"You Remember Jeanie"

In the June 13th piece on John D MacDonald’s 1952 science fiction short story “Game for Blondes” I noted that the situational device of beginning a story with a protagonist lost in an alcoholic rock bottom as the result of the death of his wife was one that the author had used before in his 1947 short story “You’ve Got to Be Cold.” I should have also mentioned “The Tin Suitcase,” where we begin the story after the protagonist has recovered and is trying to regain his life, and “You Remember Jeanie,” a tale that was published in the May 1949 issue of Crack Detective Stories. It is far closer to “Game for Blondes” in describing the depths to which the hero has sunk, the utter depravity and the hopeless attempts at assuaging grief. It is also unflinching in its descriptions of the state of the gutter-drunk, a man who has sunk so low -- emotionally, physically, economically -- that it seems he can never recover.

MacDonald was, of course, no stranger to alcohol. He was a drinker all of his adult life, as was his wife Dorothy, and except for a few dicey patches he seemed to be able to manage it quite well. But booze, specifically the hard stuff, was the drug of choice for his generation, and not everyone he knew handled it as responsibly as he did. Closest to home was the sad case of his sister Dorie and her husband Bill Robinson. Both suffered from alcoholism. In Dorie’s case it destroyed her health and eventually killed her, while Bill lost his job before finally joining AA, and he had to have his wife beg JDM to help him find new employment in Florida. (MacDonald’s description of the problem to pal Dan Rowan in a June 25, 1971 letter is pretty grim.) Virtually all of his protagonists and most of his secondary characters were drinkers, and all took it as a matter of course, a normal thing for an adult to do in postwar America. But the relatively few times he dealt with those particular characters who were unable to drink and maintain a normal life are revealed in prose that is some of the most telling in the author’s canon. Best of these is, of course, his classic 1956 short story “Hangover,” a remarkable bit of writing from the drinker’s point of view as he awakens after a particularly bad bender and tries to put the pieces of his memory back together. The pre-McGee novels are filled with detailed, finely-observed set pieces featuring drinking gone too far, beautifully rendered lost weekends of over-the-top behavior, inhibitions broken down, wild revelries and ultimate regret. They occur mainly in his mainstream efforts such as Cancel All Our Vows, The Deceivers, Clemmie, Please Write for Details, The Crossroads, Slam the Big Door, and even -- briefly but tellingly -- in The Executioners. But as evidenced by “You Remember Jeanie,” he knew the subject matter well as far back as 1949.

The opening paragraph of the story is as beautifully crafted and atmospheric as any MacDonald ever wrote for the pulps, immediately creating a scene, a world and a hopeless, lost quality to everything that would follow.

For many years Bay Street was the place. Bar whisky for eight cents a shot or a double slug for fifteen. Waterfront street. The dirty grey waves slapped at the crusted piles and left an oil scum. A street to forget with. A street which could close in on you, day to day, night to night, until you maybe ran into an old friend who slipped you a five, and somebody saw you get it; there at dawn an interne from city hospital would shove your eyelid up with a clean, pink thumb. "Icebox meat," he'd say. "Morgue bait." And maybe, as he stood up, he'd look down at your hollow grey face and the sharp bones of your wrists and wonder how you'd kept alive so long. So very long.

The story’s protagonist is Frank Bard, a homeless street bum hopelessly addicted to the sauce, living in an abandoned crate in an alley across the street from a bar called Allison’s Grill. In an early encounter with a patrolman we learn that Frank was once a cop, a good one, with a clean record and a list of accomplishments. But that all ended one night when his wife Jeanie, while having a drink at Allison’s, was hit in the head by a drunk and killed. Frank escaped into the bottle and eventually lost his marbles, believing that Jeanie is alive and with him as he stumbles into Allison’s for a semi-frequent spending of his last fifty cents.

On one such occasion Frank and “Jeanie” arrive to enjoy a drink together and the background of the story is explained by Allison’s waiter and bouncer, a man named Jader, to a curious customer at the bar who wonders why this drunk is talking to the thin air beside him.

"Mister, a drunk bashed her head in with a bottle and got clean away. We give the cops a description but they never found the guy." He paused and glanced at Bard, who was talking to Jeanie in a low voice, almost a whisper. He continued, "And this thing used to be a cop. Jeanie was his girl. He's been on the skids for nearly a year, and every time he comes in here he's got that damn imaginary woman with him. I tell you, it's enough to drive me nuts."

