brief green skirt with a big brass buckle, yellow sleeveless blouse, yellow sandals."

Ruth has quite a setup in her hotel room, consisting of two tape recorders, an amplifier with two small speakers, and "a piece of laboratory equipment that looked like an unfinished television receiver." She takes the tape from Wyatt and plays it, listening intently to Mary Lou's intonation. When she tells Wyatt that it sounds like he has "a nifty little wife," Wyatt reacts with controlled outrage, a CEO unused to being talked to that way. He gets a response he wasn't expecting:

"Correction, deary. I'm not on your conglomerate payroll. I am a specialist, and I am damned good, and I get paid very, very well. You got too confident and you got too cute and you got caught. You can lose your ass, fellow. Russo knows it, you know it and I know it. I think your Mary Lou is better than you deserve and I think you will be doing her a favor by dropping her off the back of your sleigh, fellow. I say what I want when I want to and take crap from no man alive. Now tell me you're not used to being talked to like this. And I will tell you to relax and enjoy it. Now let me get to work."

Once Ruth has Mary Lou's voice down the two of them perform a script for the recorder, where "Mary Lou" asks a lot of leading questions about the name of a company she saw among Wyatt's papers on his desk. Then another one about quarterly earnings, and another where Wyatt tells her he has changed his mind about the merger. After a few wooden performances Wyatt finally gets it down and they are through. At this point he isn't exactly clear what the grand plan is, and when he asks "what's next?" Ruth can only surmise.

"There's a lot of options... Somebody will show up with the tapes. In the interest of fair play and all that... Some woman hired an investigator to get the goods on your Mary Lou and her husband. So the investigator bugged the house; and, because it wasn't exactly legal, he sends the tapes in with an anonymous letter of explanation, sends them to your attorneys."

This is too much, even for a corporate cheat, and Wyatt claims he won't stand for it. When he tries to rationalize his actions, Ruth smiles a crooked smile and replies:

"[You were doing it] for the wife and kiddies? Come on! Any way you deal the hand, you've lost your Mary Lou. Best to set it up to look as if somebody was using her. Otherwise, she could get clipped for tax evasion. After they play the tapes and question her, and after you testify that those are conversations you had with your wife, you think she'll forgive and forget? ... [If you are cleared] you can afford to give her big alimony. If they nail you, she might have to work waitress to support those kids."

It's all too much for Wyatt and he breaks down sobbing, bringing out the "Earth mother" in Ruth, but not so much that she isn't able to get off a wonderful crack: "Poor sorry bastard... later on, you can tell yourself that when it happened, you cried."

In addition to a hard sort of pity, Wyatt's breakdown elicits another feeling in Ruth and she kisses him. Soon they are in bed and, right before the moment of truth, Ruth stops the action briefly so she can make her own rationalizations for being the way she is. In MacDonald's somewhat quaint universe, Ruth and Wyatt are two of a kind.

The second half of the story takes place four months later, in a setting nearly identical to the one in another S*E*V*E*N short story, "Woodchuck." Wyatt is awakening from a dream, one where he was on trial and found guilty of "hannenframmis."

The idea of using an actor to impersonate someone else on a tape recorder is, of course, familiar to any reader of MacDonald's novella "Linda." He used a variation on this device in his 1950 short story "Breathe No More, My Lovely" and it probably appears in other early works I've not read yet. In a similar vein, he often used the device of visual trickery, where one person was made up to appear to be another in an effort to elicit a certain response. It was done rather melodramatically in the 1953 novella "Death's Eye View" and, to a much better effect, in the Travis McGee novel Darker Than Amber.

But "Double Hannenframmis" is less about the mechanics of trickery than it is about the effects of amorality on the soul. Ruth is a person who has come to accept her own lack of ethics, lost in the act of pretending to be someone else, but for Wyatt it is different. In the cutthroat world of business and high finance he could write off his actions as necessary to the growth and prosperity of the company, but when those same ethics turn personal it becomes a different thing. Wyatt survives financially, he manages to stay out of jail, and he can rationalize the greater good of how he saved his own hide, but the act weighs heavy on him and alters his perception of everything. As the author described it in the "Playbill," "... the joy is gone and it is [now] a time of despair." And if there is any trickery in the beautifully-written second half of this story, it's in the author's ability to write that despair between the lines of a relatively ordinary scene.

