"A Corpse on Me!"

Any writer who produced as much fiction as John D MacDonald did in his 40 year career was bound to repeat himself now and then. When you write nearly 470 short stories, novellas and novels it surely couldn’t be helped. Many bits of business that originated in long-forgotten and mostly neglected pulp magazine tales later showed up as pivotal plot points in later stories and novels, especially in the Travis McGee series. I’ve written before about some of these, including the oft-used jewels-hidden-in wax smuggling trick that first appeared in “The Flying Elephants” and was eventually the mcguffin of The Deep Blue Good-By. The gaslighting via pharmaceuticals that was so important to the plot of The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper was first invented back in 1948 for the novella “No Grave Has My Love.” The singular way to defend oneself against an attacking, leaping dog that McGee used in A Deadly Shade of Gold originated in a Doc Savage story called “The Chinese Pit,” published in 1947. And on occasion MacDonald didn’t even need to go back to the pulps for help: the entire first chapter of The Long Lavender Look was a rewrite of his 1961 Saturday Evening Post story “Sing a Song of Terror.”

So it’s no surprise when digging out an old story one hasn’t read in years, like “A Corpse on Me!” from the March 1950 issue of Dime Detective, to discover yet another antecedent to yet another Travis McGee adventure.

“A Corpse on Me!” begins with the story’s protagonist -- named Brendan Mahar -- observing a young woman walking down a city street. The prose is terse and wonderfully descriptive:

At four o'clock on that long-awaited October afternoon, Brendan Mahar saw her walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, the suitcase dragging her shoulder down. Rain was a perpetual dreary mist, fattening to ripe drops on the dying leaves, darkening the gray stone wall that bordered the sidewalk, turning the litter of papers and leaves in the gutter to paste. There was an automaton quality about her walk and, even at a hundred feet, he sensed the expressionlessness of her face. She was hatless, her pale hair drawn tightly back.

The woman is Eileen Kraft and she has just been released from prison after spending four years there, jailed for being an accessory in a jewel heist. But instead of acting like the typical hardened female ex-con, Mahar observes Eileen’s complacent, disinterested attitude and, especially, her dead eyes. She must have been pretty once, but now her hands are puffy and bloated and her skin has an unhealthy pallor. Most noticeable is the ugly scar on the side of her mouth, the result of an attack by another inmate which was repaired haphazardly by prison doctors.

Mahar blocks her path and tells her he is going to help her, mentioning the name of a fellow inmate with whom Eileen was friendly. She is naturally hesitant, but woodenly agrees to come with Mahar, who has booked her a room at a local hotel. Mahar is a recovery agent working for an insurance company, although Eileen doesn’t know this and Mahar is eager to hide it from her. Once in the hotel room Eileen bathes and puts on some nice new clothing Mahar has purchased for her. They order room service and Mahar tells Eileen that he knows a plastic surgeon who can fix her damaged cheek. Eileen is curious about Mahar’s motivations but is too disinterested to ask too many questions. She is told that tomorrow she will see her old prison bunkmate, Betty Krastnov.

Mahar and his partner Cam Stoddard have concocted this ruse for a purpose. Eileen’s husband, Boo Renaki, was part of a four-man team who came up with the idea for the jewel heist. He was working on and planning the burglary unbeknownst to his new wife. But a few days before the planned snatch Boo decided that he could perform the deed on his own and freeze out his partners. With an unknowing Eileen acting as getaway driver, Boo robbed a safe and cracked an unexpected janitor over the head before hightailing it. The janitor soon died from his injuries, so now Boo was guilty of both burglary and murder. Plus, he had three very angry ex-partners now wondering where he had gone to. The couple was hiding out in a remote cabin on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and soon after the robbery Eileen returned from shopping to find Boo dead and the cabin turned upside down. Obviously the former partners had discovered Boo’s whereabouts and snatched the jewels before getting their revenge. Soon thereafter Eileen was picked up and sentenced to prison.

Mahar and Cam have convinced Betty Krastnov to go along with a ruse to pretend that the three of them are crooks looking for the whereabouts of the other partners, certain that Eileen must either know something or hold some unvoiced secret that will help them recover the jewels. But once Eileen realizes that they are “crooks” and that all the help Mahar has offered was only a means to an end, she comes out of her stupor and storms out of the hotel room. Suffering defeat, Mahar calls the hotel dick and asks him to stop her, thinking that having someone on the right side of the law pressure her might succeed where he had failed. But she is too quick and exits the hotel and walks down the street. After only a few moments outside a car stops and she is picked up and shoved into the back seat. The chase begins…

“A Corpse on Me!” -- which was, surprise, not MacDonald’s original title: it was “Sentence for a Lady” -- is a good, fairly representative example of MacDonald’s maturing writing skills during the dying days of the pulps. While the plot is straightforward and fairly obvious, the writing is peppered with keen, expertly expressed observation and even social awareness. Eileen’s background is compassionately described by Mahar in a conversation with his partner:

Cam: "Is she a pretty rough type?"