Frank Bard may be nuts but he has retained enough of the memory from his past life to recollect that Allison’s Grill is a place where the connected can buy drugs, although, thanks to an ingenious failsafe mechanism, the police have never been able to prove anything. And while bouncer Jader is the excitable type, the grill’s owner Arthur Allison is a "watchful, careful man," small, trim, "with Truman glasses and a grey Colman mustache," always dressed in a spotless white shirt while tending the bar. And while Bard’s frequent visits gives Jader the creeps, Allison tolerates him and even banters good naturedly with this hopeless drunk and his “wife” -- as long as Bard has the money to pay for his drinks.

A few days later Allison takes a rare day off to go to the races, leaving Jader alone and in charge of the grill. He’s feeling good and full of himself. The drawer with the dope is full and several buys are set for the day. But his day is ruined when he looks out the front door and sees Bard approaching. Without Allison around to force him to play nice, he reluctantly allows the drunk and Jeanie to sit in a back booth, away from the action. But when he goes back to wait on him, Jader sees two cigarette butts in the ashtray, and one is stained with lipstick…

The beauty of “You Remember Jeanie” is not in its somewhat obvious plot, or in the characterizations of the secondary characters, but in the creation of the protagonist and the carefully descriptive prose MacDonald employs to bring him to life. In addition, the neighborhood is almost a character in itself, a dirty, displaced and dangerous block in a city that tolerates it only so long as its vices stay confined to its streets. The opening paragraphs are as well written as any in MacDonald’s work for the pulps.

Which brings up an unfortunate point. “You Remember Jeanie” was chosen as one of the 27 pulp tales that were reprinted in the early 1980’s in the anthologies The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff. MacDonald grudgingly allowed these works to be republished (edited by Francis M Nevins, Martin H Greenberg and Jean and Walter Shine) only on the condition that the author would be permitted to “update” several of the stories, moving the time period from the postwar era to the then-present day. MacDonald’s rationale was that the modern reader would be distracted from the narrative if someone paid a nickel for a phone call or a dime for a loaf of bread. His readers at the time blasted this curious decision, but the author dug in his heels and defended it in the second volume. He claimed that he only updated period references but left the prose alone, stating that changing “patches of florid prose” and substituting “the right word for almost the right word” would have been “cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was.”

But that is exactly what he did.

As I pointed out in a previous post on another Good Old Stuff selection (“The Tin Suitcase”), a reading of the stories in their original form, alongside the anthologized versions, reveals wholesale changes everywhere in the text, changing just what MacDonald claimed he hadn’t changed. Why he made that assertion is anybody’s guess at this point. Perhaps he felt -- correctly -- that most of the readers at the time had no way to go back and check on him. I found scores of changes in “The Tin Suitcase” and equally as many in “You Remember Jeanie.” Here are the story’s first three paragraphs side by side:

Paragraph One Original:

For many years Bay Street was the place. Bar whisky for eight cents a shot or a double slug for fifteen. Waterfront street. The dirty grey waves slapped at the crusted piles and left an oil scum. A street to forget with. A street which could close in on you, day to day, night to night, until you maybe ran into an old friend who slipped you a five, and somebody saw you get it; there at dawn an interne from city hospital would shove your eyelid up with a clean, pink thumb. "Icebox meat," he'd say. "Morgue bait." And maybe, as he stood up, he'd look down at your hollow grey face and the sharp bones of your wrists and wonder how you'd kept alive so long. So very long.

More Good Old Stuff version:

For many years Bay Street was the place. Bar whiskey for thirty cents a shot, or a double slug for fifty. A waterfront street, where dirty waves slapped at the crushed pilings behind the saloons. A street to forget with. A street which would close in on you, day to day, night to night, until the wrong person saw some pitying old friend slap you a five. They would find you at dawn, and an intern from City General would push your eyelid up with a clean pink thumb and say, “More meat for the morgue.”

Maybe, as he stood up, he would look down at your hollow gray face and the sharp bones of your wrists and wonder how you’d kept alive this long. So very long.

Paragraph Two and Three Originals:

But something happened to Bay Street. It acquired glamor. Reading the trend, the smart boys came down and bought up the property and built long low clubs with blue lights and bright music and expensive drinks. The shining cars lined up along the curb, and the people with the clean clothes gave ragged kids two bits to make certain the tires weren't slashed while they were inside the places with the bright music and the soft women. The doormen at the new places had no time for the men in broken shoes who were living out the last years of addiction.