The stories in S*E*V*E*N are remarkable works of short fiction, even from a writer as talented as John D MacDonald. From the mad lust of "The Random Noise of Love," the coldhearted indifference of "Dear Old Friend," the achingly sad life and times of Norrie Ames in "The Willow Pool," to the predatory machinations of Aldo Bellinger in "Woodchuck," the arching theme of this collection is that of loss: how it happens, its brutal effects, and the hopeless realization that, once gone, whatever was lost can never be retrieved. And invariably in this world of S*E*V*E*N, loss doesn't just happen, it is caused -- by the omissions, the weaknesses and the conscious decisions of the author's protagonists. These tales were among the last short stories MacDonald would ever produce, and they not only prove that he never lost his literary touch, they prove that he never stopped growing as an artist.

JDM on Other Writers II

2011-05-05T06:37:00.000-07:00

Question: What books do you read?

JDM: I would say that probably over half my reading is in non-fiction, but of the fiction I read there are only a few who are tilling the same soil I am.

Question: Such as?

JDM: Elmore Leonard. And Robert Parker and Ross Thomas. Those three I think are the outstanding contemporary suspense novel people.

Question: How about people like Robert Ludlum?

JDM: No. Robert Ludlum, I think he's got a tin ear. He doesn't write good prose. John LeCarré writes good prose. Robert Ludlum plods along in the same kind of dreary style as Leon Uris. You can cover half a page and read the top half and tell exactly what the words are going to be at the bottom. There's no surprise, there's no poetry, there's no magic. He's got a great sense of story, and you can keep a work and a career going with a great sense of story, but it doesn't keep you from being guilty of having a tin ear. A tin ear usually results from a person not having read enough during his or her youth.

--- from an interview with Mark W. MacNamara, published in a 1985 issue of the Sunday newspaper supplement Family Weekly.

Interestingly, Paul Greengrass, who is currently under consideration as director for the upcoming film version of The Deep Blue Good-By, achieved his fame by directing the film adaptation of Robert Ludlum's The Borne Supremacy.

"You Got to Have a Good Lip"

2011-04-29T03:01:00.000-07:00

The story of John D MacDonald's beginnings as a writer was often told during his lifetime, so much so that it became the stuff of literary legend. While stationed in Asia during the second world war, he wrote a story to entertain his wife, because censorship of his letters home robbed them of anything interesting to say. Without telling him, Dorothy MacDonald typed it into manuscript form and submitted it to Story magazine, a popular pulp of the era, who purchased it for publication and paid the author $25 for the honor of doing so. Dorothy saved the good news until her husband's return home, and MacDonald was so dumbfounded over the news that he quit the army and became an author. The facts of the story are, of course, a simplification but they are basically true. Left out of most tellings of this tale is the fact that Dorothy MacDonald's first attempt at selling "Interlude in India" met with a rejection slip.

It was Esquire magazine who had the first chance to publish the first John D MacDonald story -- then still called "Through a Glass Darkly," JDM's original title -- but they turned it down, reportedly because of its meager length, not due to any lack of quality in the writing. The editors even encouraged Dorothy to submit something longer. But a little over a year after MacDonald returned home Esquire managed to make up for its oversight by becoming part of another bit of JDM history: they were the first slick magazine to publish a John D MacDonald story. "You Got to Have a Good Lip" appeared in their gigantic (382 very large pages!) December 1946 issue and the story is a peek, I think, at the kind of writer MacDonald could have become, had 1,000 rejection slips not separated his first and his second sales.

