"Night Ride" and Interview

Black Mask Magazine, the storied detective pulp of the last century, began publication in 1920, created by H.L. Menken and George Jean Nathan for publisher Pro Distributors. After a period of great and growing success in the 1920’s and early 30’s, circulation began to decline and the title was sold -- in 1940 -- to Popular Publications, joining other great crime titles there such as Dime Detective and Detective Tales. Black Mask’s final issue was published in July 1951. John D MacDonald, whose first attempts at fiction were published in 1946, had seven stories in its pages.

In 1985 Matthew J Bruccoli and Richard Layman revived the title, and began publishing The New Black Mask as a quarterly trade paperback. It was a mix of (mostly) new short stories by contemporary authors, along with some classic reprints, but it lasted only until 1987 (eight issues) when some kind of trouble over the use of the magazine’s name caused the editors to end the endeavor. Issue Eight contained a “new” John D MacDonald story.

MacDonald had, of course, passed away in December of the previous year, but this issue had obviously been put together many months prior to his fateful trip to Milwaukee. The story JDM provided, “Night Ride,” was, the author explained in an introductory paragraph, an old one written “twenty-four years ago” (1962) and had never been finished or submitted.

“I came upon it last year when I was grubbing around in the old files, looking for something else. I wondered why it had not been published. I cannot remember who thought it needed more work, my agent or I. I suspect that some other project got in the way and it fell through the cracks. So, I gave it a quick polish and sent it in, pleased to find it was not dated."

The story is a good one, concerning a down-on-his-luck man who accidentally hits and kills a pedestrian while he is driving home from a losing late night poker game. The only real problem, apparently unknown to all concerned, was that the story HAD been published before. Walter Shine, in his regular column in the JDM Bibliophile, revealed that it was, in fact, a reprint of MacDonald’s excellent “In a Small Motel,” which appeared in the July 1955 issue of Justice, a crime digest of the era. For years I took this as gospel and, because it was only a reprint, never bothered to hunt down a copy of The New Black Mask.

Now I have, and I can corroborate Walter’s assertion that the story was published before its appearance in The New Black Mask, but it is not “In a Small Motel,” it’s one titled “Scared Money,” which also appeared in Justice, in the October 1955 issue. He got the magazine right but not the story title, which compounds MacDonald’s own error as to both the prior-publication and the date he wrote the story. Also, note that JDM writes that he “polished” the story for its new publication, much as he did for the Good Old Stuff stories. Happily I can report that the changes are minimal.

This was not the only time MacDonald pulled out a story from his files that he thought hadn’t been published and submitted it for publication. In the very same issue of the JDM Bibliophile where Walter Shine called out “Night Ride,” editor Ed Hirshberg published a short story MacDonald had given him for the fanzine a week before he left for Milwaukee. Hirshberg quoted MacDonald as telling him, “Here’s one that was never accepted, but it isn’t too bad and you might as well use it in The Thing. [JDM’s appellation for the JDMB.] There are more in my files, and I will let you have these as time goes on, when the need for copy arises.” This one was titled “The Killer,” and it should have been obvious to everyone involved, since it had been published under that very title in the January 1955 issue of Manhunt. There must have been something askew with JDM’s 1955 sales to crime digests.

Along with the submission of “Night Ride,” MacDonald agreed to a short interview for The New Black Mask. By this time in his life most of the interviews JDM agreed to do were by mail only, answering a set of pre-written questions submitted by the interviewer, and he only answered the questions he felt like addressing. Without the give and take of an actual conversation MacDonald often comes across as impatient, condescending and, at times, outright angry. This interview has such moments, and I’ve transcribed it below.

John D. MacDonald: An Interview

John D. MacDonald was born in Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, and Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He served six years in the army in World War II. He is married and has one son and five grandchildren residing in New Zealand. Since he began writing in 1946 and has published seventy-five books and over six hundred short stories, novelettes, and articles. His work has been translated into sixteen languages, and his books have sold over ninety million copies worldwide.

New Black Mask: You began your writing career producing stories for the pulps, a large writers' market that no longer exists. How important was your pulp-writing apprenticeship, and how has the demise of the pulps affected genre fiction—especially the mystery?

John D MacDonald: I began my career writing stories for the pulp magazines as well as the so-called slicks. In the first years-1946 to 1950—I had stories published in American Magazine, Argosy, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Story Magazine, Liberty, This Week, and the Toronto Star Weekly, in addition to a wide range of pulp magazines. I do not think that the demise of the pulps has affected the quality of today's fiction writing as much as has the demise of those slick-paper magazines, which used so many pieces of fiction each year. In the case of The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and Liberty alone, a market for seven hundred pieces of fiction a year at quite good rates disappeared seemingly overnight. Thus in the general field of the novel, in all categories, some very clumsy work is being published. There is no training area. The university courses lean so heavily on subjectivity that the prose becomes muddy and pretentious. I am sent many sets of bound galleys in hopes I will make some useful comment for public purposes. I rarely have to read beyond page ten.