Mahar: "No. The Krastnov woman was right, Cam. I suppose women's prisons all over the country are full of them. Sensitive kids who grow up in the wrong neighborhood, too innocent to see what's going on right under their noses, then getting mixed up in something pretty shoddy. They get clapped into prison before they find out what the world is all about."

Cam: "If you're through with the philosophy and sociology, we'll get practical."

And even MacDonald’s typically glib ending is written to be shadowed in some doubt.

(For the seasoned reader of John D MacDonald, the clue that Eileen is a good girl is made obvious in her description: a blonde with pale gray-green eyes.)

The bit that was later reused in a Travis McGee novel occurs far too late in the story for me to reveal it here. It’s not terribly original and was probably used by countless other authors of the era, but still it’s similar enough to ring familiar tones in the mind’s ear of a MacDonald fan. The novel is the excellent eighth entry in the McGee series, One Fearful Yellow Eye, and the mcguffin was stolen and hidden by Saul Gorba.

As far as I can tell “A Corpse on Me!” has never been reprinted.

No Girl in the Plain Brown Grave

Last week’s posting discussed John D MacDonald’s 1948 novella “No Grave Has My Love,” which originally appeared in the December 1948 issue of Dime Detective and was later reprinted in the British edition of Black Mask. I focused mainly on the history of overseas versions of pulp titles, outlined the plot of “No Grave Has My Love,” and offered a brief opinion on the quality of the story. What I didn’t do, because it didn’t occur to me until after I wrote the article, was to reveal the fact that the novella was the origin of part of the plot of a later JDM novel, a Travis McGee title no less. I happened to be listening to the latest audio book version of The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (expertly read by Robert Petkoff) and suddenly I recognized several of the plot points of “No Grave Has My Love,” updated with 1968 scientific advancements. I don’t know why this didn’t ring a bell with me, considering how many times I’ve read Brown.

Recall that in “No Grave Has My Love,” Dr. Andre Spence is a renowned surgeon who has developed a means of treating psychosis through a unique method of performing a lobectomy. This technique not only cures the mental malady, it erases recent memory. Spence is trapped in a loveless marriage, to a “mountainous” woman who is bedridden. He has fallen in love with one of his nurses and comes up with a plan to kill off the wife by substituting water for morphine in the ampules the nurse draws from and administers. He is successful in killing the wife but is undone when the nurse begins suspecting something fishy after Spence reacts to her offer to return the unused ampules to the dispensary. Spence’s intention was to drop them in some inconspicuous place and “crush them with his heel.” He decides to perform his surgery on the nurse so she will forget everything about the dead wife and her illness.

(I can’t imagine there’s anyone reading this blog who hasn’t already read The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, but if you haven’t I’m about to spoil the plot.)

Twenty years later MacDonald brushed off this means-to-an-end, updated the science, and reused it for different characters in different situations. In The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper Travis McGee is fulfilling the request of a recently dead paramour by checking up on her married daughter, one Maureen Pike. Following a second miscarriage Maureen has descended into a strange kind of childlike psychosis and had made several attempts at suicide. She also disappears for long periods and returns with no memory of where she was or what she did. It develops that her husband, Tom Pike, is dosing her with a substance called puromycin, which makes her lose memory of recent events. His ultimate goal is to kill off Maureen by making it look like suicide and marry her sister for what will be a very large estate.

Pike has obtained the puromycin from a local doctor named Stewart Sherman who he was blackmailing after he learned of the doctor’s murder of his wife. A police detective named Stanger, talking with McGee, goes into the very familiar details:

"Nobody is ever going to prove anything on him, and it wouldn't do much good now anyway. But let me tell you something. I have lived a long time and I have seen a lot of things and I have seen a lot of women, but I never saw a worse woman in my life than Joan Sherman. Honest to Christ, she was a horror. She made every day of that doctor's life pure hell on earth. Damn voice onto her like a blue heron. She was the drill instructor and he was the buckass private. Treated him like he was a moron. One of those great big loud virtuous churchgoing ladies with a disposition like a pit viper. Full of good works. She was a diabetic. Had it pretty bad too but kept in balance. I forget how many units of insulin she had to shoot herself with in the morning. Wouldn't let the doctor shoot her. Said he was too damned clumsy with a needle. Three years ago she went into diabetic coma and died."

"He arrange it?"

Stanger shrugged. "If he did, he took such a long time to figure it out, he didn't miss a trick."

"Want me to beg? Okay. I'm begging."