So the men of Bay Street moved to Dorrity Street -- one block over. Many of the displaced little bars moved over. The red, blue and green neon flickered against the brick flanks of the ancient warehouses, and, in the night, the steaming chant of the juke boxes, the hoarse laughter and the scuff of broken shoes was the same as always.

More Good Old Stuff version:

But something happened to Bay Street. The smart developers saw what was happening elsewhere, and they conned the city, county and federal government into a glamorous redevelopment project. A huge mall. Parking garages. Waterfront restaurants on new piers, out over the water. A marina. Smaller shopping malls with quaint stores selling antiques, paintings, custom jewelry, Irish tweed.

So the old saloons were uprooted, and for a time there was no place at all for the Bay Street bums. Then some of the old places started up again on Dorrity Street, four blocks inland, and soon it was all the same as before, with the stale smell of spilled beer, the steamy chant of the jukes, hoarse laughter, the scuff of broken shoes, the wet sound of fist against flesh.

MacDonald has obviously done much more than simply change time periods. The magic rhythms of the pulp original are almost completely lost in the new version, eliminating the wonderful staccato style that oozed regret and decay. Instead we get MacDonald circa 1980, the outraged knight with a pen, battling the evil developers, a man much more at home in the world of Condominium and Barrier Island than in the dirty, venal world of postwar America. One can certainly argue about what updating did to narrative, but not, I think, what it did to style. How MacDonald couldn’t recognize this is one of the great unsolvable JDM mysteries.

One can certainly read the More Good Old Stuff version and enjoy it -- even appreciate it. I did for many years before acquiring a copy of this issue of Crack Detective Stories. But after reading the original I have no desire to return to the modern version, ever. The same is true of all of the stories collected in these two anthologies, and where I have the opportunity (I don’t own copies of all of the originals) I will go pulp and decline to be “updated”.

More Good Old Stuff is out of print but easily available as a used book. An eBook version is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever else you get eBooks. Happily, the original version of "You Remember Jeanie" is now available as an eBook from online booksellers (Amazon, at least) in one of those strange digital re-releases that have somehow circumvented copyright. This reprint is not without its problems, including the inevitable typos caused by unproofed optical character recognition, but it's the original story, not the updated one. It is paired with another great JDM story from a few years later in his career, "Elimination Race".

"Even Up the Odds"

I’ve always been a reader. Growing up in a house full of books and with one parent a true bibliophile (my mother), reading was a normal and expected way of life. I began at an early age and never looked back. And outside of a normal childhood fascination with comic books, it has always been the written word that has captivated me. Looking back on my reading life I sometimes try and quantify my experience: how many books have I read? How many different authors have I enjoyed? How much required reading did I zip through while my classmates struggled with a volume of Cliff Notes? What was the first book that I stopped reading because it was so bad I couldn’t continue? (That one’s easy: The Word by Irving Wallace. Taking a cue from Dr. Watson, I threw it across the room in disgust.) The route from my house to the local library has always been a well trodden one, and once I learned to drive I practically lived in used book stores on the weekends.

Of all of the great literary years of my life, 1978 stands out as the Year of the Short Story. In the tenth month of that year three monumental and indispensable anthologies of short stories by three of the best writers America ever produced were published. Irwin Shaw, who had long since devolved into a slightly pedestrian writer of sprawling novels, issued a huge tome titled Short Stories: Five Decades. It contained 63 stories that dated back to the beginning of his career and revealed a craftsmanship that was only sporadically exhibited in his novels. Stories such as “Circle of Light,” “Tip on a Dead Jockey,” “The Eighty-Yard Run,” and the magically titled “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” were a revelation to me at the time. I never thought of Shaw the same way again. John Cheever released his own collection of past writings that same month, The Stories of John Cheever, and it was even better. A superior writer to Shaw, Cheever’s short work was more familiar to me as I owned an old used paperback of an earlier, shorter collection titled The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories. Most of the stories from Housebreaker were in The Stories of John Cheever, as were many more, nearly as many as Shaw had published (61). A few of the stories contained therein are some of the most memorable moments of fiction I cherish, including “The Swimmer,” “The Season of Divorce,” “O Youth and Beauty!,” “The Death of Justina,” and, especially, “The Sorrows of Gin.” Cheever’s anthology went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The third anthology published that October certainly doesn’t seem to belong with the two other weighty collections, but on a John D MacDonald blog and in my own literary life it certainly does. It was Other Times, Other Worlds, published as a lowly paperback, and was a collection of MacDonald’s science fiction short stories, mainly from his early pre-novel career that hailed from the pages of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories and Galaxy. To me, these stories were the equals of the works of the other two authors, not in style or even in depth, but in revealing the sheer breadth of MacDonald’s talents. It was also the first collection of his stories culled mainly from pulp magazines and it got a lot of fans thinking that MacDonald, an author we championed as an equal to the great writers of the time, deserved his own large collection of short stories. In a word, we wanted him Cheevered.