Once MacDonald decided to try writing for a living, he recalled that "for the first time in my life I really worked. Really. Eighty-hour weeks. I turned out 800,000 unsalable words in four months." Later he said "I must tell you that a lot of those words were really dreadful." What kinds of stories were these early efforts? We'll never know for certain, since the author and his young son later burned all of the manuscripts, however it is important to remember that "Interlude in India" was not a mystery story but straightforward narrative fiction dealing with the subjects of race, culture and boredom. MacDonald once sarcastically characterized his early unsellable work as "wonderful beautiful [stories] about dying blind musicians, but they didn't sell." It wasn't until he "lowered [his] sights a little" and started writing crime fiction that he finally began receiving checks back in the mail.

"You Got to Have a Good Lip" is the story of a musician, but he is neither dying nor blind. His name is Souie Bless and he's "a sarcastic, egotistical jerk" who "can't think and... never smiles." But he can play jazz.

"He had one fine talent that kept him in Packard roadsters and big blonde dollies. He could blow a horn -- or a trumpet if you're one of those people who call them that -- that was high, wild, sweet and true."

Souie's story is told in the first person through the character of Marty Terrace, the man who "discovered" Souie and who brought him up into the big time. Marty tells the tale in a kind of affected Runyonesque prose that is a bit stilted at times and definitely shows an author still learning his craft. Marty recalls how he first became involved with Souie:

"I had heard a few guys mention his name when he was playing out in the tank towns. I listen for things like that. I noticed that they said it with a kind of reverence. That, I didn't get... So when Hoggarty, who is the Ronald West of Ronald West's Band, caught his first horn with his babe, there was a vacant spot in the band. They filled in with a couple of plumbers and I took a trip looking for this Souie Bless. I found him in a mixed joint in Buffalo..."

When he finally gets to hear him play, Marty is impressed.

"He didn't mess with rough riffs or fancy breaks. Just nice plain round notes that kind of melted out of the bell of that horn."

Souie, "a swarthy guy with little black eyes," is unimpressed with the applause that "tore the roof off the place," puts his horn down and heads for the bar, "a mean look on his nasty little face." When Marty introduces himself Souie responds with bile and the two almost come to blows. But finally Marty is able to communicate his reason for being there and eventually gets Souie's agreement to quit his current combo and join up with Ronald West's Band. When Marty explains how much of a great opportunity this will be, Souie responds, "Opportunity for me... hell! West'll be buying the best horn in the business."

Souie joined the new band it should have been the end Marty's involvement with him, only "somehow, by going out and getting him, I had given everybody who got browned off at him a ticket to cry on my shoulder." Souie headed straight to the top and became the featured soloist in the band, performing on radio and "cutting discs by the bushel." Marty recalls that no matter how famous Souie became, he was still the "little stinker" he had always been, hated by any and everyone who worked with him, an enmity that was reciprocated toward all. He tells a story about a run-in with a trombone player over a solo that results in an "accident" involving the other musician's instrument. Then there was the fight with Big Bronson, one of the best men on drums in town. Despite Souie's smaller size he manages to chop Bronson's face into "hamburger meat" thanks to a deftly-wielded signet ring. And of course there were the girls, "big blonde women who stared at him with that honest sincere affection with which big blonde women always stare at big bank notes." Souie just "enjoyed blowing that horn and he enjoyed being a big shot."

But this musician is a specialist, and when Souie steps out of his specialty, only for a moment, it all comes crashing down on him...

For early JDM, "You Got to Have a Good Lip" isn't bad, and the author's attempts at a kind of stylized idiom full of colorful slang spoken by earthy characters works more often than it doesn't. It was rare for MacDonald to have a first-person narrator tell an entire story using this kind of language, and as his career progressed it was a task that eventually fell to secondary characters. The author usually used it for comic effect, reaching its apogee in his 1949 mainstream story "Looie Follows Me." These kinds of tales featuring musicians, second-rate actors, gangsters and other assorted low-lifes populated the fiction pages of certain magazines in the 1940's, and none of them were mystery pulps. Pulp magazines demanded action, violence and real crime before anything else. Slicks like Esquire preferred a bit of distance from its subject matter, lives to be looked into and marveled at and to feel superior to. These walls eventually broke down in the 1950's as fiction became less important to the slick magazines, but there has always been a dichotomy in the world of fiction between the "serious" writers and the "popular" ones. I think MacDonald longed to be a serious writer despite protestations to the contrary, at least early in his writing career, and he never stopped producing mainstream fiction. His readers can be thankful that the editors of all of the slick magazines to which he submitted work to in late 1945 didn't think he was good enough to join the ranks of the serious boys and girls.