"Back then the Shermans lived about six miles out, pretty nice house right in the middle of ten acres of groveland. We were having a telephone strike and things got pretty nasty. They were cutting underground cables and so on. She'd had her car picked up on a Friday to be serviced, and they were going to bring it back Monday. Because of the phones out that way being out, he thought he'd better drive in Sunday morning and see to some patients he had in the hospital. Besides, he had to pick up some insulin for her, he told us later, because she used the last ampule she had that morning. He'd pick up a month's supply at a time for her. He made his rounds and then he went to his office and worked awhile. Nobody would think that was strange. He stayed away from her as much as he dared and nobody blamed him. He said he was supposed to get back by five because a couple was coming for drinks and dinner. But he lost track of the time. The couple came and rang the bell and the woman went and looked in the window and saw her on the couch. She looked funny, the woman said. The husband broke in. No phone working. They put her in the car and headed for the hospital. They met Doc Sherman on his way out and honked and waved him down. She was DOA. They say he was a mighty upset man. There was a fresh needlemark in her thigh from her morning shot, so she hadn't forgotten. He said she never forgot. They did an autopsy, but there wasn't much point in it. I don't remember the biochemistry of it, but there just aren't any tests that will show whether you did or did not take insulin. It breaks down or disappears or something. County law checked the house. The needle had been rinsed and put in the sterilizer. The ampule was in the bathroom wastebasket. There was a drop or so left in it. That tested out full strength. The doctors decided there had been a sudden change in her condition and so the dose she was used to taking just wasn't enough. Also, they'd had pancakes and maple syrup and sweet rolls for breakfast. He said she kept to her diet pretty well, but Sunday breakfast was her single exception all week. Now, tell me how he did it. That is, if he did it."

After a few minutes of thought, I had a solution, but I had been smartass too often with Stanger, so I gave up.

It pleased him. "He brought home an identical ampule of distilled water, maybe making the switch of the contents in his office. Gets up in the night and switches the water for the insulin. She gets up in the morning and shoots water into her leg. Before he goes to the hospital, he goes into the bathroom, fishes the water ampule out of the wastebasket, takes the needle out of the sterilizer, draws the insulin out of the one he filched and shoots it down the sink, puts the genuine ampule in the wastebasket, rinses the needle and syringe, and puts it back into the sterilizer. On the way into town he could have stopped, crushed the ampule under his heel, and kicked the powdered glass into the dirt if he wanted to be real careful. I think he was careful, and patient. I think maybe he waited for a lot of years until the situation was just exactly right. I mean maybe you could stand living with a terrible old broad like that if you knew that someday, somehow, you were going to do it just right. Nice?"

MacDonald reused lots of business from his early years into his later novels (like jewels in a wax-filled canteen), but this is one where a novel’s entire plot turns on not one but two inventions from the same early story. I wonder how many more are out there?

"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.

"High Dive to Oblivion"

Out of the hundreds of stories John D MacDonald wrote for the pulp magazines in the early days of his writing career, some were terrific examples of mid-twentieth-century popular fiction, some were so-so, and others were downright awful. There were relatively few in either extreme, leaving a lot of okay-but-not-great tales as JDM’s real pulp legacy. Most of the best of them were collected and published in the early 1980’s in the Good Old Stuff anthologies, leaving the remainder to molder away in the crumbling pages of the surviving issues of Detective Tales, Startling Stories, Doc Savage and the like. Several of the good stories not collected in the MacDonald anthologies appeared in other pulp anthologies over the years, collections like American Pulp, Hard-Boiled Detectives, A Century of Great Suspense Stories, Pulp Masters, and their ilk, and I have written about all of these that I know of.

This leaves the orphans, the stories that have never been reprinted outside of their original publication. There is usually a reason for this, mainly that the tales aren’t really worth reprinting. But for fans of a particular author, every story bears at least one examination, and here on this blog I intend -- eventually -- to write about every story MacDonald ever wrote and had published. Given the size of this task, the frequency that I post, and my age, this is a road I will probably never see the end of, but hey, it’s a goal. So today we come to a randomly selected tale titled “High Dive to Oblivion,” originally published in the April 1948 issue of Dime Detective. It’s a perfect example of these middle-tier JDM tales that bear reading but don’t really stand up with the best of them.

Dime Detective published more JDM stories than any other pulp magazine. Here’s what I wrote about it a few years ago:

“Of all the magazines John D MacDonald published short stories in, Dime Detective holds the record for printing the most. From October 1946 until August 1952, MacDonald's works appeared there 39 times, either under his own name or as one of the "house authors" such as Scott O'Hara. The pulp magazine was one of the earliest to accept his submissions and, beginning with only his second appearance, prominently displayed his name on the covers of nearly every issue his stories appeared in.

“Dime Detective began publication in 1931 and ran until August 1953. It was the premier pulp magazine of Popular Publications, who published other "Dime" fiction magazines such as Dime Sports, Dime Western and Dime Adventure. It was, according to anthologist Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, "the one legitimate rival to Black Mask," publishing many "name" mystery writers such as Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Frederick Nebel, and the father of the hard-boiled detective, Caroll John Daly. Chandler appeared there exclusively from 1937 to 1939, and some of his most iconic short fiction was published within its pages, including "Red Wind," "The Lady in the Lake" and "Trouble is My Business." According to Dziemianowicz in the Introduction to Hard-Boiled Detectives, a 1992 anthology of Dime Detective stories, the magazine lured many of these big names away from Black Mask by paying "the princely sum of of four cents per word -- one cent more than Black Mask and quadruple the going pulp fiction rate." Their newsstand price was also a nickel less than Black Mask.

