"The Straw Witch"

In a week or two I will be launching a new link in The Trap of Solid Gold Resources you see in the right hand column of this blog, a listing of all of John D MacDonald’s science fiction and fantasy fiction. It’s going to contain all of the stories and novels that Martin H. Greenberg included in his appendix to Other Times, Other Worlds -- MacDonald’s 1978 science fiction anthology -- as well as several additional titles that were omitted but are clearly science fiction. It will also include a couple of stories that lean more toward fantasy, and some that barely qualify as representative of either genre. “The Straw Witch” will be on that list.

Originally published in the January 12, 1964 issue of This Week magazine, this very short story is one of MacDonald’s better works, as is most of the author’s fiction of this period, and qualifies as fantasy only in the individual reader’s perception. It’s one of those “was it real or only imagined?” kinds of stories, with the payoff coming in the final paragraph of the piece. Some may argue this point, but I think I’m on pretty solid ground here, and even if you want to dispute my assertion, you’ll have to agree that it is otherwise an excellent, well written story.

The protagonist is a paid assassin named Williamson, on a mission in an unnamed country to kill an ambassador. Two prior attempts by other had failed and now the security around the man was impregnable. His large country home was now guarded around the clock, with the grounds lit by floodlights at night, and his transportation provided by a bullet-proof limousine. He never appears outside of the home except to go or to come home from the embassy. Williamson has found a safe place in a wooded area where he can observe the house at night with high powered binoculars. Every night he is there, observing, trying to find some weakness he can exploit and take out his target.

The long nights have got him thinking and remembering. Specifically, he has begun recalling a brief period during the last war (WWII?) where he learned his trade as a clandestine killer of civilians. On a mission that had gone terribly wrong, he found himself hiding in the cellar of a house for several weeks with his partner, an old, grizzled Irishman named Gulligan.

Gulligan, like an old hound, had caught the whiff of death. In the darkness his mind wandered, and he talked on and on. Gulligan was a sour old hulk, an Irish murderer, a life-long saboteur and conspirator, just the sort of malignant riff-raff they sent on missions like that one. They never sent their clean young men to assassinate civilians.

Gulligan’s rants revolve around the imminent death he foresees for both himself and Williamson, and he slowly recalls the myths of his homeland.

"I don't know how they summon all the others, Billy boy, but for the ones like you and me, for us they send one of the straw witches... On the nights when the moon rises full and yellow they gather where there's a black pool, and quaggy ground so no fool can approach them. You can hear them on a still night, making their little sing-songs of laughter, sitting with their pale beautiful feet in the black water, all of them with silver needles knitting straw in the moonlight, fashioning it into wee gallows ropes and dainty shrouds... When yours comes for you, lad, you won't be thinking she's a straw witch. No, you'll have your mind on but one thing, and she will take your hand in hers and be in such a sweet hurry to take you to a private place. But when you reach to her, her thighs will be as smoke, her breasts no more than the wind passing, and it is only her lips you will find with a snow taste to them, cold as pebbled snow, and with a quick and clever suck she takes your wind away and your murderer's soul."

Gulligan sickens in the dark cellar and begins to rave. Williamson “felt for the socket at the base of his skull” and quickly, silently kills him. He saw no straw witch come for Gulligan, but he does recall the man’s dying words: “Darlin’ darlin’”

After a full month of observation outside the ambassador’s estate, Williamson finally comes up with a plan. Every night at the same hour the man opens his door to let his dog out. He’s too far away for a rifle shot, and even if he wasn’t, the target is wary enough to only crack the door wide enough to let the pet outside before quickly closing it again. But the dog is free to wander all over the expansive grounds of the estate, and if Williamson can manage to get close to him he believes he can accomplish his mission successfully...

“The Straw Witch” was the second in a great burst of excellent short works MacDonald produced for This Week, after a five year hiatus from writing for this newspaper supplement. Up until “End of the Tiger,” which appeared in October of 1963 JDM had written one or two stories per year for This Week, beginning in 1950 and taking a break in 1958. Then, between “Tiger” and “The Quickest Way Home” in 1966 he wrote no less than twelve uniformly excellent works of short fiction, including two I have written about: “The Loveliest Girl in the World” and “Blurred View.” In all likelihood this run of stories was due to the magazine’s new Fiction Editor, Stewart Beach, a longtime writer and editor who had been around the literary scene since the 1920’s. Back in 1929 he had written a book titled Short Story Technique and obviously thought MacDonald’s was very good. In 1957 he edited an anthology of This Week stories titled This Week’s Stories of Mystery and Suspense and included JDM’s 1955 entry “There Hangs Death.”