It began with the amazing Martin H Greenberg, possibly the world’s greatest expert on the short story published in the American popular press; he was also the editor of Other Times, Other Worlds. Along with Francis M. Nivins -- writer, editor, anthologist, mystery story historian and frequent contributor to the pages of the early JDM Bibliophile -- he approached MacDonald about just such a project, although restricting it to the writer’s early work for the pulps. MacDonald was less than enthusiastic but agreed that the two could proceed and present him what they deemed to be the the best of the lot. Jean and Walter Shine, the foremost JDM bibliographers alive, joined the project and proceeded to go through every one of MacDonald’s pulp tales. They eventually whittled the list down to thirty and presented the proposal to the author. Admitting that he was “astonished” at the quality of the work, MacDonald eliminated only three of the thirty stories and agreed that they could be published, not in a single book (which would still have been half the size of the Cheever and Shaw collections) but in two separate volumes. The second would only see light if the first one didn’t tank at the bookstores.

The first volume, which was titled The Good Old Stuff, didn’t appear until 1982 and while this was not the great literary event we had perhaps hoped it would be, it was still a big deal to us fans and for many opened up a world we hadn’t experienced before. It was favorably reviewed and sold well, in fact better than anyone had expected. All of the stories are uniformly good, some okay, some excellent and a few truly amazing. I would classify “Even Up the Odds” as belonging in the later category. It didn’t appear until the second volume, which was titled More Good Old Stuff, but it was certainly worth waiting for and proved that as far as quality went, the collection wasn’t front-loaded. While written in a Runyonesque first person singular and featuring a plot that isn’t exactly original, there is a quality to the writing that is a step above most of the other tales, along with a wistful air of regret and loss that barely skims the surface. It had a lasting effect on me the first time I read it and I’ve enjoyed going back to it often. For me, it never gets tired.

Johnny Pepper, a “large and ugly” bartender, is the story’s protagonist and narrator. He works in a dingy dive called the Spot Tavern, situated on River Street in a less-than-good part of town. The Tavern’s owner, Angelo Manini, a small and somewhat elderly man, is a kind of tyrant and he frequently tries to push Johnny around, only resulting in Johnny quitting, which he has done several times before.

... always he fires me and the neighborhood hears that he is behind the bar and all the characters come around and talk rough to him and he gives away two free drinks for every one paid for, as he is usually nervous of anybody who acts like they want to hit him. Then he begins to think how he would rather be in the back room drinking that red wine and playing some screwy card game with some old guys who come in just to play with game with him. The next day he comes to see me and at twelve noon sharp I am wrapping on the apron and once again Johnny Pepper, which is me, is at the old stand, with that junior baseball bat handy to reach, prepared to handle the business.

One day Manini asks Johnny to move all of the crates and boxes of booze out of the upstairs storage room and down into the basement. When asked why, Manini informs him that he is renting it out to “a lady and her husband.” The room has “only a sink, with holes in the walls and rats like jackrabbits,” but Manini says he is getting it fixed up that afternoon.

The next day the couple move in. From the bar Johnny can see them outside supervising the movers. The man is unimpressive, a “frail type” leaning against the side of the truck “sneering at the bustle.” The wife, however, is altogether different.

She is a slim type with good clothes, and she stands out in the wind giving orders to the bums who carry up her furniture. The wind plasters her skirt against her and I see that when the customers are drinking, she better stay upstairs with the door locked, as she is built like what my customers dream about on winter nights.

Johnny’s brief reverie is interrupted by the arrival of Buster Pasternak, built “like Gargantua,” mean as a snake (“even when he is sober”) and as quick as an alley cat. He’s thirty-five, blonde and half balding, “with a beefy face and mean little eyes.” He’s also connected.

Often I have wished to work him over with the ball bat, but seeing as how his brother Dave is deputy chief of police, and his brother Harry is alderman, and his brother Francis is behind all the rackets in town, one swing with the bat and Angelo Manini has to fold his tent and sneak. Buster meets nobody but yes men and strangers. He loves to turn the strangers into yes men.