“He goes on to point out that the magazine "made only two stipulations to its authors: there were to be no novel serializations and the characters they created could not appear in competing magazines. Beyond that, they were given relatively free rein to write what they chose." (Chandler obviously cheated by changing the name of his detective John Dalmas to Phillip Marlowe when he harvested his Dime Detective stories for his later novels.) And although the focus, as one might imagine, was on detective stories, Dziemianowicz explains that "in its later years, it also published a good many non-detective crime stories written in the grim noir style that would become the trademark of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and other writers of the paperback originals that helped put the pulps out of business."

“High Dive to Oblivion” was MacDonald’s ninth appearance in Dime Detective and the story was written when the MacDonalds were living in Clinton, New York. As referenced last week, this period was the beginning of JDM’s great science fiction output, but he was still writing plenty of traditional crime stories. The story begins promisingly, with just the right mixture of mystery and uncertainty.

He worked in a bank, in one of those jobs where you've got to lead a clean life or they can't take a chance on you. He was smart enough to know that. I had his schedule figured out pretty well. I worked on it long enough. I gave up my job to work on it, and now that it's over, I think I'll go back to that little out-west town that I came from -- that Clara came from.

The protagonist, speaking in the first person, is named Deven, and his search for a girlfriend he had before the war has led him to the big city. When he returned from overseas Clara had left to work as a stenographer at a big city bank, and it took Deven some time to recover from post-tramatic stress before he left to go look her up. When he asked about her at the bank he was told that she had left her job two months ago, that she didn’t indicate where her new job was, and that all they have is her home address where she lived when she worked there. A check of the residence reveals that she move out of there as well, around the same time. Also around this time, her letters home to her mother ceased.

Deven goes to the police to ask about her, and for reasons the author never clarifies, tells them that he is looking for an old girlfriend named Alice Williams. He tells an inspector the last date he “saw” her and is then shown photos of four dead Jane Doe’s.

Four dead girls, unidentified. I looked at the pictures. A truck had nearly cut one in two. She was too hefty to be Clara, and the face wasn't right. The second one was a swarthy one who had been hauled out of the harbor. Not her. The third one came out of the river too, only she had been there a long, long time. Probably right through the winter. He said the lab gave the natural hair color as auburn. Not Clara. When she was a little kid her hair was as black as the crows in her old man's corn patch. The fourth was a mess. Her face was smashed. She could have been Clara. She was the right size to be Clara. The blood-soaked hair was black.

The fourth woman was the victim of a fall from an eighth floor apartment, her face so badly damaged from her landing in the back of a truck that her features could no longer be determined. The driver of the truck had only a vague idea of where he was when he heard the landing, but when he stopped to look (thinking he had been hit by another car) he saw nothing. It was only when he arrived at his destination that he found the body, dead, nude with no identification.

When Deven asks about any scars or marks found on the body, he is told of an old scar on the neck, a feature he immediately recognizes as one Clara had, but he bluffs his way out of the police interview by telling the inspector that this couldn’t be his “Alice Williams.” He finds his way to the driver of the truck, who remembers only the block he was on when the crash took place, and Deven spends time visiting every one of the cheap apartment buildings that lined the street. Eventually he finds someone who recognizes her picture. She was a “Mrs. Charles Driscoll” and she and her “husband” were there only infrequently, with many midnight departures on the part of Mr. Driscoll. Through more detective work Deven eventually identifies the man, a bank employee named Alexander Warder who is married to another woman. Convinced that Warder and Clara were engaged in an extramarital affair and that Alexander was responsible for Clara’s fall from the apartment window, he sets out the right this wrong on his own…

Story art from the Cavalcade reprint

There is a lot of uncharacteristically sloppy writing and plotting in “High Dive to Oblivion,” some of it so bad as to jump out at the reader like a typo. In order for MacDonald to make his plot work he had to elbow in a lot of unrealistic, insensible and downright ridiculous situations that don’t stand up to the first reading, let alone repeated ones. The detective work Deven does is simplistic enough that it could have been done by the laziest of policemen, so one wonders why is wasn’t done in the first place. Well, I guess MacDonald wouldn’t have had a story otherwise. I’m not sure he has one here: a good idea that he can’t really pull off successfully. Still, a lot of the writing is expertly done, and the haunted mood of the protagonist is especially well handled. “High Dive to Oblivion” is worth reading for that fact alone.

Although this story has never been reprinted as part of an anthology, it was republished in another magazine. It appeared in the July 1949 issue of an Australian men’s magazine called Cavalcade, under its original title, with new artwork and a few editorial changes. (New York changed to Sydney, color to colour, harbor to harbour…). I’m making an educated guess about these changes, since I don’t own the issue of Dime Detective but do have a copy of Cavalcade. I’m also guessing that that “little out-west town” where Deven and Clara came from was originally an “upstate” town, since this reference is repeated later in the story and apparently slipped by the Australian editor. It would certainly make more sense coming from a writer who lived in an upstate town. Perhaps some of the inconsistencies evident in the version I own are the result of other editorial decisions I am not aware of. I’ll have to wait until I can locate a copy of Dime Detective to know for certain. The April 1948 issue seems to be rarer than most.