Finally, as I say about every JDM This Week entry, these stories are readily available through various newspaper archives, and can be accessed via a commercial entity such as Pro Quest, or through local library systems that provide access to a particular newspaper that carried This Week during the 1950’s and 1960’s. And, in the case of “The Straw Witch,” this story was included in MacDonald’s 1966 short story anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories which is available as an eBook, or, if digital reading is not your thing, used copies of the paperback can usually be found for very reasonable prices.

In fact, with this posting I have now covered every entry in that excellent anthology, and for those who are interested you can access the postings individually either through the Books by John D MacDonald or the Short Stories by John D MacDonald lists available through my Resources..

"Blurred View"

John D MacDonald wrote short stories and novellas for over 70 different general circulation magazines during his 40 year writing career, magazines that covered every special and general interest one could imagine. He wrote for the pulps. He wrote for men’s magazines like Argosy, Cavalier, Climax and Playboy. He wrote for special interest magazines like The American Legion Magazine and the Catholic The Sign. And he wrote for the mainstream slicks like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, Redbook and Cosmopolitan, Family Circle and The Ladies’ Home Journal -- magazines prominently displayed on every newsstand in the country and whose circulations reached into the several millions. This was where the real  money was for an author of fiction during the middle part of the last century, and MacDonald was paid well.

But no magazine had the circulation that This Week boasted. That’s because of its delivery model: it was included as part of the Sunday edition in scores of American newspapers, heavyweights like The Los Angeles Times,  The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Star, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Boston Herald. Begun in February of 1935 it started out being carried by 21 newspapers with a combined circulation of more than four million. Over the the next thirty years the magazine’s growth was explosive: eleven million issues per week in 1955 and a high of over fourteen million by 1963. These numbers dwarf those of contemporaneous newsstand slicks -- four million got a periodical into the big leagues, with only a few like Life (5.6 million) and Reader’s Digest (ten million) exceeding that. This Week was about 80% fiction when it began but gradually started including non-fiction as time went on. By the time John D MacDonald got his first This Week story published in 1950 it was down to, at most, two short stories per issue.

That first story, “I Love You (Occasionally)” which appeared in the December 1950 issue, set the template for the kinds of tales MacDonald would write for the magazine for the next few years. These were light, breezy tales of suburban families, all nearly identical (father, mother, and two children of opposite genders) that concerned some comic misunderstanding usually caused by the father. The titles of the other early stories illustrate this better than I can: “He Knew a Broadway Star,” “What are the Symptoms, Dear?” and “She Tried To Make Her Man Behave.”

Eventually MacDonald’s This Week stories began to take on a more serious tone, beginning with his seventh story for the magazine, “The Man Who Almost Blew His Top,” (great story, lousy title) which concerns an incident of 1950’s road rage and how it enlightens a man to a growing alienation from his family. By the time “Blurred View” was published in the February 23, 1964 issue, the author had seventeen This Week stories under his belt and many of them dealt with crimes of one kind or another. And like MacDonald’s writing in general, the This Week stories got better and better as time went on.

“Blurred View” is told in the first person by Frank Fletcher, the protagonist -- and the bad guy. He’s married to Gloria, a gregarious, flamboyant, hard-to-control television actress, beloved by her many industry friends but no longer by Frank. He’s an artist, but probably not a very good one and his work is in a “lull” right now. Gloria’s income and her shrewd investments have allowed the couple to build a beautiful cliffside home in San Francisco, complete with a large studio for Frank.

Frank is having an affair with a New York widow named Helen, a woman a few years older than he. She is small and plain but had a good figure and is quite wealthy. So what’s an unhappy, unproductive husband to do? He murders his wife. He drugs her and once she is unconscious he picks up her body and brings it out on to their terrace and dumps her off the cliff. There is an inquest, where Gloria’s television friends turn out “in numbers that astonished the officials,” and the ruling determines her death to be either accidental or a suicide. After the funeral Frank takes a long recuperative trip to the Islands, where he meets up with Helen, who is unaware of Frank’s crime and who drops more than a few hints about marriage. Figuring that Gloria’s wealth will support his bachelor life sufficiently, Frank is non-committal, but that doesn’t stop Helen from planning to move to San Francisco to be near him. Frank returns home to the scene of the crime.