NBM: You were trained as a businessman at Harvard and used your business skills to become one of the most successful novelists of your time. To what degree have the instincts and mindset of the businessman affected your fiction?

MacDonald: I can see only a very remote relationship between my formal education and my writing. I have the instincts of the businessman only when I am involved with the problems of everyday life. I am often shocked at the gullibility of some of the members of my peer group when their innocence in investing in tax shelters is revealed in the press. I do not have the mindset of a businessman. Their scope, like that of doctors and lawyers, is for the most part quite narrow.

NBM: There is a trend now, demonstrated by recent novels of Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard, for writers of mysteries to attempt what Parker calls the “Big Book” -- the novel that will transcend the bounds of genre fiction and attract attention as a mainstream work. Are you concerned that because of your success as a mystery novelist your works will be neglected over the long haul and categorized by critics as ephemeral?

MacDonald: I think that trying to puff a small story into a big book is a mistake. Books and short pieces of fiction should be permitted to find their own proper length. My most recent novel, Barrier Island, is not long. Knopf expressed dismay that it was not a thicker book. I did the story the way it felt right to me. Puffing it would have upset the rhythm of it. I must confess to being a little distressed by your patronizing tone in categorizing me as a mystery novelist. We Americans feel more comfortable with categories and filing systems, and butterflies pinned to the board in proper order of species, I guess. I am pleased to write novels of mystery and suspense, of course. But at the risk of boring you, here is a list of my published novels which do not fall into that category: Wine of the Dreamers (1951), The Damned (1952), Ballroom of the Skies (1952), Cancel All Our Vows (1953), All These Condemned (1954), Contrary Pleasure (1954), Cry Hard, Cry Fast (1955), A Man of Affairs (1957), The Deceivers (1958), The Executioners (1958), Clemmie (1958), Please Write for Details (1959), The Crossroads (1959), Slam the Big Door (1960), The End of the Night (1960), A Key to the Suite (1962), A Flash of Green (1962), The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything (1963), I Could Go on Singing (1963), The House Guests (1965), No Deadly Drug (1968), Condominium (1977), Nothing Can Go Wrong (1981), One More Sunday (1984), Barrier Island (June 1986), A Friendship (November 1986).

Insofar as "being neglected over the long haul and categorized by critics as ephemeral," I could not care less. It has been my personal observation that those members of my peer group who get terribly earnest about their literary immortality are the ones least likely to achieve any. And, of course, any writer who pays attention to critics is an ass. I write because I enjoy the hell out of it, and if I couldn't ever sell another word, I would keep right on amusing myself with it.

NBM: You are known as a writer with a social conscience, concerned about environmental issues, corporate greed, economic abuses, immorality on a large scale. Do you consider yourself a social evangelist?

MacDonald: What a dreadful phrase that is: "social evangelist!" I would not invite one of those into my kitchen for a beer. Any intelligent person who is indifferent to the environmental issues, indifferent to the corporate greed which pried unearned billions out of NASA and the defense program, indifferent to a lethargic, self important bureaucracy which spends two dollars on itself out of every five appropriated for social programs, that person is not living in the world. He is not experiencing life. He is as dead upstairs as he soon will be in toto.

NBM: Are you interested in politics as an active participant?

MacDonald: I have supported a few -- a very few -- politicians I respect. But only with donations. I am not a group person. I like to be alone, work alone, so that both blame and praise are undiluted.

NBM: Writers' organizations are in the news lately -- The American Writers Congress and the PEN conference, for example -- largely due to their interest in national and international political matters. As a former president of MWA, do you have any observations on the role of a writers' group and the matters writers' organizations ought to address?

MacDonald: Historically, all autocratic governments oppress writers. The dictator does not want to be told he is wearing no clothes. A lot of very good work has come out of such oppressions. I suppose it is reasonable for organizations of writers to complain as loudly as possible about their fellow writers in the gulags, prisons, and asylums. Sometimes it seems to do some good. But I far prefer the sort of activity the Authors' Guild undertakes when they publish model contracts with publishers and recommend the abolishing of traditional unfair clauses therein. The Screenwriters' Guild has used the strike weapon successfully to pry loose a share of the income from sale of tapes.

NBM: Early in your career, you wrote science fiction. Why did you stop?

MacDonald: I will probably write some more science fiction some day. I will come upon an idea which cannot be expressed as well in another form. Science fiction is particularly useful in making social comment without being dull.

NBM: A turning point in your career was your introduction of Travis McGee, who has now been the protagonist of some twenty novels. Does the time come when, despite your best intentions, you find that you have exhausted a character's possibilities and you become bored with him?