I'm sure MacDonald viewed this first appearance in a slick with some pride, so much so that he notified the local newspaper of its pending publication. The November 17, 1946 edition of the Utica Observer-Dispatch ran the following piece on page 2 of their Sunday paper, complete with the author's home address, in case one felt like stopping by to congratulate him:

MacDonald loved music and he especially loved jazz. He owned a large collection of recordings, enjoyed visiting intimate clubs where jazz was performed, and wrote about it with some frequency. One of his Clinton Courier columns (April 29, 1947) was entirely devoted to a review of a local jazz concert (he panned it). One of his club visits was a celebration of his return from the war, when he and Dorothy headed down to NYC to see Billie Holiday, backed by Big Syd Catlett's combo, perform at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street. (Catlett was a drummer and one naturally wonders if he was the model for Big Bronson in "You Got to Have a Good Lip.") Hugh Merrill in his biography of MacDonald tells the amusing story of that evening, when during an intermission JDM and Dorothy made a trip to the rest rooms. Along the way they encountered three enlisted men in uniform fighting. Holiday pulled Dorothy into her nearby dressing room, where she enjoyed the protection of two boxer dogs. John, who had just quit the service holding the rank of lieutenant colonel, attempted to break up the row. Unfortunately he was not in uniform and one of the soldiers slugged him, knocking him five steps backward. MacDonald recalled, "I will never forget my shock at looking down at my clothes and finding out I was a civilian any damn soldier could clobber at will."

It is interesting to note that, despite the purported objection to the length of "Interlude in India," "You Got to Have a Good Lip" -- at 1,550 words -- is only 50 words longer than the former short story. Esquire didn't even include "Good Lip" in the "Fiction" section of the December issue's table of contents, relegating it to a category titled "Briefs," which included works of both fiction and non-fiction. Would another 50 words have made "Interlude in India" both MacDonald's first story sold and his first mainstream sale?

"You Got to Have a Good Lip" has never been anthologized or republished.

Deep Blue Good-By News

2011-04-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

Some recent news on the upcoming film adaptation of The Deep Blue Good-By:

Paul Greengrass Pushes Back 'Memphis'; So Is Travis McGee Novel His Next Film?

Stephen King on Creative Writing Classes

2011-04-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

"I'm often asked if I think the beginning writer of fiction can benefit from writing classes or seminars... I'm doubtful... In all fairness, I must admit to a certain prejudice here: one of the few times I suffered a full-fledged case of writer's block was during my senior year at the University of Maine, when I was taking not one but two creative-writing courses... Most of my fellow students that semester were writing poems about sexual yearnings or stories in which moody young men whose parents did not understand them were preparing to go off to Vietnam...

"I brought poems of my own to class but back in my dorm room was my dirty little secret: the half completed manuscript of a novel about a teenage gang's plan to start a race riot... This novel, Sword in the Darkness, seemed very tawdry to me when compared to what my fellow students were trying to achieve, which is why, I suppose, I never brought any of it to class for a critique. The fact that it was better and somewhat truer than all my poems about sexual yearnings and post-adolescent angst only made things worse. The result was a four-month period in which I could write almost nothing at all. What I did instead was drink beer, smoke Pall Malls, read John D. MacDonald paperbacks, and watch afternoon soap operas."

-- from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) by Stephen King.

MacDonald, of course, went on to write the Introduction to King's first short story collection Night Shift, and the two eventually became friends.