After I had been there alone for five days, a seedy little man arrived in the afternoon. He drove up in a battered little car and came to the door carrying a big manila envelope in his hand. He was trying to say he had something to show me. He was humble, and nervous, and had a little recurring smile like a sudden grimace. He smelled sweaty. Something about him alarmed me. Reluctantly I led him back through the house.

His name is Walsik and he is an assistant manager at the local Thrifty Quick. Several months ago he dropped a case on his foot and was laid up for weeks at the home of his brother in law, a San Francisco doctor, who just happens to own another cliffside house near Frank, with a distant view of Frank’s terrace. Oh, and Walsik’s hobby is photography, and he has a camera with a 1600 mm lens, and he was testing it out on April 10, the day of Gloria’s death.

And you can guess what is in the envelope he is carrying…

Without giving too much away (but I probably am), “Blurred View” is another in a long line of JDM stories and novels where characters use modern technology to warp reality in order to elicit a confession of guilt from a wrongdoer. Think “The Telltale Heart” with a tape recorder. And with MacDonald, sometimes it is tape, other times photography. In “Linda” it was tape, and the trick didn’t work on the title character but it did on her lover. In “Double Hannenframmis” the only crime was a bad relationship, but the reaction to the recording ended one relationship and began another. With film, the trick was actually used by the bad guy in The Turquoise Lament, a ruse later unravelled by Travis McGee. And in MacDonald’s 1950 short story “Breathe No More, My Lovely” photography is used in the exact same manner as it is in “Blurred View.” With the same results.

“Blurred View” is a beautifully written 1,900 words, the perfect example of a tale told without a single unnecessary word. It is told in flashback, beginning at Gloria’s funeral, shifting back to the inquest, then to the post-funeral legalities and on to the stay in the Islands, all done in the space of four very brief paragraphs. The structure of the short story is brilliant, and reveals itself even more on repeated readings. The author once wrote about how he came up with where to begin a story or a novel and it is still instructive reading today:

“Once I have the story… I establish  a clear sense of the ending , and then I try, through trial and error, to find the most useful beginning. The right point in time to start a story is tricky. Begin too far back from the dramatic peaks and the story becomes slow and labored. Begin too close to the tensions and the pace becomes frantic. There are no rules except the subjective  sense of “feel.”

Read “Blurred View” and you will understand how he mastered that particular problem. And in 1964 MacDonald was at the peak of his powers as a writer.

MacDonald thought enough of “Blurred View” to include it among the stories in his first short story anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories. Included were three other This Week stories, “End of the Tiger,” “The Loveliest Girl in the World,” and “The Straw Witch,” which should give one a feel for just how good his work for this magazine was; the very nature of the newspaper supplement forced him to be as concise and precise as he possibly could be.

And if you’re interested in reading “Blurred View,” End of the Tiger and Other Stories is now available as an eBook on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Also, used copies of the paperback, which saw eight separate printings from 1966 to 1987, aren’t too hard to find. And there’s another way, by which one can read not only “Blurred View” but all of John D MacDonald’s This Week stories. Thanks to the digitization of much of the runs of city newspapers throughout the country, formerly microfilmed versions the stories are available online. You can purchase them like I did through a service like ProQuest, or if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has (or had) a newspaper that carried This Week, you may be able to access these digital versions through your local library system. The Washington DC Public Library, for example, has the entire run of the old Washington Evening Star (which I used to deliver when I was a boy!) available to their members, who can access the archives from home and download PDF versions of the stories for free. Perhaps one day we can view the old pulps this way.

"Blue Water Fury" ("The Big Blue")

In April 1981 John D MacDonald sat for an interview with fellow writer Dick Lupoff. Done for radio, it was a fascinating conversation that touched on many aspects of MacDonald’s early short story career, writing for the pulps and his relationships with several of the editors of those periodicals. Early on in the interview, Lupoff explains that he had done some research into MacDonald’s biography in “the standard reference works,” and MacDonald replied: “You may find a lot of contradiction, because I lie a lot.”