MacDonald: Are you serious? How could I know if a time will come when I will become bored with McGee? I am not bored now.

NBM: You will be seventy in July. Have you contemplated retirement?

MacDonald: I haven't given it a thought. I'd hate to have to pack it in. It's too much fun.

"No Grave Has My Love"

The history of the pulp fiction magazine is primarily a history of the American pulp fiction magazine, a singular invention that took place and flourished in the United States in the late 19th century on into the Twentieth. But as with many things uniquely American, it was not and had antecedents in Europe going as far back as 17th century in the form of pamphlet fiction. During the heyday of the American pulp, countries such as Britain and Germany had their own pulp titles with their own pulp heroes, and many of these magazines published works by writers who would one day become household names. Britain had its The Story Teller, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story. Germany its U-Boot Abenteuer and Der Detektiv, whose hero Harald Harst was killed off after his author and publisher refused to turn him into a Nazi.

But these examples, as with scores of others in different countries, were parochial affairs, titles that never crossed the borders of the countries from which they originated. The American pulps, on the other hand, like American culture in general, found huge audiences in other countries and the publishers of these magazines were only too happy to oblige by selling reprint rights to overseas concerns. Almost every big American pulp title had a version published in either Canada or the UK (or both) and these issues were not necessarily carbon copies of the US originals. As pulp magazines slowly died in the postwar era and many US titles began including reprints in their new issues (almost a sure sign of imminent death), so too did the overseas versions of these magazines look to other sources for their copy.

A case in point is the British version of that singular detective pulp, Black Mask. The first edition of the UK version appeared in June 1923, three years after the magazine’s birth in America, and it was nearly an exact copy of the American issue of June 15th (one additional story from a previous edition was included). The magazine was actually printed in the United States and shipped to England for sale there. This was the business plan for nearly two decades, and it seems that no issue ever included material that originated the UK (a few stories cannot be traced, so it remains a possibility). In 1939, due to England’s entry in the war, the magazine began being printed in London, and the copy began changing as well. The number of stories reprinted from the American edition dropped to only four or five and the number of pages was reduced as well. Toward the end of the war the magazine began including stories from other American pulps, mainly Dime Detective, and usually only one story per issue. Then, with the July 1950 issue, the UK version began relying more and more on reprints from other American detective magazines, mainly Dime Detective, but also Detective Tales and Detective Fiction.

John D MacDonald had scores of his pulp stories reprinted in British versions of the American magazines. His first appearance in the UK version of Black Mask was a reprint of his “Murder in One Syllable” which was originally published in the May 1949 edition of the American version. The second time his name showed up in the table of contents was in the August 1950 issue, where his novella “No Grave Has My Love” was the featured entry. And like the other stories in this particular UK edition, all of the titles originally appeared in the December 1948 issue of Dime Detective. The UK version even used the original cover art from the American magazine (a practice they continued).

“No Grave Has My Love” is a story bordering on the fantastic, with an aspect of the plot that could nearly be called science fiction, but it’s only used to justify a plot requirement late in the story. The setting is the Meadowbrook Retreat, a private institution for the treatment of the insane, located in the green, bucolic hills south of the city of Benton (most likely a stand-in for Utica, New York). It's a prestigious medical facility, employing some of the finest doctors in the world, and a staff far more skillful than those employed by public institutions. The most skilled of these physicians is Dr. Andre Spence, a brain surgeon who has developed techniques used to treat the insane that are practiced nowhere else. We meet Dr. Spence as the story opens, and it's clear from MacDonald's description of him that he is not the story's protagonist.

The bones of his face were prominent. High, sharp cheekbones, a beaked, high-bridged nose, a lean, hard jaw, thin lips. He seemed not to find it necessary to blink as often as most people, and when he did so, his eyelids moved with exceptional slowness. In three days he would be forty-six. Since he managed to give an enigmatic and ageless impression, he knew that behind his back attendants called him "the lizard."

Spense is shaving as these observations are made, while in the bedroom outside his wife is dying. She is a “mountainous” woman, a dim bulb that Spence married for money many years ago. She has suffered his numerous dalliances with nurses over the years and theirs is a deeply loveless marriage. When Spense diagnosed a heart condition due to her excessive weight, he contrived a means to kill her without drawing any suspicion. He has substituted cold tea in the ampules that were supposed to contain morphine, and a Meadowbrook nurse attending the woman is unknowingly administering the useless concoction.

The nurse, one Marianne Parnal, is also the latest object of Spence’s affections, although his feelings for her are not of the normal lust variety -- he wants to marry her and that is why he has finally decided on killing his wife. And why not? Marianne is the MacDonald paragon:

With the air of a new proprietor inspecting his property, Andre Spence looked on the face of his beloved. She was quite tall, just an inch shorter than Spence, and the tawny lush hair, red-gold and shimmering, seemed to be trying to escape from the severe coiffure. Her head was tilted to one side. He knew that behind the closed lids, her eyes were the changing blue of the sky, seeming to deepen in shade under emotional stress. Even under the uncompromising starch

of the nurse's uniform, he could see the ripe, warm lines of her body, and his need for her was an ache that hurt his chest and made it impossible for him to draw a deep breath. He, Andre Spence, would renew himself in the warmth and purity of her youth. She was love and laughter and a promise of unnamed delights.