"Trap for a Tigress" ("Noose for a Tigress")

"Trap for a Tigress" was the last John D MacDonald short story ever published in Dime Detective, the venerable pulp magazine that showcased more of the author's short fiction than any other publication. It appeared in the August 1952 issue, only a year before the magazine would end its 22-year run, and was the only story featured on the cover. "Trap for a Tigress" has a lot going for it as a quintessential JDM thriller, including an ex-Marine hero, a beautiful-but-evil female, a slimy lawyer, drug-running gangsters and a pretty cornflower blonde who also happens to be a federal agent. There's intrigue, suspense, murder, double-dealing and a fistfight or two, all plot elements that typically make up a good MacDonald early pulp tale. It's too bad that this story couldn't have been better.

MacDonald's tight, workmanlike story construction is evident in the early pages of this tale, as we are introduced to a protagonist in an intriguing closed-room kind of setting: a long-distance passenger train complete with dining and sleeping cars. And ex-Marine Simon Pell ("Sim" to his friends) sports an unusual war wound, a foot missing all of its toes and requiring a special shoe containing a steel spring. Neat stuff. The problem with "Trap for a Tigress" is that these plot devices, once introduced, are never followed through and the plot itself, after proceeding nicely for a dozen or so pages, abruptly shifts gears and meanders off into what can only be described as an unsatisfactory ending. The story's tone shifts as well, into a kind of hardboiled humor that falls flat and doesn't really suit the voice of MacDonald. The work reads like a great idea that the author didn't know how to finish. Coming, as it did, so late in MacDonald's short-story career, it is surprising indeed and makes me wonder if this wasn't something he dragged out of the reject pile from 1946. Either that or an offhanded attempt at humor.

The story does indeed read like many of the early MacDonald efforts, where a returning WWII vet struggles to reenter civilian society while still haunted by the horrors of war. Anyone who has read these early tales would certainly recognize the tone of the opening paragraphs in "Trap for a Tigress."

"The Gooks were coming through the rice. I could see it moving, and there was no wind. I cursed Beldan, out at point, and I couldn't move. A heavy automatic weapon started a slow cadence. Chaw-pah, chaw-pah, chaw-pah!"

"I did the only thing I could do: I woke up. Slick with sweat. Panting. The automatic weapon was the beat of steel wheels on the rail joints. Beldan was long dead. Maybe I was dead too. A bedroom, they called it. A moving coffin in wheels. Aluminum and stainless steel, boring a roaring hole in the afternoon."

But instead of beginning the tale of a haunted veteran, these sentences open the curtain on a character who is happy, adjusted and in need of a cool bourbon. He has just been released from the military and is traveling back to New York by train, from San Francisco, after returning from Korea. His wife Marj has come to meet him and travel back on the same train. Actually, it's his ex-wife, who divorced him before Sim went overseas, and she's travelling with her attorney. She's here on the train attempting to come to some mutually-agreeable settlement with her former husband, who has figured out a way to get out from under an onerous divorce settlement. Instead of taking a lump-sum property settlement, Marj fought for and received fifty-percent of all of Sim's future earnings, believing it would set her up for life. But she neglected to get the judge to set a minimum. Immediately after the divorce Sim joined the Marines, going from well-paid ad agency Mad Man to grunt overnight, with the corresponding drop in pay. And because he was injured in the war he is now collecting a lifetime disability benefit, an income that can't be touched by the settlement. He plans to "build a shack in the tropics and lie on [his] back for the rest of [his] life." His counter-offer is to get Marj to agree to drop the fifty-percent agreement for a cool $10,000.

Once the reader is introduced to Marj it becomes apparent why Sim is going to such lengths to prevent her from enjoying the fruits of his labor. As they meet in the dining car of the train, Marj and her lawyer (with whom she is apparently sleeping), greet Sim with icy contempt and Marj's first words to Sim are "You dirty stinking welcher." Sim returns the greeting with sarcasm and when the lawyer objects to the insinuation that the two are having sex, Sim responds with a blistering denunciation of his former bride that provides all the background on Marj the reader needs.

"... you, sir, should smarten up. Missy, here, is a playmate for men, not boys. She walks around in an aura of dangling scalps. She's a gun-notcher. She's a pelt-stretcher. Why don't you trot home to the wife and kiddies, Mr. Hanneman? Your wife probably senses the phoniness of your excuse for this trip anyway."

This, of course, leads to a fist fight and Hanneman is quickly bested. The couple leaves the dining car in a huff, with Marj giving "a flaunt and twitch of her hips that melted ice in the drinks all down the line." Sim finds an empty seat in a booth occupied by a "cornflower blonde," with "petaled eyes," the kind of pretty girl who looks "like [she] wants to talk baby talk and is smart enough not to." (I'll confess that I don't really understand what that means.) They banter back and forth in the wise-cracking language of the day and when Sim tells her he is just back from the war and "hacking at attractive females," she responds,

"'Hack away, McDuff. You'll just dull your little hatchet. The girl is armor-plated. I'll angle you for a free dinner and then pat you on the head. I never get tight and I'm not impulsive, and I've got four brothers, every one of them over six feet."