I remember that when I first read his response I was taken aback. Lie? What does John D MacDonald have to lie about? This is a guy who spends eight hours a day sitting in front of a typewriter. Married to the same woman for decades. The only lies I could imagine were ones used to spice up an otherwise dull biography. Years later when Hugh Merrill’s MacDonald biography The Red Hot Typewriter was published there appeared another admission of occasional mendacity, quoted in a letter JDM wrote to a friend about his upcoming bio written by Ed Hirshberg:

“Should you read Ed Hirshberg’s tome, you will find some obvious discrepancies here and there. That is because he is such a nice, gullible, trusting chap, I just can’t keep from lying to him. I know it is a bad habit, but I keep wondering how far I can go before he realizes it’s a put-on. This is a strange basis for a bio.”

It didn’t take long in the Lupoff interview for MacDonald to prove true to his word. Only a few questions later, when talking about “house names” -- that fairly static list of JDM pseudonyms employed by pulp magazine editors when more than one MacDonald story appeared in a single issue -- he let rip an assertion that was not questioned by Lupoff and has been taken as gospel by a few of his later chroniclers.

“I had one magazine -- I don’t know which -- I’ve still got it around somewhere -- where I wrote every story in it, so that I used about five of those [house] names in addition to my own.”

Well… I’m sure most readers or listeners bought that line when it was uttered, but not me. (I didn’t read a transcript of the interview until 1987 when it was included in the first edition of Mystery Scene Reader.) By then I was well steeped in the bibliography of John D MacDonald and knew about nearly all of his published work, thanks mainly to Walter and Jean Shine’s indispensable A Bibliography of the Published Works of John D. MacDonald. I knew, for example, multiple inclusions of JDM’s stories occurred only in pulp magazines, never in a mainstream or “slick” magazine. I knew that there were eighteen issues of various pulp magazines which contained two stories by MacDonald, and seven which included three. And I knew about the one time when a pulp contained four John D MacDonald short stories. It was undoubtedly this issue MacDonald was referring to in his conversation with Lupoff, and it has long been a sought after collector’s item among JDM fans. It wasn’t a mystery pulp, or even a science fiction pulp, but one of that rarest-of-all-and-hardest-to find collectables, a sports pulp. And if MacDonald had remembered the name of the magazine he would have given the game away.

The July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories does, indeed, contain fifteen stories, but only eleven were works of fiction. The remainder were cheats: running columns, quizzes and other “departments and features.” The four MacDonald pieces and their listed authors were:

“The Glory Punch” by John D. MacDonald (Boxing)

“Bye, Bye Backfield” by John Wade Farrell (Football)

“The Thunder Road” by Peter Reed (Auto Racing)

“Blue Water Fury” by Scott O’Hara (Deep Sea Sport Fishing)

This would only be a bibliographer’s attempt to count a gang of angels dancing on the head of a pin if it was not for the fact that one of these stories was of enduring quality and was one of the author’s proudest short story achievements. “Blue Water Fury,” a title the magazine’s editor came up with after discarding the author’s “Freedom by Violence,” is a 5,000 word story ostensibly about a particular day of fishing but really concerns itself with the weightier themes of domination, determination and freedom.

Told in the first person by a somewhat passive observer, “Blue Water Fury” takes place in Acapulco and the nearby Gulf of Mexico off of the Yucatan peninsula. Referred to only by his last name, Thompson is an American who has been living in Mexico for some time, and he is an expert deep sea fisherman. Planning an outing for the next day he approaches one of his favorite charter boat captains, Pedro Martinez, skipper of the Orizaba, only to be joined by a rival pair who arrive at the same time. Agreeing that the three of them can charter the boat together, they make the arrangements and head across the street to share a beer together. Thompson immediately begins to regret his decision.

The pair are an odd couple, and in another day and in the hands of a different author these two men might have had some homosexual undertones going, but not here, at least not in any overt sense. Lew Wolta, the alpha male, is initially described by MacDonald in terms that are both familiar and predictive for readers who know his work.