Dr. Spence’s medical skills are only part of his repertory. He is skilled at manipulating people, at digging into their psyches and discovering the easiest way to get them to become his worshipful subjects. And once the deathwatch is over with and Mrs. Spence is gone, we see Marianne cleaning up, the narrative voice changes and we realize just how successfully Spence had done his job. MacDonald here sounds like he is channeling a character from one of the Love pulps.

It made her proud and happy to think that she could help, in any small way, a man like Andre Spence... She knew how he worked, how he drove himself. She tossed her head in anger as she thought of the snide remarks she had heard about the private life of Dr. Spence. It was certainly not Andre's fault that a nurse had hung herself from a tree limb a few months before Marianne had reported. They tried to make it sound as though it were Andre's fault Probably the silly girl had fallen in love with him and could not accept the fact that Andre had no time for her.

Could a man like Andre ever learn to love a girl like -- She tried to laugh. She was acting like a schoolgirl. Besides, she was being wicked. Only a hour before the hearse had come for Myra Spence's body.

And yet... And yet... She wondered if she was falling in love with Andre. I'm being a schoolgirl again, she thought. Goodness, he's twenty-three years older than I!... She drifted into a daydream wherein she told Andre that he really should get away for a rest. He then looked at her with those odd dark eyes and said softly that he would consider it only if she were to come with him, as his wife.

Which is, of course, exactly what happens next, much to the consternation of a local Benton psychiatrist named Ralph Bettinger, introduced as “Young Dr. Bettinger,” and here we meet the real JDM hero. Bettinger, once a promising young surgeon whose career was cut short by a piece of shrapnel during the war, has referred several of his patients to Meadowbrook and it was here that he met Marianne Parnal. The two of them have dated, and it is clear that Bettinger’s feeling for Marianne are much stronger than hers for him. Naturally Bettinger hates Spence and suspects him of killing his wife, but he can’t convince the head of the hospital of that.

There is a mix-up with some of the unused ampules, Marianne unwittingly tries to help Spence return them to the dispensary, and begins to become suspicious after witnessing Spence’s strange reaction to her offer. Eventually she becomes deeply suspicious of his guilt, but the all-knowing Spence realizes this and decides he has to put a stop to it. He could murder her, but that would leave him without the young body he so craves, and he then comes up with a solution that only he can bring about: a  lobectomy, a procedure he himself developed that will rid Marianne of the memory of the murder but keep her alive and willing....

Of course MacDonald had used this radical medical procedure before and would use it again. It first appeared in his early thriller “The Scarred Hand” (November 1946) and would be used again, in his February 1950 science fiction tale “Spectator Sport,” and most notably in the second Travis McGee novel, Nightmare in Pink. Indeed, the Dr. Varn of that novel bears a close resemblance to Andre Spence, and Baynard Mulligan’s description of the results of the operation give a better illustration as to the depth to which Spence is willing to go to preserve his “love.”

"It's a minor surgery. It used to be used frequently in cases of acute anxiety, but it has been discredited these past few years. I can only give you my layman's idea of it, of course. Varn used to do a lot of them. They go in at the temples, I believe, with a long thin scalpel and stir up the frontal lobes. It breaks the old behavior patterns in the brain. With a normal adult it has very specific effects. It will drop your intelligence quotient about forty points, permanently. It will make you incontinent at first. They'll shift you over to one of the regular rooms for special care-toilet training, dressing and feeding yourself, that sort of thing. You will have a short attention span, but you will be able to make a living doing some kind of routine task under supervision. It does cure all repressions and inhibitions, McGee. You will become a very friendly earthy fellow. Very strong but quite casual sex impulses. You will eat well and sleep well, and you will have no tendency to fret or worry about anything. If somebody annoys you, you may react a little too violently, but other than that you should have no trouble with society. It will be a pleasant life, believe me… “Most important of all, McGee, you will have just small disorganized memories of all this, and no urge to do anything about anything you do happen to remember clearly."
 

Talk about a Stepford wife!

Ultimately, “No Grave Has My Love” promises more than it delivers. Its outré plot isn’t helped by its unrealistic characters, whose actions seemed shoehorned into the plot in order to make it head in the direction of MacDonald’s ending. The treatment of Marianne Parnal is especially sloppy, making her almost childlike in her admiration for Spence, yet asking the reader to give a damn about her outcome. I will say that the ending of this story surprised me, an ultimately unhappy one made glib by Spence’s special procedure. To find out more you’ll have to read the story.