"Fast Loose Money"

2011-04-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941 John D MacDonald was already a member of the armed forces. He had joined the Army in June of 1940 in an act of near desperation, having failed in several attempts at a career in the financial industry. With a recent Harvard MBA on his resume, he managed to snag a position as an ordinance officer and was stationed in a variety of locations in upstate New York before being sent overseas in 1943 to serve in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater of war. He remained there until the war's end in 1945, having been stationed in both India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). So it is no surprise that once MacDonald began his writing career in 1946 much of the early work he produced drew heavily on his war experiences. And although he never saw any real action -- he worked in procurement and supply-- he had obviously seen enough and remembered enough to use many of the things he has witnessed in his fiction.

MacDonald produced a glut of war-related stories in the very early years of his writing career, so much so that he had to eventually be dissuaded by one of his pulp magazine editors. Stories with titles such as "Blame Those Who Die," "The Flying Elephants," "Muddy Gun," "Justice in the Sun" and "The Chinese Pit" filled the pages of long forgotten pulp magazines such as Best Stories, Doc Savage and Short Stories. But he never really stopped writing about people who had served in the war, about how the conflict had shaped them, the massive waste on a nearly unimaginable scale, and -- especially -- the bonds of friendship and enmity that were forged when young men were separated by thousands of miles from their homes and living in a strange land. Some died, some merely survived, others were made better for their time overseas, and some made out like bandits.

In the early spring of 1958 MacDonald must have been reliving his war days, for he produced at least two memorable works that drew upon his experiences in the conflict. His novella titled "Taint of the Tiger" appeared in the March issue of Cosmopolitan, and was later expanded and published as a paperback original called Soft Touch. It's the story of two war buddies who are reunited after the war and attempt to pull off a grand heist. They met serving in "Detachment 404" of the OSS, precisely the same unit the author was assigned to, and while these two characters were behind-the-lines combat veterans, their past experiences were clearly drawn from MacDonald's own.

Four months after "Taint of the Tiger" was published, another MacDonald work appeared in the pages of Cosmopolitan. The July issue featured his short story "Fast Loose Money," a tale that again featured two old war buddies who had served in the CBI, but this time their experience drew directly on MacDonald's. Jerry Thompson and Arnie Sloan spent the war serving in C Company of the 8612th Quartermaster Battalion stationed thirty-five miles north of Calcutta, and they used their decidedly non-combat war time to make the most of a bad situation. It is a behavior that has carried over into their post-war lives in the States: as Jerry puts it to the reader, "... if you play by the rules, you're a sucker."

The pair met when Arnie Sloan was transferred to the QM Battalion, where Jerry was already stationed as a sergeant. Life in the railway junction of Deladun was hot, monotonous and ripe for picking.

"We had warehouses there and plenty of six-ton trucks, and it was a soft deal. Go load stuff off the Calcutta docks, check it in, warehouse it, then either ship it north by rail, or run priority items by truck to Dum Dum Airfield for air transportation or turn it over to a QM truck company."

At first Jerry eyes the newcomer Arnie warily, as he "had a lot of things going on the side" and he kept his guard up in case Arnie was an "I.G. plant." But after a while they recognize each other as birds of a feather and become friends and partners in the art of skimming. "We were both hungry, and for hungry guys that station was paradise."

Their enterprises were aided by the fact that C Company was headed by an indifferent leader, a South Carolinian named Lucius Lee Brevard. Captain Brevard "just plain didn't give a damn, and neither did his lieutenants. The officers kept themselves stoned and ran down to Calcutta to the big officers' club almost every night."

Jerry recalls many of the crooked deals he and Arnie undertook in their quest to acquire personal wealth, including everything from PX watches, to stolen liquor, to a complicated scam involving exchanged missionary bonds. When the money got too big for those small-time swindles, they devised a way to melt gold into airplane parts and fly them over the hump to China for exchange. "You could make 10 percent on your money every trip." At first the pair sent their profits home via "those hundred-dollar money orders you could get." But when their earnings became too great they had to devise alternate methods.

After Captain Brevard crashed his jeep on the way back from Calcutta one evening, a new leader is assigned to C Company. Captain Richard E. Driscoll is everything Brevard is not, and it spells immediate trouble for Jerry and Arnie's money machine.