“Wolta was a tall, hard, heavy-shouldered man in his late thirties with a huge voice, white teeth gleaming in a constant grin, and washed-out eyes that never smiled at all. He kept up a running chatter, most of which seemed designed to inflict hurt on the younger, frailer Jimmy Gerran, a quiet lad with a humble manner… Over the beer, Wolta said, ‘Yeah, I ran into Jimmy up in Taxco and it was pretty obvious that he needed somebody to get him out of his daze. Hell, I’ve never been in this gook country before, but I’ve got a nose for fun. Leave Jimmy alone and he’d spend all his time walking around the streets.” At that he had slapped Gerran roughly on the shoulder. ‘Tomorrow we hook a sail, boy, and it’ll make a man out of you.’”

When Thompson arrives at the dock the next morning he finds Wolta and Gerran already there, and it is obvious from Pedro’s manner that Wolta has been treating him rudely. In Spanish Pedro tells Thompson that Wolta has been speaking to him “as if I were his gardener.” Wolta is instantly suspicious of the conversation he cannot understand and asks what was said. Thompson replies, “He said that he thinks we’ll have a good day.” Once at sea the experienced Thompson sets the fishing ground rules: two men have lines out seated in the two fishing chairs. Once one man hooks a fish the other must quickly reel in his line. Once the man who hooked the prey either catches or loses his fish, he is replaced by the third fisherman.

Throughout the day Wolta is disdainful of Thompson’s expertise and rulemaking, reacting sarcastically to nearly every utterance out of the narrator’s mouth. And even though neither Woltz or Gerran have ever been deep sea fishing before, Wolta acts like a know-it-all and continually refers to Thompson as “the expert.” Jimmy Gerran seems genuinely interested in the mechanics at hand and asks Thompson to explain everything in detail. After a lengthy explanation of how to use the rod and what to do when there’s a strike, Jimmy asks Thompson how he will know if the fish has been hooked. Woltz roars with laughter and replies, “ He’ll rise up and talk to you, boy. He’ll come up and tell you all about it.”

Wolta and Jimmy are the first two in the chairs, and Jimmy is the first to hit a strike. After a bit of a struggle the catch breaks the line and escapes, resulting in the following exchange:

“Absolutely beautiful!” Jimmy said softly.

Wolta gave a hoarse laugh. “Absolutely butterfingered, pal. You had him and you lost him.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jimmy said.

“I’d have liked to see him boated,” Wolta said. “What the hell good is it to look at a fish?”

Next to land a strike is Thompson, another sailfish slightly smaller than the one Jimmy lost. With little effort Thompson reels it to boatside, where the crew of three (Pedro and two crewmembers) club the fish and bring it aboard. Jimmy looks at it wide-eyed and says “That was wonderful.” Wolta responds, “The experts are always wonderful… Do I have your permission to fish?”

When Wolta makes his own strike, the landing of it is “a comedy of errors,” but eventually, with some unsolicited help from Thompson, he reels in a ninety pound sailfish. After Pedro and crew club and bring the fish onboard, Wolta does a curious thing: he grabs a club from one of the sailors and hits it again.

“It was an understandable thing to do. But the way he did it, the way the club smashed against the hard flesh, revealed something savage and soul-naked about the man… He kicked the dead fish. I didn’t like that and neither did Pedro. A sail is an honorable opponent, a brave fish, a gentleman of the sea. Even dead he isn’t to be kicked.”

It’s Jimmy’s turn again and as he seats himself Wolta calls out from inside where he is getting a beer, “Both the men have got a fish, kid. Now let’s see if you can lose another one.” Jimmy smiles weakly. After a long time without results, Wolta gets impatient and wants to fish again. He begins browbeating Jimmy into setting a time limit, and after repeated haranguing Jimmy agrees.

“The older man had him buffaloed. I knew the signs. I liked Gerran. So all I could do was to think that it was just too bad… While I was wondering how Gerran got himself tied up with Wolta, Pedro hissed and said, in Spanish, ‘There is a monstrous fish to starboard, señor.’”

It’s a monster, indeed, not a ninety pound sailfish, but “five hundred pounds of blue marlin.” Jimmy hooks it with four perfectly timed strikes, and then the battle begins. It’s a long, exhausting affair that tries the limits of the seemingly placid Jimmy Gerran, with an impatient Wolta interjecting cutting remarks while at the same time imploring his companion to give up and let Wolta take over the battle. When it is all over one of these three men is a different person.