(When a woman refers to herself in the third person, you know she can handle herself, especially in a John D MacDonald story!)

When she tells him her name is Skipper Moran, the reader knows instantly that she is "the one."

After dinner and the forewarned pat on the head, Sim returns to his sleeping car (a room, actually) only to find an apologetic Marj waiting for him outside his door. When MacDonald writes that "her underlip was out like a candy shelf and her eyes looked like a stoked furnace," the reader -- at that point -- doesn't know if he is being put on or not. She tries the reasonable approach, fails, lashes out at Sim with her "claws" and, after being "hammered" with the heel of Sim's hands, sits down and begins to cry. She reveals that she has gotten herself into major trouble by aiding a drug smuggler, who is now blackmailing her by threatening to expose her unless she comes up with thirty thousand dollars. And while Sim feels pity for Marj he tells her he has no intention of forking over a dime. She leaves and he goes to sleep.

But in the middle of the night he is awakened by the sound of pounding on his door. It's Marj, in a panic and holding a bloody knife. Hanneman has been killed in her sleeping car, while she stepped out for a moment. She gives the knife to Sim, who stupidly takes it. Marj orders him to help her or she'll implicate him in the murder. Since he was seen fighting the lawyer earlier that evening, Sim is forced to agree and helps Marj move the body back to Hanneman's car. When Sim goes through the dead man's wallet he finds something strange. Business cards. All sorts of business cards, one advertising Hanneman as a lawyer, another as a physician, yet another as a broker. Then, back in his own car, he finds the knife where Marj had hidden it: under Sim's bed.

The plot seems destined to end where it began, on the train, but it doesn't. There is a wild hunt for the killer involving several dozen agents, then an epilogue of sorts, happening long after the initial 24 hours, and it all feels a bit unfocused, like the author didn't really know where he was going or how to end the thing. The climax of the story is so preposterous that MacDonald had to be joking. When one looks at the quality of the other fiction the author was writing at the time -- The Damned had been published only two months earlier -- there can be no other conclusion, unless you buy my mothballed reject theory.

"Trap for a Tigress" was republished three month later in the British edition of Black Mask, then sat mouldering for nearly thirty years before it was included in MacDonald's first pulp anthology, The Good Old Stuff. Since the author makes no specific mention of the story in his introduction, one can only conjecture his original intention. I suppose it can be read either way, but seeing it alongside other really good, serious works of pulp fiction like "Miranda" or "They Let Me Live" makes the reader wonder. And like all the other stories anthologized in the two Good Old Stuff collections, MacDonald restored his original title ("Noose for a Tigress") and updated the setting, changing the war setting from Korea to Viet Nam and placing the action on an Amtrak train. Which was a stupid mistake, like all of his updating in those stories. Who was riding a cross-country train, complete with dining cars, in the mid-1970's?

"Five-Star Fugitive" ("Border Town Girl")

The July 1950 issue of Dime Detective appeared on the newsstands that summer sporting a typically-nifty pulp cover featuring a bound, blonde damsel-in-distress wearing a vivid red dress and flashing a nicely-shaped nylon-stockinged calf. The names of three authors whose works appeared in that issue were superimposed onto the illustration, and one of them was John D MacDonald. In a separate blue banner splashed across the bottom of the cover, highlighted by a large yellow "PLUS" badge, the editors added an all-caps come-on announcing that the issue also contained "A COMPLETE BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL" titled "Five-Star Fugitive" by one Scott O'Hara. At the time the issue was published you could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of readers who were aware that Scott O'Hara and John D MacDonald were the same author. Since there were two JDM stories in that particular issue of Dime Detective, one of them had to appear under a house name to avoid what editors feared might be an oversaturation by a single source.

I wrote about house names a few months ago and noted that MacDonald had a total of 40 of his short works originally appear under another name, a practice that began at the very beginning of his career and which continued up until 1951 when he shifted his efforts from short stories to novels. With the exception of two 1951 issues of Super Science Stories, the July 1950 issue of Dime Detective would be the last time JDM would have a house name used for one of his stories. (Super Science Stories used a house name for one of JDM's stories that same month. Also, I'm not including a 1952 reprint of "Five-Star Fugitive" in the British edition of Black Mask, which retained the Scott O'Hara credit.) But what seems odd to me is the fact that it was the longer, higher-profile piece by MacDonald which was chosen to appear under a secret identity rather than the shorter, 10,000-word "Dead Men Don't Scare." I've never read the latter story but have no doubt that it is inferior to "Five-Star Fugitive" for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that "Dead Men Don't Scare" has never been anthologized, by either MacDonald himself or by another editor. (It did, however, appear in the same 1952 British issue of Black Mask.) Had it been of singular quality it no doubt would have been chosen for one of the Good Old Stuff collections or anthologized in one of the dozens of volumes that have appeared with JDM works in them over the years. The other reason I'd vote for the superiority of "Five-Star Fugitive" over it's companion without having read both is the fact that "Five-Star Fugitive" is, quite simply, one of the finest John D MacDonald pulp pieces ever written.