"He was a little blonde guy with long eyelashes, chilly blue eyes and a way of holding himself very erect. He did absolutely nothing for three days. Just when we were beginning to relax, he made his move. He conducted an official inspection without warning. Then he called a company formation. It had been so long since anything like that, the boys felt they were being imposed upon."

Jerry describes Driscoll's first address to the unit as "G.I. chicken, right out of the book."

"All officers and enlisted personnel are restricted to the company area until further notice... No vehicle will leave the motor pool without a proper trip ticket countersigned by me. All personnel will wear the uniform. There will be a complete showdown inspection tomorrow morning at nine. All non-coms in the three top grades will assemble at the orderly room in ten minutes. Dismissed!"

After a week under Driscoll's command Jerry and Arnie's income is severely affected. They get together and, along with a few of Brevard's leftover slacker officers, devise a plan to slowly drive Driscoll out.

"Arnie summarized it. 'Okay, guys. Get the word around. Whatever you do, you do slow. Whatever can be dropped, you drop it. And follow every order right to the letter. The stuff everybody has been doing as routine, you don't do it unless you're ordered to do it.'"

And within two weeks the company "went to hell." Simple tasks never got done, or if they did they were done poorly. Driscoll soon recognized what was happening but couldn't respond with discipline because no one had done anything technically wrong. Instead of relaxing his grip, Driscoll was "too stubborn to quit" and he tried to be everywhere at once. With no one on his staff he could actually trust, the task of running the company "peeled the weight off of him" and the battalion brass "was on his neck every minute." After a mere seven weeks of this Driscoll was relieved of command.

It only took a week to "break in" his replacement, and by then the boys were back in business.

When they were finally discharged and sent home, Jerry and Arnie came up with alternate methods of getting their loot home. Jerry converted all of his gains to US currency and hid it inside a hollowed-out wood carving from Java. Arnie had his earnings converted to star rubies and sapphires, put them in the bottom of his canteen, poured wax on top of them and filled the canteen with water. (Sound familiar?)

Once back home the boys use their money to go into business, but in separate enterprises. Arnie now owns a fancy restaurant and Jerry operates three downtown parking lots. Both are married, have remained friends and live next door to each other. And both have continued their "off-the-books" way of life, Arnie by cash kickbacks from suppliers and large, undeclared tips, and Jerry by rigging the time stamp machines at his lots. They are careful about spending too much of their illegal profits and keep much of it in cash, hidden in safes inside their homes.

The story opens after an unusual day at the parking lot for Jerry. He's been paid a visit by a special someone, and when he arrives home he is too upset to eat. He ignores his wife's questions and heads over to Arnie's back yard, where he waits until late in the evening for his friend to come home. He has something to tell him...

Stripped of its background and setting, the plot for "Fast Loose Money" is as old as O. Henry. The ending is fairly predictable and is prefigured in the opening of the story. But MacDonald's background, his character construction and the structure he uses to tell the tale are really terrific. From the opening interaction between Jerry and his wife, to his recollections of times past, MacDonald keeps the narrative going a breakneck speed. At only 3,000 words MacDonald creates several real and recognizable worlds, where the reader can almost feel the tropical Indian heat and smell the backyard cigar smoke. It is one of JDM's better short stories, a fact he himself recognized by including it in his first "mainstream" anthology, End of the Tiger and Other Stories.

Just exactly how autobiographical "Fast Loose Money" is cannot be known. Company C is clearly modeled on the unit MacDonald was originally assigned to once he arrived in the CBI, before being reassigned to the O.S.S. in Ceylon. I've always wondered if the character of Captain Richard E. Driscoll was based on the author himself. His rank was the same as MacDonald's when he arrived in India, he was blonde and blue-eyed like MacDonald, but his height and demeanor are polar opposites to the author's. Although he is hardly a sympathetic character, Driscoll was only trying to straighten out a bad situation, much as MacDonald may have tried to do. One can certainly imagine a young captain arriving in a theater of war, heading up his first command and trying his best to run things the right way, even if it really was nothing but "G.I. chicken." And there were people like Jerry and Arnie in every unit of the war, especially in areas where combat was but a faint sound in the distance.