Told directly and with not a wasted word or sentence, MacDonald wrote this tale of honor and independence with the style and economy that would become his trademark for the rest of his career. Wolta, especially, is a “type” that MacDonald developed and used repeatedly throughout his career. Perhaps it is because I am currently rereading it for an upcoming posting, but he reminds me especially of Warren Dodge, a character in his 1957 novel A Man of Affairs. There are plenty of others, most notably John Lash in the similarly told story “The Killer.”

MacDonald loved this story and never forgot it. He freely admitted that most of his early work had been lost to memory, and that when he studied most of the possible inclusions for his latter-day pulp anthologies The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff, he had no idea how most of the stories would end. But in 1966 he remembered “Blue Water Fury” well enough to include it in his first short story anthology, End of the Tiger and Other Stories. Mainly a collection of the best of his mainstream slick magazine short stories, it is the only pulp story included in that book.

And although finding any critical mention or discussion of any of MacDonald’s 400 published short stories is almost as impossible as finding an old copy of the July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories, “The Big Blue,” as it was retitled by MacDonald for End of the Tiger and Other Stories, was actually one of the only short works ever discussed outside of the late, lamented and sorely missed JDM Bibliophile. Ed Hirshberg, in his 1985 biography of the author gives the story a few sentences while discussing the author’s growth as a writer. Unfortunately he fumbles the ball embarrassingly, making comparisons to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and decrying a “rather inappropriate ending.” I won’t reveal more, only to say that if you decide to read “The Big Blue,” go read Hirshberg’s paragraph on the piece, if only to see how facile and supercilious it is. And if you’ve ever read The Old Man and the Sea you might actually laugh out loud. As for that “inappropriate ending,” I’ll admit that it’s a bit abrupt in the flow of the narrative, but after a second reading it seems like the perfect coda.

“The Big Blue” even got a mention in that Dick Lupoff interview I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, a rare accomplishment for any of John D MacDonald’s short stories.

Lupoff: Would you care to mention your [favorite short stories]?

MacDonald: Well, I like “The Annex” and I like “The Bear Trap” …

Lupoff: “The Big Blue” -- the fishing story?

MacDonald: I like that one, yes. That was sort of based… You know how little things happen. Budd Schulberg was telling me about going fishing with his father in Acapulco and having another person aboard ship that so enjoyed clubbing the fish that he wouldn’t let the guide do it. He wanted to do it himself. It’s a kind of the germ of it.”

And that’s how (some) great fiction is born.

The story, now forever known as “The Big Blue,” is available in ebook form through Amazon and (probably) other online outlets as one of the stories in End of the Tiger and Other Stories. And used copies of the original paperback are always floating around.

"Fast Loose Money"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A Romantic Courtesy"

The shortest John D MacDonald story ever to appear in Cosmopolitan was published in the July 1957 issue of the magazine. It was submitted under the title "A Picture of Success" and clocked in at a mere 1,800 words. Cosmopolitan's fiction editor Kathryn Bourne eventually changed the title to "A Romantic Courtesy" -- an improvement -- and the story went on to appear alongside authors such as Harriet Pratt, Stephen Birmingham, Baird Hall and at least one writer whose name you might actually recognize, Bill S. Ballinger. It was one of only four short stories MacDonald would publish that year, the same period he would produce five(!) novels and publish four (The Executioners was serialized in October and November of that year, eleven months before it hit the bookstands). "A Romantic Courtesy" is one of the author's non-crime pieces, a "mainstream" work of fiction that focuses on human relationships and behavior, that region MacDonald called the "little areas between the myths." In this particular case it is that area between desire and action, and between contentment and regret.

MacDonald uses a favorite structural template in "A Romantic Courtesy," one he had been using at least as far back as 1949 (see "The Anonymous Letter") wherein the protagonist has a random and unexpected encounter with someone from his past, initially sparking a flashback -- deeply rich in the details of time and place -- where some kind of unresolved conflict is introduced. Once the flashback is completed the reader is returned to the present where said conflict is resolved, usually employing some kind of literary twist.


John Raney has it made. The thirty-five year-old Texas rancher lives on twenty-six thousand acres north of Fort Worth and is married to a pretty blonde-haired woman named Betty who has given him three husky boys. John made his money in oil and horses, owns his own plane along with a private airstrip on the ranch. He is recognized in Texas as a Mr. Big and is respected as an honest businessman.