The British version of Black Mask continued until its November 1953 issue, lasting over two years past the death of the American title. Of course, by then the magazine was reprinting stories from other pulps, primarily Dime Detective and Detective Tales. Twelve of MacDonald’s stories were reprinted in the UK version, including “Five Star Fugitive” and “Trap for a Tigress.” Unfortunately it seems as if the UK reprint of “No Grave Has My Love” was the last appearance of the story.

"Heritage of Hate" ("Secret Stain")

Black Mask magazine was undoubtedly the most influential and most highly regarded mystery pulp ever published. The list of authors that appeared within its pages is a literal 'who's who" of detective fiction, including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and the creator of the hard boiled detective, Carroll John Daily. Its initial focus, articulated by editor Joseph T. "Cap" Shaw, was "...simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility and belief...[and] action [that] involve[d] recognizable human character in three dimensional form." It's place in American fiction cannot be overstated.

Many of the finest works by the great mystery writers were published in Black Mask. Hammett's Sam Spade originally appeared in the serialized debut of The Maltese Falcon, and the prototype for Chandler's Phillip Marlowe was born in a number of Black Mask stories, later "cannibalized" by the author for his early novels. And while John D MacDonald published stories in the magazine long after the greats had either stopped or moved on to novels, his entries there were uniformly excellent. I've already written about two of them -- "Killing All Men" and "Jukebox Jungle" -- both terrific examples of "revenge" writing with much psychological subtext. "Heritage of Hate" fits nicely into that category as a story of retribution and redemption, filled with mystery, violence, an interesting and instructive background and an ending that doesn't quite resolve itself.

The story takes place in the world of the "numbers racket," a setting that must seem quaint to today's readers, what with state-run lotteries and ubiquitous Powerball promises of instant riches. Before it became "OK" to gamble, lotteries were illegal and the purview of organized crime, meticulously stratified organizations that thrived in poor urban neighborhoods. For the gambler the cost was low, the chance of winning real, and the ease of involvement ridiculously convenient. It was a lucrative business that naturally invited competition, and in the world of criminals, any inroads made against their flow of money was met with violence and gunplay.

The protagonist in "Heritage of Hate" is the mysterious Lawrence Hask, a right-hand-man to a syndicate lieutenant named Gus Lench. Hask came to be employed by Lench after he showed up one day attempting to run his own numbers game inside Lench's territory. He was dragged into Lench's office by a couple of strong-arms and immediately began explaining why he was muscling in on Lench: his operation was "soft."

"You've got no penetration in your area. Stinking little candy stores and horse rooms and newsboys. Hell, you've got half a hundred big plants in your area. One out of every three foremen and sweepers and setup men ought to be peddling for you."

Lench -- a man whose "weakest point was his inability to think of any motive beyond profit" -- hires Hask and makes him his "promotion manager." For one full year Hask has been working, improving the operation, all the while "gently prodding Lench ... telling him how smart he really was, of how unappreciated he was by the higher-ups." That higher-up is a man by the name of Carter, a big, dignified, well-dressed boss known for his ruthlessness. The story opens at Lench's luxurious Westchester home, where a party is underway, including drinks, dinner and swimming in the heated indoor pool. Carter is there and Hask senses that this is the evening Lench is going to make his move against his boss. With the help of his ex-swimmer wife Gail -- who is secretly having an affair with Hask -- he has arranged a pre-dinner swim for all the guests. Once everyone is in the pool the lights suddenly go out and Hask immediately heads to where he last saw Carter. Sure enough, Carter is underwater and unconscious, and after quickly getting the lights back on, Hask pulls Carter out of the pool and revives him with artificial respiration. The look on Lench's face shows he is not pleased.

Once Carter is conscious he asks who saved him, and when he is told it was Hask, he tells him that the two of them are leaving and that Lench's days are numbered. Although he didn't see his assailant he knew it was a woman's arm that grasped his throat from behind, and he also recognized Gail's perfume. Lench sputters his claims of innocence as Carter is walking out the door, but Carter will hear none of it.

"You, my greedy friend, may live another twelve hours, or even as much as thirty-six hours if you stay and fight it out. If you run like a rabbit, it may take my people a year to find you. If you want another year -- run."

As Hask leaves with Carter he gives the frightened and enraged Lench a wink, as if to tell him that this is all part of some grand plan. Carter brings Hask on as his assistant and immediately begins pumping him for information on Lench's operation, seeking the best way to rub him out. Hask tells him that Lench is too well fortified to go down in a direct assault and suggests a double cross: Hask will go to Lench and propose a burglary of Carter's safe, while Carter will hide out in his office and gun down Lench during his attempt. A time and alibi is established, but when he makes the proposal to Lench he gives him a different time, one that will take both of the crooks by surprise. Just who's side is Hask really on?

