"Night Ride" and Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John D. MacDonald: An Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"In a Small Motel"

If you ever feel the need for a lesson in the quality of John D MacDonald's early short fiction, go right to "In a Small Motel." Published in the July 1955 issue of a short-lived and utterly forgotten mystery digest called Justice, the longish (9,500 words) short story is a virtual classroom course on writing. The plot is well done, but it is the finely-drawn characters and evocative, realistic location that are the standouts in this tale of happenstance, danger, and hidden motives.

MacDonald's characters here are average, working-class stiffs, people too busy with the grind of their daily lives to spend much time with introspection. They are people who are just getting by, who live with crushing loss, who harbor secret hopes and desires and who nurture indecision as a way of either avoiding finding out something they don't wish to know or to avoid making a decision at all. At the same time, the place these characters live their lives, the locale, is so expertly crafted as to make you almost smell the mildew from the underside of an old motel mattress. MacDonald brings the reader there, and never once is there a false note in the writing that would belie this realism. Finally, the plot is character-driven. These real people in this real place make and act on motivations that are entirely believable, because the author possesses the art to make us believe in them in the first place.

Ginny Mallory owns and operates the Belle View Courts, a roadside motel in southern Georgia on the highway to Florida. Belle View was the dream of Scott, Ginny's husband, who was killed in a traffic accident seven months earlier, leaving Ginny alone to run the place and to wonder why she's still there. She's a strong, capable young woman who is run ragged at the end of a long, busy summer, living under the crushing weight of a mortgage she can barely keep up with. Her first full summer alone has been wearing: "Thick October heat lay heavily over south Georgia. Though she walked briskly, she felt as if all the heat of the long summer just past had turned the marrow of her bones to soft stubborn lead."

Ginny's one permanent client is Johnny Benton, who owns a gas station across the road and who lives in one of the cabins. Johnny -- tall, broad-shouldered and deeply tanned -- has been helping Ginny with small repairs around the motel and feels guilty for the low rent he pays for his living quarters. All his attempts to pay more are abruptly dismissed by Ginny as "charity."

It's the end of a long, hot day and the motel has nearly filled. Between wheeling rollaway beds into rooms and chasing ice for shouting patrons, Ginny checks in a "tall, white-faced man" from Boston who speaks in a "flat and toneless" voice, and who insists on parking his car in the back. Once he's registered, she takes advantage of a lull to enjoy a cigarette with Johnny, which is interrupted by the arrival of Don Ferris, a one-time suitor of Ginny's who has begun courting her again. Don, an attorney from Jacksonville, has driven up unannounced and asks her out to dinner. Since Ginny can't leave the motel unattended, they compromise on carry-out in the back of her office.

Don begins his umpteenth pitch to get Ginny to sell the motel and come back to Jacksonville with him. He goes into all of the monetary and emotional benefits and -- to be "one hundred percent honest" -- admits that the small profit she would realize on the sale could be used by him to make a killing on a much larger deal, one that could provide them with enough money for the rest of their lives. She fights a strong temptation to give in, ultimately telling him that she'll think about it. At that moment they are interrupted by the guest from Boston, who asks a strangely belligerent question: "What are you telling this man about me?"

I won't reveal more, other than to say that this is a crime story and to leave it at that. The suspense the author creates in the second half of the story comes from the individual morality of the four characters, traits MacDonald has painstakingly revealed in the beginning pages. Those different moralities lead to different decisions being made, decisions that are the real drivers in the plot, not some arbitrary happenstance. MacDonald gives clues along the way as to how things will turn out, but clouds them enough so that the reader is left guessing until the end.

The guest from Boston is the deus ex machina that propels the plot, and he is less-finely drawn than the other characters, but that is because he doesn't need to be. Still, he is an individual in MacDonald's world, and it is his decision based on his own sense of morality that has brought him here, not a random event. Ultimately the story comes down to the decisions one makes.

MacDonald's sense of place -- in the words of editor Ed Gorman, his "apt and unforgiving social eye" -- bring this story alive with passages that ring like music. Some examples:

"Out on the highway directly in front if the Belle View Courts the big diesel rigs thundered by. The sun was far enough down to give the world an orange look. There was a hint in the shadows of the blue dusk that would bring the mosquitoes out of the lowland. And this, she thought, was the slack season."

"She went outside and leaned against the front of the office, her hands shoved deep into the wide front pockets of the sun suit. She felt sticky and weary. The sun was entirely gone and the world was blue. Peepers were beginning to chant over in the patch of swamp beyond the gas station. Cars had turned on their lights. The big rigs were aglow like Christmas trees."

"She sat in the metal chair. The night air was getting cooler. For the first time in many days she was completely relaxed, comfortable. It was a strong temptation to let Don go ahead with it. And so much easier to be Don's wife than -- Scott's widow. Don would get them a nice little beach house. Long lazy days in the sun. Just a few rooms to take care of. And sleep, sleep, sleep. Thousands of hours of it. It would be so blessedly simple. And he was nice. Quick and funny and nice. It would be cheating him, in a way."

Or this line, so descriptively vivid as to be transporting:

"The truck roared by, the motor sound changing to a minor key as it rushed south down the dark road."

"In a Small Motel" might have remained just another obscure MacDonald work from his early period had it not been for its revival by a couple of anthologies. In 1985 Black Mask was revived as a quarterly digest and called The New Black Mask. It ran for only a couple of years before losing the rights to the magazine's name, but published some very good stories while it was around. The editors approached MacDonald and asked him for a contribution, whereupon JDM dug into his voluminous files of not-printed or rejected works and pulled out something called "Night Ride." "I wondered why it had not been published," MacDonald was quoted as saying in an interview in issue #8, where the story appeared. "Night Ride" seemed vaguely familiar to JDM bibliographer Walter Shine after he read it and he began to do some research. Sure enough, MacDonald had mistakenly pulled out the manuscript of "In a Small Motel" and submitted it to The New Black Mask. Whether "Night Ride" was the author's original title or a new one created by The New Black Mask editors is unclear. I'm sure future bibliographers will be forever confused.

Then, in 1997 the editorial team of Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg included the story -- bearing it's proper title -- in their terrific anthology culled from America's mystery digests called American Pulp. It's out of print but easy to find.

Finally, someone in Hollywood read the story when it was originally published and purchased the rights. It was adapted for television as an episode of an obscure syndicated anthology show called Chevron Hall of Stars, which was only broadcast on the west coast. It starred Marilyn Erskine as Ginny and featured Dick Van Dyke's brother Jerry Paris as Don Ferris. Unfortunately, like much of early television, any surviving traces of the episode seem to have vanished into the ether, like a diesel heading "south down a dark road."

Update (4/9/2015):

This terrific story is now available from Amazon as a Kindle eStory for only 99-cents. 

Update (3/26/2020):

I finally got around to reading "Night Ride" in The New Black Mask and discovered that, while it was a previously published short story, it was not "In a Small Motel" but another tale published in Justice, "Scared Money". It appeared in the October 1955 issue of the magazine. It was "polished" by the author, but the changes were minimal.