And sure enough, he picks a fight with another customer, a big man nursing a drink and minding his own business. Buster saunters up to him smiling and manages to provoke a fight, which he wins with little difficulty. (And told in a few fairly graphic sentences.) The man staggers out of the bar and is back in a few minutes with the local cop. When he points out Buster as the attacker, the cop shoves the man out of the bar. “Get away with you, you stew bum. If Mr. Pasternak beat you up, he had a good reason.”

The next day the man living upstairs makes his first appearance in the bar. He says little, but begins to open up after a few quick belts of straight rye. He introduces himself as Bob Simmonds, and Johnny thinks to himself “I had him cased. There‘s only one kind of drinker that drinks like that. I began right then to feel sorry for the wife.” Simmonds tells Johnny that he is a poet and is working on a book of poetry that, when published, will make him rich. His wife is the family breadwinner, a secretary for a guy who runs a big laundry. As the day winds on, Simmonds gets more and more lit, reciting poetry and talking about art and culture, and before Johnny realizes it he has emptied a bottle. Then Buster walks in.

But it is Simmonds who makes the first move. In a scene that is remarkably similar to an early incident in Clemmie, he yells across the bar. “And here comes an example of the Neanderthal man. The primitive type.” Buster comes over and Simmonds takes a swing at him, “like a kiss from a mosquito.” Buster grabs him and just as he is about to start slugging, Simmonds’ wife comes into the bar and gets between them, “her big eyes flashing.” She warns off Buster with a “Keep your paws off him, ape man” and Simmonds falls to the floor in a dead drunk. She asks Johnny to please bring him upstairs for her and she heads up,  “her hips moving nicely under her skirt.” Buster, looking dazed, whistles “That’s for me. Boy! That’s for me.”

This worries Johnny, as Buster has a reputation with women, and it usually involves violence, which is always hushed up later by his brothers, no matter how extreme. Johnny carries Simmonds up to his room and he gets an earful from Mrs. Simmonds about her husband’s alcoholism, which has been especially bad for the past three years. She begs Johnny to stop serving him, but Johnny says he can’t do that, and besides, there are plenty of other bars in their neighborhood. Thinking of Buster, he tells  Mrs. Simmonds to purchase a chain for the door and tells her all about the man who nearly beat her husband. She agrees and the next day Johnny installs it for her.

A week goes by without seeing anything more than a glimpse of Mrs. Simmonds on the way to work. Then, on a rainy Thursday, in walks Mr. Simmonds, flashing a ten dollar bill, which he pilfered from his own sugar bowl. A boy who was sitting by the door rushes out and Johnny tells Simmonds to hurry up and drink his drink and get upstairs behind that chained door, as the kid just ran out to inform Buster that Simmonds had come back to the bar. Simmonds is unperturbed and pulls out a .22 automatic, answering “I loaded sweetie pie last night… I can put all seven shots into your eye from across the room. I’m ignoring the monkey, but he lays a hand on me and he gets it.”

Five minutes later, in walks Buster…

The charm of “Even Up the Odds” lies not only in the wonderful first person narration of Johnny Pepper, that kind of street level urban prose that MacDonald mastered early in his career without it coming off as (too) derivative, or in the gritty, realistic world that the author creates so effortlessly in as few words as possible, but also in the almost implied feelings Johnny has for a perfect stranger, Mrs. Simmonds. Almost as if he is afraid to reveal it to the reader or even to admit it to himself, he drops a sentence here and there that is dripping with meaning, a tender hearted bartender who is utterly smitten by a beautiful woman. The final two paragraphs of this short story are wistful, evocative and nearly poetic.

“Even Up the Odds” was published in the January 1948 issue of Detective Story Magazine, a Street and Smith pulp publication that had been on the stands since 1915 and which had once been a weekly. Over 1,000 separate issues of this title were on the stands over that 33 year period, an amazing amount of popular fiction. The pulp would last only another year after “Even Up the Odds” was published, and Street and Smith buried it. The rights to the title Detective Story Magazine were sold to Popular and they revived the pulp in 1952 as a bi-monthly. Yes, 1952 seems an odd year to be starting a “new” pulp, and the magazine lasted only six issues before folding, this time forever. “Even Up the Odds” was the only JDM story to appear in the Street and Smith version of the magazine, while he had three stories in the Popular version. (I wrote a somewhat more detailed history of the magazine in my post on JDM’s “Finders Killers!”