The story ends violently with plenty of bloodshed, and includes a scene that may or may not be a surprise to the reader. Running 6,300 words, "Heritage of Hate" zips along at a rapid pace and is ultimately satisfying, if morally ambiguous. It would prove to be MacDonald's penultimate entry in Black Mask.

Black Mask ceased publication in in 1951, ending with its July issue. In May of 1953 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine "merged" with the defunct Black Mask, announcing on the cover of that month's issue, "Black Mask Magazine -- originator of the hard-boiled mystery -- is now part of EQMM." This simply amounted to reprinting one or two old Black Mask stories in each issue, under a separate heading in the table of contents. In the very next issue (June 1953) EQMM reprinted MacDonald's first Black Mask story, 1947's "Manhattan Horse Opera," re-titled "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose." A year later in their April 1954 issue they republished "Heritage of Hate," again under a new title, "Triple Cross."

To make matters even more confusing to bibliographers, MacDonald restored his original title -- "Secret Stain" -- when he included the story in his second anthology of pulp tales, More Good Old Stuff. Happily, because of the unique setting of the numbers racket he had employed, MacDonald was unable to "update" the story into a modern setting, an unfortunate practice that marred so many of the stories reprinted there.

"Jukebox Jungle"

John D MacDonald wrote seven stories for the great detective pulp magazine Black Mask, beginning in September 1947 with "Manhattan Horse Opera" and ending in July 1950 with "Jukebox Jungle." The fiction magazine, generally regarded as the finest of the mystery/crime pulps, would last only one more year after that last story appeared, ceasing publication with the July 1951 issue. "Jukebox Jungle" is a fitting ending to MacDonald's work for Black Mask. It is tough, gritty and just about the most hardboiled piece of short fiction he ever wrote.

Structured like a mini-novella (if such a form can be said to exist) the 9,100-word story is divided into three chapters, all with colorful titles ("Margaret Street Blues," "Die, Die Again" and "Dizzy Mary") that serve no purpose other than to make the tale seem longer than it really is. Perhaps the chapters were inserted by an editor. "Jukebox Jungle" is a work that is somewhat reminiscent of a 1948 story called "Homicidal Hiccup," and it's setting in a blighted urban wasteland would be explored in deeper detail two years later in his novel The Neon Jungle. But the story is strong enough to stand on its own and it's a real surprise that it wasn't included in one of JDM's Good Old Stuff anthologies.

The story opens as Paul Cate, a mysterious and enigmatic former resident of Margaret Street returns after the absence of a year. The neighborhood is run down and crime-ridden, a typical 1950's urban slum, described beautifully by the author in a few breathtaking paragraphs:

"He stood with the hot airlessness against his face. A small girl roller-skated solemnly by, the skate clacking over the sidewalk cracks. The cars lined up abreast and panted patiently, then roared off as the light changed. Cate smelled spilled beer, the lidless garbage cans behind the Russell Café next door, a distant trace of a woman's musky perfume... The street was the same. Margaret Street never changed. In the daytime the old women, as shapeless as their market bags, possessed it, along with five thousand smudged children, with the number peddlers, the horse players, the broken-down fighters, the cokeys, the bums, the sneak thieves squinting at the sunshine.

"But when the neon buzzed Margaret Street awoke with the thump-stomp of the jukes as shrill and endless as a cry of pain, an arm locked around a throat and heels drumming the alley asphalt as a quick hand rifles the pocket. Then most of the children slept, some of them on broken leather couches in the back rooms of the beer joints. The old women talked and laughed toothlessly across the high air shafts. At night, on Margaret Street, you felt the cool of the gun steel where you had it tucked under your belt. Your palms sweated. You moved carefully and you kept your mouth shut, and if you were alone you stayed out of the shadows. Because this was the new jungle. And beasts walk in the jungle."

Cate has returned to the neighborhood where he was born, where he grew up and once worked respectably as an accountant. But he became involved with the local crime lord Hank Olaf, at first a little, then a lot. When Cate changed his mind and tried to back out, his office was smashed, his apartment wrecked and his car was rolled into the reservoir. After a good beating or two, Cate left town, hiding out in the shadows until he realized that he had to make a decision: come back and face down Olaf or live in fear for the rest of his miserable life. He knows that Olaf has most of the police department in his pocket, so returning for another beating won't scare Olaf, but there's one section of the police force he doesn't have the fix in: the Homicide boys.

So Cate, fearful but determined, walks into the Golden Slipper Bar and confronts Olaf. The crime boss is there with Cate's old girlfriend Gina, a trampy little minx with a "compact figure and a sallow complexion." Olaf is not impressed:

"Take a look at him, Gina. Runover heels and worn out cuffs and a dirty shirt and a two-day beard. Look at the bum, Gina. He used to look pretty sharp when he run around with you, eh?"