In the introduction to their excellent 1997 collection of mystery digest stories titled American Pulp, the editors (Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg) make the seemingly sacrilegious observation that most of what appeared in the pulp magazines of the first half of the last century was really little more than junk. "Before we get too choked up about the demise of the pulps," they wrote, "one must consider a sobering reality: most pulp fiction was cliché-filled and godawful... to be sure, the pulps did produce giants... And [they] wrote some great stories. But looked at objectively today, a good deal of pulp fare was laughable and forgettable." As someone who has read more than a few old pulp magazines from cover-to-cover, I can attest to this observation. Great, original writing in the pulps was the exception, not the rule, which is why the herculean work of editors like Greenberg is so important: when you see an anthology bearing his name you can be assured that he has already separated the wheat from the chaff. Even some of the early work of John D MacDonald, while interesting to me as a student of his output and, especially, his progress, is not always something I would classify as great writing. Which is why I scratch my head over the fact that "Five-Star Fugitive" was published under a house name. Perhaps the decision was made without MacDonald's consent. Who knows? What is an established fact it that MacDonald thought highly of this work, enough so that in 1956 he renamed and featured it in his first-ever anthology, the eponymous Border Town Girl.

All of the great features we now associate with classic pulp fiction is on display in "Five-Star Fugitive." It is a sprawling, vital, multi-character drama that features murder, sex, drugs, gunplay, a redemption-seeking protagonist and a larger-than-life (literally!) bad guy named Christy. It is filled with exciting adventure, evocative scene-setting and the kind of deep, insightful characterization one doesn't usually associate with pulp writing. In fact, one of the most attractive aspects of this work is the central character of Lane Sanson, a burned-out writer who, unlike many previous JDM hard-luck heroes, has no outside force to blame for his dissolution. His own one-time success and the way he dealt with it is the only reason he is now living on the wrong side of the US-Mexico border, standing at a bar drinking cheap muscatel in a dingy dive. If you want to a read great mystery pulp, this is a great place to start.

The author's ambitions are clear from the beginning, as he introduces two seemingly-separate characters and plots. First encountered is Diana Saybree, a tall, good-looking gangster's moll who is waiting in a cheap hotel room in Baker, Texas for a scheduled drug buy. The action begins quickly as she is interrupted while taking a bath, rendered unconscious and robbed of her money roll. A quick call to her boyfriend-boss George results in him promising to send down his "muscle" to check things out. Said muscle is a former carnival strongman named Christy, a dimly-aware sociopath with a penchant for imaginative torture. Diana's first instinct is to run, but she realizes that doing so would imply guilt, and besides, with George there would be nowhere she could hide long enough before he found her.

On the other side of the border in Piedras Chicas, Mexico we meet Lane Sanson, a once-famous reporter and writer whose war novel Battalion Front became a huge bestseller and was sold to Hollywood for some serious change. The disruption of his former life was sudden and jolting: "One day you're a member of the working press. A day later you're a cocktail party lion." But that was five years ago and now the money was gone and so was his wife Sandy. In a page-and-a-half of expertly-written prose, MacDonald tells us everything we need to know about Sanson, his background, his strengths, talent and the great weakness that has held him captive for so long.

"Where did it go, that integrity they yakked about? Diluted over a thousand bar tops, spread in sweet-talk to half a hundred wenches... And sooner or later you hit bottom. The inevitable bottom."

For the past two years he has lived in Mexico City, drinking and whoring and attempting to write the next great novel. But all he had to show for it was "fifty pages of manuscript so foul that on the last cool night he'd used it to get the fire burning in the apartment out Chapultepec way." With his money nearly gone he started writing letters to newspapers in the States, looking for a job. Most of them responded with a "Sorry, pal," but one in Houston responded with a tentative, "Come on up for a try. Leg man. Guild rates." And so he piled his few belongings into his once-proud Buick and headed north. But here in Piedras Chicas, with the United States visible across the river, he couldn't make it. "On this side of the river a man could drift along. On the other side he had to produce. And Lane Sanson was grievously afraid that, at thirty-four, his producing days were over for keeps." He wonders how long a man could get away with "alienating his friends, forgetting his skills and fouling up his marriage." His regret over the treatment of his wife is the greatest:

"The loss of Sandy was a pain that rattled around in his heart. Sandy of the gamin smile, the quick young body, the eyes that could go solemn on you. Sunday mornings with Sandy. Sandy whom he had struck, hearing her emit a low soft note of pain that stung his drunken heart because it was the same soft sound she made when ecstasy was too much to bear silently."