John D MacDonald has yet to have his day in the short story sun, and one wonders if there will ever be a The Stories of John D MacDonald published anytime, ever. I would never claim such a work could rival the prose of a Cheever, and there are a lot of his early pulp stories that are just plain bad, but there is so much good out there, unpublished or in long out-of-print anthologies, that I pine sometimes that these works aren’t better known. Still, if one gathers together the anthologies that MacDonald himself put together during his lifetime, Border Town Girl, End of the Tiger and other Stories, S*E*V*E*N, Other Times, Other Worlds and the two Good Old Stuff volumes, that makes for a pretty good The Stories of John D MacDonald, even if they aren’t collected under one roof. But that “collection” would be missing MacDonald masterpieces such as “In a Small Motel,” “The Homesick Buick,” “I Always Get the Cuties,” “He Was Always a Nice Boy,” “Built for Speed,” “Cop Probe,” “First Offense,” and a slew of other deserving stories that are lost to time. Let us hope that somewhere, behind the scenes, someone is preparing such a work. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to write about these forgotten gems, mouldering away in my collection, just waiting to be rediscovered.

More Good Old Stuff is now available as an eBook, and used copies are easy to find.

"Heritage of Hate" ("Secret Stain")

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You've Got to Be Cold" ("The Night is Over")

Lakes. John D MacDonald loved them.

He loved their beauty and their tranquility, and in his fiction he employed them with both of those characteristics in mind, but he also loved the sense of separation they evoked, as well as the terrible frailty one could feel because of that isolation. Bad things can happen at a lake, including murder, infidelity, rape and kidnapping.

MacDonald loved one lake in particular, Piseco Lake in upstate New York, fifty miles northeast of Utica in the Adirondacks. It was there that he and his wife Dorothy owned a large plot of lakefront land, purchased with the winnings from a wartime poker game, which later became the family's summer home for thirty-five years. Every spring from 1951-on, John, Dorothy and son Johnny would escape the crushing heat of Florida and make the long trek by car northward. Their cabin was built on a remote shore of the lake and could only be reached via a long, twisting dirt road that encouraged privacy and allowed the nearby wildlife to flourish. MacDonald wrote a great deal of his published works there, and it was at Piseco that he and Johnny burned 800,000-words of unsold short stories from his earliest days as a writer.

But most important to the reader of MacDonald is the spell Piseco Lake cast over the fiction the author produced. Lakes serve as the setting of numerous short stories and novels, and anyone who has read JDM's "cat biography" The House Guests can recognize Piseco virtually any time a lake is used by the author. Of the works I have already written about in this blog Piseco served as a model for the opening scene in Judge Me Not, the place where Jane Wyant committed adultery in Cancel All Our Vows, the weekend getaway spot in You Live Once, and the setting for the entire plot of All These Condemned. Of the ninety-one short stories I've covered so far in this blog, ten of them feature settings at a lake.

Now I can make that eleven. MacDonald's early novella "You've Got to Be Cold" takes place almost entirely near a remote lake that was certainly modeled after Piseco. Appearing in the April-May 1947 issue of The Shadow, it is a rambling, wildly improbable tale featuring one of JDM's quintessential "damaged veterans" who, returning from World War II finds it difficult to adjust back to normal living. The lake setting emphasizes the hero's detachment from society and its distance from any hint of the modern world allows a primeval menace to permeate the the story.

Walker Post is a mess. He's a man who doesn't give a damn about himself or anyone else, and who is content to drink his life away in run-down bars. While fighting in the Pacific during the war he lost his mother and his wife in an auto accident and he has returned to a home devoid of any family. His former boss offers him his old job back, but after working there several weeks he walks out. "He thought it would give him something familiar to hold on to. It hadn't worked." After putting his furniture into storage and moving into a shabby furnished room, he begins to drink up the two thousand dollars of insurance money left from his wife's death.

"He hadn't tried to find work... He knew he wasn't drinking himself to death. Just enough liquor each day to cloud the pictures in his mind. Just enough to dull the constant irritation with everything around him. He slept in the cheap, sour room between the gray sheets. He ate heavy fried foods. He walked the streets slowly and wondered what there was to care about. In some distant corner of his mind he was uncertain and frightened. Some mornings he would remember and realize that it would have to end sometime. There would be no more money. But that was a long time off... He spoke to no one. He didn't read. He didn't go to movies. He sat and drank and ate and slept and walked, fighting down the mad thing in his heart that wanted to flash out at the people around him. He wanted to strike and crush and batter the faces of those around him."
 