Cate sits and orders a beer while Olaf ducks into the back room. Gina begs Cate to leave, but he doesn't move, responding, "There's only one answer to running. If you've run once, you'll run the rest of your life unless you come back and face what you ran away from." Moments later two of Olaf's goons show up and escort Cate out to the side alley and work him over good, sending him to the hospital charity ward. A detective eventually shows up to take a statement and is told everything, including names, but is surprised when Cate won't press charges. When Cate tells the cop he's going right back to the Golden Slipper as soon as he's released, the cop responds, "You poor damn fool! The next time might kill you!"

Cate lays out his plan of revenge to the cop:

"That's just the point. Hank's fix is strong enough so that he can laugh off a thing like this. But he can't laugh off murder. That brings Captain Moley and his homicide boys in, and the fix doesn't cover Moley. I know that much."

That's exactly what Cate does, but his plan goes awry when Olaf figures it out. Things look bad, but help eventually arrives from an unlikely place...

MacDonald employs a stylized prose in "Jukebox Jungle" that is noticeably different from much of his other work, a prose that has the sound of Chandler and Hammett. It's fun to read, rings in the ear and jumps off of the page. His description of a secondary character, Dizzy Mary, is a good example:

"No one on Margaret Street knew her last name. It was doubtful as to whether Dizzy Mary remembered it. Her IQ was probably somewhere in the sixties or low seventies. She was blonde and she was impossibly beautiful with a soft wholesomeness about her that always made Cate think of milk maids and sleepy summer mornings. Her eyes were wide and empty and her voice was little and thin and high. Each night of her life she drank herself into meaningless, sodden helplessness, awakening the next morning with no memories, no regrets, no hangovers, no flaw in her beauty."

Hank Olaf is also described in a kind of an arch voice that might seem out of place in any other setting:

"Big Olaf with the corn-tassel hair and the face like a clenched fist and the tiny blue eyes through which you would look into an emptiness where once there might have been a soul."

As Cate's presence in the neighborhood becomes known, old friends and customers are brought into the story, giving MacDonald an excuse to create some colorful urban ethnics, as well as to show off his business background. A clothing merchant named Mert Steen, a poolroom owner named Sam Aigo, and a haberdasher named Rufe Tomasoni are all former clients who sorely miss Cate's services, and who help him by giving him clothing, a place to stay and food to eat. Steen speaks for them all when he tells Cate:

"These boys I got handling my books now, a big outfit. Who is Mert Steen to them? Poo! A nothing. I ask them. I say do you think I should maybe cut down the size of the storeroom to give me more sales space? With you, I could get advice. With them I get the cold eye."

And of course, there's a girl... no, not Gina, but little Fran Fergesson, all grown up from "knobbly bones and joints and snarly hair" into one of MacDonald's archetypal good girls:

"The eyes, he saw, were the same. Wide and blue under a bold arch of brow. The mouth was soft, vulnerable. But the greatest change was in the maturity of her figure. She seemed to wear the surprisingly ripe femininity like a costume but recently donned so that the wearer was not yet accustomed to it."

The story ends nicely, but not before some serious violence, described by MacDonald with a lyrical pulpy poetry, almost like he knew this was his last appearance in this singular magazine. It is a fitting farewell, and JDM was perhaps the last great writer to appear within its pages.

MacDonald may not have thought it worthy of inclusion in either of the Good Old Stuff collections (if it was even considered), but thankfully the modern reader can hunt down the story without paying $100 for an old issue of Black Mask. In 1991 Maxim Jakubowski included it the mystery anthology New Crimes 3, part of an annual series of collections meant to showcase "the sheer variety, versatility and excitement of modern American and English mystery fiction." Most of the volume is reserved for contemporary mystery stories, and "Jukebox Jungle" was featured at the end in something called "Vintage Corner" along with a Robert B. Parker story and a John Dickson Carr Sherlock Holmes oddity. Used copies of the anthology aren't that hard to find and are usually not very expensive.

"Killing All Men!" ("Deadly Damsel")

"When she had awakened that morning, she had looked at her husband in the other bed. Howard's slack mouth was open, there was a stubble of beard on his chin and he was puffy under the eyes. It was at that moment she realized how bored she was.

"Howard Goodkin bored her and so did the little city of Wanderloo. Ohio. As had happened so many times before, the plot and the lines and scenery failed to wear well.

"When he came down to breakfast she kissed him warmly, smiled up into his eyes -- and wondered if he should be buried in the blue suit or the gray one."

So begins "Killing All Men!," the loopy title an editor assigned to John D MacDonald's March 1949 story he called "Deadly Damsel." The first two paragraphs could have come out of a short story published in any women's magazine of the period. The third could only come from a Pulp, in this case the king of all Pulps, Black Mask.