"The money was piling up, much faster than he had ever dreamed. A few breaks, and a lot of hard work, and now he was in the clear and moving fast. No regrets."
 

No regrets, except for the one he is about to have called to mind.

On the way back from a Corpus Christi business meeting, his private aircraft develops engine trouble and his pilot is forced to land in San Antonio. While the plane is being worked on John decides to head over to the terminal for some coffee. Since he hadn't planned on stopping anywhere, he is unshaven and unkempt, wearing a pair of sweat-stained khakis, dusty boots and a ranch hat that has seen better days. Then, as he sits at a counter waiting for his coffee, he sees her. Her: the one that got away.

"He felt as though his heart had dropped. She had not changed. Not at all. Funny to have been thinking about no regrets, and then the next moment see her and have the sight of her take the lid off this one little hidden regret... Gloria had come first, and he had lost her."
 

It was fourteen years ago and John had been in the army, training in California. He and two of his friends had been dating Gloria, but John had "gained the inside track" and a wedding was planned. But Gloria was an ambitious girl, and although she was genuinely in love with John, he had little to offer her at the time. So when Major Christopher Kimball came along -- Kimball, of "the Philadelphia Kimballs" -- Gloria quickly broke off the engagement.

After joining her at her table, the one-time couple begin trading histories. When John asks about "the Major," Gloria makes a face and reveals that she and Kimball were divorced soon after they were married. He went off to live in a Colorado mountain town and she headed to New York, where she met and married "a sweet boy" named Jerry Cobbler. Jerry was indeed a sweet boy, but one who refused to grow up and he eventually returned to his mother. ("Sweet boy" probably had a much different meaning in 1957 than it does today!) Husband number three -- and current spouse -- is Wendell Cowliss, a producer of some of the biggest television shows in the country. Wendell is an older man but, assures Gloria, one "young in spirit."

As John listens to her he detects "tiny lines of tension" around her mouth and under her eyes. "There was a nervous brittleness in her voice. the dark hair was as glossy as ever, the soft mouth as provocative, but she seemed to be under a strain."

When Gloria asks if John got "the little ranch" he used to talk about, it is clear that she has not kept up with the success of her former fiancée. He tells her yes, that he is married and has three boys, and Gloria launches into an odd reverie.

"Gee, you know, sometimes I wish...I've gone this far, I might as well say it. Sometimes I wish you and I had... done what we planned before Chris came along. Wendell can buy me almost anything in the world I want... but if I could have been with you on some little ranch, working hard, raising kids, entering stuff in the county fair, driving into town on Saturday night in the pickup... I think I would have made a good ranch wife, don't you?"
 

Taken aback, John quickly realizes that he is being patronized. "Up until that moment it had not occurred to him that she would regard him as a sort of grubby semi-failure." He responds sarcastically: "Hard work being a woman on a ranch. Chop wood, run the tractor, feed the hogs. Lonely life." So when Gloria asks to see a picture of his family, he pulls out his wallet and leafs through his small collection of family photos. Would he show her the the shot of Betty wearing the Dior dress, standing in front of the enormous fireplace? Or the picture of the family the day the Mercedes was delivered, with the huge ranch house in the background? When he decides on the image of the family standing in front of the airplane on their private runway, he looks up to see an unexpected warmth and vulnerability in her eyes...

"A Romantic Courtesy" is a satisfying little vignette, expertly told, featuring one of MacDonald's hero types, the self-made man. He's driven but fair, hard-working to distraction but never neglecting his family, supremely self-assured yet still harboring gnawing regrets from the past. And Gloria too is a JDM "type," the beautiful but self-absorbed woman who puts her quest for a comfortable life ahead of happiness, but one who has enough self-awareness to realize she might have been wrong. In less than 2,000 words MacDonald put together the full package, a complete world leaving much to the imagination yet nothing unanswered.

MacDonald was proud of "A Romantic Courtesy" and included it in his first short story anthology, End of the Tiger and Other Stories. Interestingly, there are a few extra sentences in the anthologized version, not important to the overall story but important in further establishing John Raney as an honorable man. I'm not sure if these additions were afterthoughts or if Cosmopolitan removed them for space considerations. Not a big deal, but it is rare to find alterations in republished JDM, as the author strenuously avoided revising anything he had written after it was initially published.

End of the Tiger and Other Stories is out of print but used copies are easy to find.