He's about to get his chance to do just that. As a result of his surliness he manages to get into a bar fight and is nearly demolished before striking back. Not quite sure if he is winning or losing, the battered, nearly unconscious Post is pulled out of the bar and put into a car by an unknown man. His rescuer introduces himself as Dr. Benjamin Drake, who just happened to be passing by when he heard the ruckus. Drake senses Post's unhappiness and offers him a job working for him at a new "combination summer camp and health resort" just constructed on the site of an old, deserted lumber camp on remote Lake Meridin. After initially refusing, Post decides to take him up on the offer. The work will be physical and he can keep to himself if he wants to. Post tells Drake, "What's the difference what I do?"

The following day Drake picks up Post and they head to the camp. The path to the lake is nearly invisible, an old, overgrown dirt road off of an old country lane, protected by low hanging bushes and a fallen tree trunk that turns out to be fake. After another quarter of a mile of dirt road and a four mile walk down a nearly invisible trail, they arrive at the "resort."

"It lay below them, a thousand yards away. It was small, possibly a mile long and a half mile wide. A large patch of the sky had cleared and the still water threw a deeper blue back toward the sky. It ran east and west... Wooded hills rose steeply from the lake on every side except the west. Ahead Post could see the outlines of weathered gray buildings against the evergreens. It was very quiet, strangely quiet. Post felt a momentary uneasiness."
 

As well he should. Dr. Drake drops the veneer of kindness and begins ordering Post down to one of the buildings. He warns him that there is only one way out of the place, the way they came, and that to attempt to leave will not be tolerated. That's kind of a moot point right now, as Post's long months of drinking have softened him up to the point that he is ready to drop. He meets two other "workers," big tough guys who eventually become Post's prison guards. There are only two "patients" there, both well-to-do businessmen in separate and remote cabins, one accompanied by his wife, the other by his daughter.

When Drake leaves for a few days Post decides he's had enough and tries to leave, only to be stopped by one of his co-workers, who shoves him to the ground and warns him of further violence if he doesn't get with the program. When Drake finally returns and learns of Post's attempt to leave, he pulls out a newspaper clipping from his pocket. It's a story about a barroom brawl and how one Walker Post killed another man in a fight, and how the police in three states were now looking for him. Post is stuck.

To further summarize this sprawling plot would take forever, and I'm not going to attempt it. Suffice it to say that Drake's plan with his patients has nothing to do with curing them and everything to do with getting huge sums of money from them. Walker and the second patient's daughter eventually combine forces to try and escape, but the reader can guess that the minute she's introduced: "tall... slim... high cheekbones... gray eyes..." The JDM female archetype.

Although MacDonald permitted "You've Got to Be Cold" to be included in the second Good Old Stuff anthology (under his original title "The Night is Over") he was not proud of this particular work, calling it "clumsy" and admitting that the characters' motivations were "unreal." Francis M. Nevins, Jr., who was one of the editors of the two Good Old Stuff volumes, had a much better opinion of the story, calling it "smoothly written, sharply paced and impossible to leave unfinished." He also termed it "a fine example" of JDM's early use of the psychologically damaged veteran, his "self-ruination" and eventual redemption. I'll agree that it is a nicely-written pulp yarn with a couple of interesting characters, and that it has a uniquely interesting premise, but it does seem a bit drawn out at times and the structure wobbles every now and then. The knowing reader certainly comes away with a fresh reminder that pulp magazines paid writers by the word.

MacDonald's biographers rarely -- if ever -- discussed or even mentioned individual works of short fiction in their books, but Hugh Merrill gives "You've Got to Be Cold" a sentence in The Red Hot Typewriter. Unfortunately, it's a perfect example of the careless writing and sloppy research that makes that work so suspect. He prefaces his observation by claiming that the pulps were MacDonald's apprenticeship and that "...like any apprenticeship, he learned by imitation.

"His asylum in "You've Got to Be Cold"... bears an astonishing resemblance to the hospital run by Dr. Anthor (sic) in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely."
 

Well. First of all, as anyone who has actually read the Chandler novel can attest, the hospital in Farewell, My Lovely was not run by Jules Amthor (or even Jules "Anthor"), and the only thing "astonishing" is the fact that Merrill would compare a rustic and remote group of cabins by a small lake with a mental hospital in Bay City, California. There are no locked rooms in Benjamin Drake's "health resort," and Walker Post is not held there as a patient. It is not an "asylum" in any sense of the word and for Merrill to make this connection leads me to suspect that he has never actually read Chandler's book but has instead relied on one of the movie adaptations for his reference here. In the 1975 film version of Farewell, My Lovely, the location of Marlowe's imprisonment is indeed run by Amthor, but the character was changed from a phony psychic to the madam of a brothel. In the book the hospital was run by a Dr. Sonderborg.