Founded in 1920 by no less a literary beacon than H. L. Mencken, Black Mask was originally intended as a money-making omnibus, featuring stories from all popular genres. It was eventually sold and quickly began printing crime stories exclusively. In 1926, under the editorship of Captain "Cap" Joseph Shaw, the magazine flowered into the premier mystery fiction magazine, publishing stories by the great writers of that genre: Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. Shaw left the magazine in 1936 and became a literary agent. He eventually represented a young John D MacDonald and helped him begin selling his writings in the pulps. MacDonald's first published story in Black Mask was in the September 1947 issue and was called "Manhattan Horse Opera." "Killing All Men!" appeared almost two years later. In total, MacDonald sold seven of his early crime stories to the magazine, the last one appearing in July 1950, a year before the publication's demise.

"Killing All Men!" is the classic black widow tale, told with MacDonald's characteristic style and economy. Alicia Bowie is the wife referenced in the quote above, although she hasn't gone by that name since her first marriage, twenty-four years before the action of the story begins. Since that time she has wed and murdered five husbands, and now has grown bored with husband number six. She's 41, still attractive, and has grown to love the excitement and the cycles of her chosen life: meeting, being wooed, marrying and eventually killing and moving on to the next victim. Never staying in the same place twice, she's amassed a comfortable nest egg, hidden away in various safe deposit boxes throughout the country. It's a good life. Or lives.

MacDonald gets inside her head nicely in the opening paragraphs, revealing a methodical and well organized person who completely understands what she is doing and has no problem living with herself. 

"Death gave her a feeling of power that she bore with her wherever she went. She looked at the dull, tidy little lives of the women in the small cities in which she lived, and she felt like a goddess. She could write all manner of things on the black slate of life, and then, with one gesture, wipe the slate clean and begin all over again. New words, new love, new tenderness and a new manner of death... It was good to kill men... but it was not until her fourth death that she managed to connect her joy with that half-forgotten incident in the woods near her home when she had been fourteen...It bothered her that her hatred of men had to be based on a particular incident. She would rather it had been hatred without apparent cause, because it would have seemed cleaner that way."

The story abruptly changes scene, and we are now in Cristofer, Florida, "a small, inland town, sleepy in the hot sun." Ben Lawton is a former WWII POW who has recently been released from a VA Hospital, suffering from "tension," and who was advised by his doctor to avoid his stressful pre-war job (we're never told what it was, but it was important) and go find "some quiet and isolated spot -- manual labor-- no worries." He's working as a maintenance man at Komfort Court, a shabby resort motel consisting of sixteen one-room cabins, run by Jonas Bright, an elderly, semi-paralyzed man, and who also has another employee: his attractive daughter Serena, "tall, slim, young figure, [with] a proud walk, warm strength [and] fine sensitivity." In other words, MacDonald's ideal woman. Ben pines for Serena, but realizes "a subdued, solemn psycho case, a man straight out of a PN hospital, held no charms for her." Besides, Serena herself longs for Jay Kelso, a recently-arrived guest who rode into town in a yellow convertible, who is described as looking like a "racetrack tout who had cut himself a piece of the killing. He wore loose-weave sports shirts in pearl gray, lemon yellow and powder blue. His neckties were knotted into great bulky triangular knots... His faun and pearl slacks were knife-edged, and his sports shoes were obviously elevators... His face was wan and thin, with a deep tan over the sallowness, dark hair pompadoured with a greasy fixative, his facial expression a carefully trained imitation of a movie tough guy." How could Serena resist? Kelso and Serena become an item, despite Ben and her father's warnings.

Then, guess who shows up as the next guest? Yep, the recently-widowed Mrs. Goodkin, only now she's poising as the recently-widowed Betty Oliver. Kelso smells money, "Betty" smells a new victim, Serena gets tossed aside like yesterday's front page, and Ben... well, he's just waiting. The fun begins.

"Killing All Men!" is a terrifically sly, engaging piece of pulp writing, with MacDonald's beautifully-drawn characterizations the focal point. The plot is exciting and, at times brutal, but it is the characters of the widow and her prey Kelso that MacDonald hones and spends the most words on. They become real, recognizable people, although no one you would ever want to actually know. Their situations at the end of the story are extremely satisfying, and reading the last couple of sentences made me actually laugh out loud.

The character of Ben Lawton is of a type seen frequently in MacDonald's early writing: the returning WW II veteran, damaged by war and in need of healing, but never to the extent that you don't believe he'll ultimately pull it off. MacDonald himself had been one of those men, although how damaged he was will never be known. When he decided to give up the military and a business career in order to attempt fiction writing as a full time job, he was pitied and looked on as a "war case" by his neighbors and family (although not by his ever-supportive wife Dorothy). Probably much the same way Ben Lawton was.

"Killing All Men!" is included in MacDonald's last short story anthology, More Good Old Stuff, appearing for the first time under the author's original title.