It is during this self-pitying remorse that MacDonald begins to gently weave the two plot lines together. A barefoot, obsidian-eyed Indio girl with "high, bold breasts" named Felicia sidles up to him at the bar and asks Lane to buy her a drink. She clumsily suggests that the two of them head on over to her place for some "luff." Lane is drunk enough to toy with her, mocking her gently by calling her "a daughter of kings," but just uncaring enough to agree when she leads him out of the bar and into an alley, where two Mexican men await and begin asking about "the package." After much arguing and threats, it is obvious that this is a case of mistaken identity and Lane is slugged and his car stolen.

He awakens in the small, barely-habitable casita of Felicia, who cares for him for several days as he recovers from his beating. MacDonald shows a great respect for this character, as he did for most of the Mexicans he wrote about. Felicia, who lives alone, tells Lane that two men paid her to meet him in the bar and to bring him to that alley, but she had no idea they would do violence to him. "It is a thing I never did before," she tells him in Spanish, "as I do not wish to be in trouble with the policia. I am not a good girl, but neither am I ever taken by the policia and with me that is a matter of pride." Lane comes to appreciate Felicia's unselfish care for him and develops an affection for her. One night, after he is well enough, they make love (or "luff.") Eventually the man Felicia was supposed to have met in the bar -- and who was unavoidably detained -- arrives after encountering Felicia in town. He apologizes to Lane for causing him to be "the man in the middle," but tells him that he now has to carry out a few dubious instructions or he will be implicated in the murder of a Mexican citizen. "You won't get any help from the American consul on a deal like that," he tells Lane. " You'll rot in the prison in Monterrey for twenty years. Beans and tortillas, my friend." He is ordered to take his car --which is now in police impound -- to a garage, leave it there for a day, then drive it across the border and later meet up with someone named Diane Saybree. He has no choice but to comply.

Meanwhile, Christy has arrived, and what a character he is! An early MacDonald pure-evil prototype, he is nearly comic in some of his characteristics. As viewed from the eyes of the pilot of the plane he flew down on, Christy seems like a monster from a horror story and the reader has to wonder if MacDonald wasn't writing with his tongue in his cheek.

"... he wasn't the sort you'd want to strike up any casual acquaintance with. Brute shoulders on him. Stocky bowed legs. Long arms. Damned if he wasn't built like one of them apes. But it wasn't an ape's face. First you might think it was a face like a college professor's. Those rimless glasses and that half-bald head. Some crackpot, probably. The zany little blue eyes beamed around at the world and the mouth was wide and wet-lipped, set in the kind of smile that made you think of the time the psychology class went over to the state farm and got a look at the real funny ones."

Christy, it seems, has plans of his own. Sent to Texas to get rid of Diana and to purchase the drugs with new money, he has secretly orchestrated the original theft in an attempt to get rid of George and take over the operation. That includes getting George's girl, whether she likes it or not. The more we know about Christy, the more evident it seems that Diana would prefer death to being Christy's plaything. He checks into the same hotel where she is staying and quickly pays her a visit. He reveals that George wants her out of the picture, but not just because she lost his bankroll. It seems he has a new "protégé," a cute little nineteen-year-old, and now Christy wants Diana for himself.

"I've always had a real yen for you, sweetness. I'd take it bad if you tried to run out. If you ran out, I'd have to go up to that jerk town you come from and see how those kid sisters of yours look."

While all this is happening, Lane has crossed the border in his newly-repaired car, now with thousands of dollars of heroin hidden within it somewhere, and he is resigned to fulfill the duties assigned to him. But Lane has other things on his mind. His liaison with Felicia has awakened something within him and he is ready to write again. He checks into a hotel, cleans himself up and has a typewriter delivered to his room. Once it arrives he begins writing nonstop, working on his new creation, "A Daughter of Many Kings." After years of writer's block, "the words came, and they were the right words. After six years, the right words." The next morning he inspects his manuscript and ruminates on its quality. The observations MacDonald has Sanson make could be his own, describing any of his own writing on the country he loved.

"There were crudities in it, he knew, but there were also places that had the deep tones of a great bell. In it was something of the flavor of Mexico. The preoccupation with death, the sun and the dust and the ancient faces. The patience and the hopelessness."

But after feeling pleased with himself and feeling regret because Sandy will never read it, he realizes that it is time to go pay a call on Diana Saybree. Her room just happens to be right down the hall...

At this point -- not even halfway through the text -- the plot goes into overdrive and the reader is led on a crazy, violent ride through the wilds of Texas and back to Mexico, bringing in new characters and relationships, and focusing on the partnership-of-necessity between Lane and Diana, with a very angry Christy not far behind. It's a remarkably detailed plot for a pulp story and it is certainly no wonder that MacDonald eventually wanted to seek a wider audience for it. Whether it was he himself or an editor who suggested anthologizing it, his readers were thankful for turning a once obscure and hard to find story into a readily available paperback original. You couldn't find a better example of pulp writing at its best and if you are one who enjoys this kind of thing, I can say with near certainty that you will flat out love this tale.

I'll go into greater detail on the background of the Border Town Girl anthology when I discuss the second story in that collection, an original titled "Linda," one of MacDonald's absolute masterworks.