If MacDonald was copying another writer in "You've Got to Be Cold" it certainly wasn't Raymond Chandler.

"Killers' Nest" ("Neighborly Interest")

"Killers' Nest" is a terrific John D MacDonald short story that originally appeared in the February 1949 issue of Detective Tales. It's a gritty little drama full of murder, kidnapping, infanticide, greed, suspicion and hoodlums talking wise, served up with a surprise twist at the end. It's about as rough as a MacDonald crime piece ever got in the early days and reads like it was written yesterday. It's a rare JDM work that features no good guys, only people in varying degrees of bad.

Three kidnappers are holed up in a small house out in the middle of nowhere, next to a highway eight miles outside of town. Things have gone very, very bad. Their plan to kidnap the infant child of a wealthy couple worked fine, up to a point. The couple agreed to keep the authorities unaware and gathered a large sum of ransom money to exchange for the child. But at the drop point Howie Jadisko panicked when the kid began to cry and, in an attempt to quiet him, smothered him instead. The trio's leader Art Marka ordered Stan Ryan -- the junior member of the gang -- to bury the body at a crossroads (nice imagery) in "a hole in the leaf mold." The three of them have been hiding out in the house -- with the money -- for nearly three months now, and only Stan is allowed to leave.

That's because of the ruse Art has established. Two weeks before the kidnapping Stan moved into the house and pretended to be living there with a wife and infant child. There's a car in the driveway, a baby stroller on the front porch and laundry on the clothesline. Only the roof of the nearest neighbor's house can be seen, off in the distance and behind a rise of pastureland. Of course there's no wife or child, but a little movement each day, taking the stroller inside and changing the laundry on the line, will create the illusion of family life should anyone be looking. Stan goes out for groceries once every now and then, while Art and Howie are stuck inside playing gin rummy. With another month and a half before Art will allow them to split the money and leave, cabin fever has settled in and nerves are fraying.

The story opens with a visit from the neighbors, Mrs. Clarey from the other side of the pasture. She's there to make friends and to see how "Mrs. Ryan" is doing. Stan does his best to be disagreeable and tells the woman that his wife is not feeling well.

Mrs. Clarey: "I guess I'd better go and come back when Mrs. -- when your wife is feeling better."

Stan: "You do that."

She went awkwardly down the steps, picking her way across the mud toward the strip of pasture that separated the two houses. The back of her neck under the tightly curled hair looked flushed. She turned and glanced back quickly and went on, moving as though she wanted to run from him.

Stan goes back inside and heads for bed, where he will do what he does every night while trying to fall asleep: dream of his cut of the ransom money and how he will spend it down in Guatemala, the women there, the freedom... all the while trying to push down the memory of the "dead kid in his hands." When he awakens he is surprised to hear the voices of Art and Howie down in the kitchen, up long after they should be in bed. He sneaks to the head of the stairs and overhears them plotting to kill him once they're ready to leave, to "stuff him in the furnace" where he won't be found until winter. Stan sneaks back into his bedroom and lays awake in a "cold wrath." He feels "a deep, excited thrill" run up his back as he plots to take care of them before they have a chance to fulfill their plan.

There's a certain grim reality to "Killer's Nest" that is not always present in MacDonald's short work. It's as if the lack of any sympathetic character has set him free to explore the truly darker sides of people, the ugliness, the bitterness and the unrelenting paranoia of the criminal mind. Stan Ryan's occasional attack of guilt over the death of an infant easily gives way to his reveries of Central American women, but it never really goes away. It's like the degree of difference between kidnapping and murder gradually fading to a pale unreality. But this is John D MacDonald, so there is only one way for people like this to end: badly. The fate of these three killers is satisfying indeed.

"Killer's Nest" is available to the modern reader as a selection in JDM's More Good Old Stuff, published under the author's original title "Neighborly Interest." To confuse matters even further, in 1985 Redbook published the story as part of the promotional campaign for More Good Old Stuff, under yet another title, "The Fatal Flaw." There is no explanation as to why the magazine's fiction editor Kathyrne V Sagan disliked either of the other two titles.