The bit about the hundred dollar money orders was clearly drawn from MacDonald's own experience. He won a large sum of cash in a "very fortunate session at the poker table with some people heavy with flight pay" and sent it home in "a little sheaf of hundred-dollar money orders." The funds were used to purchase the MacDonald's summer camp on Lake Piseco in upstate New York.

And the attentive reader really has to wonder about that bit with the jewels-hidden-in-wax-in-the-canteen bit. How autobiographical was that? It was easily the most oft-used method of secretly moving ill-gotten riches in the JDM oeuvre, appearing in many different places, including the early stories "The Flying Elephants" and "Sepulchre of the Living," the first Travis McGee novel The Deep Blue Good-By, and a couple of other tales I can't recall to mind right now. Did MacDonald bring anything back to the states that way?

Copies of End of the Tiger and Other Stories are relatively easy to find on eBay or Amazon. MacDonald changed the name of the story slightly ("The Fast Loose Money") for the anthology.

A special thanks to Leif Peng of Today's Inspiration for the scans of the original Cosmopolitan story art, illustrated by the great Bob Peak.

Dana Delany Loves JDM

2011-04-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

"5 Reasons We Love Dana Delany" from tvguide.com.

JDM on Dialogue

2011-04-17T17:27:00.000-07:00

"I never met [Dashiell] Hammett and never corresponded with him. Here are some small and unimportant ways in which our lives touched. Hammett and I were both discharged from the Army in September of 1945 at Fort Dix, NJ. I was 29 and he was 51.

"His first novel, Red Harvest, was published in 1929 when he was 33. My first novel, The Brass Cupcake, was published in 1950 when I was 34. Both novels are still in print.

"His last short story in the pulp magazine Black Mask was "Death and Company," published in 1930. Seventeen years later, my first story in that magazine was titled "Manhattan Horse Opera," which doubtless shows a smidgen or two of the Hammett influence. He influenced us all: The straight, simple prose style. Everything deleted except what moved the action forward. Characters shown through action and through dialogue -- with a special emphasis on making the dialogue ring true. This is a very chancy area. You cannot have people talking the way people actually talk. Transcribe a tape of any casual conversation, and you will see what I mean. You have to do dialogue that, if spoken exactly as written, would sound just a little bit stilted -- yet on the page, it creates for the reader the imitation of a total reality."

-- from John D MacDonald's book review of Shadow Man (a Hammett biography) published in the August 2, 1981 edition of the Washington Star.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Raymond Chandler, when the problem was reversed. From a letter to James M. Cain dated March 20, 1944:

"A curious matter I'd like to call to your attention -- although you have probably been all through it with yourself -- is your dialogue. Nothing could be more natural and easy and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn't quite play. We tried it out [while writing the screenplay for Double Indemnity] by having a couple of actors do a scene right out of the book. It had a sort of remote effect that I was at a loss to understand. It came to me then that the effect of your written dialogue is only partly sound and sense. The rest of the effect is the appearance on the page. These unevenly shaped hunks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen this is all lost, and the essential mildness of the phrasing shows up as lacking in sharpness. They tell me that is the difference between photographic dialogue and written dialogue. For the screen everything has to be sharpened and pointed and wherever possible elided."

JDM on His Florida Neighbors

2011-04-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

"'Look --' [MacDonald] pointed out through the mosquito screen across his own front yard. 'The neighbors. Now the guy over there, beyond those trees, he's a minister of the church. Right now he's under indictment for selling eight million dollars' worth of phony tax havens. Then there's another guy, just there; he's a qualified physician. He's never practiced, so far as I know. He keeps a Rolls-Royce in his driveway -- never cleans it. I don't know what he does. But every two weeks or so I hear his power boat going our to sea at three in the morning. Maybe an hour later, it comes back. That's what he does. I don't think I exaggerate too much in the books.'"

Jonathan Raban, describing his visit with John D MacDonald in his 1987 collection of essays For Love & Money: A Writing Life.