"Tune in on Station Homicide" ("A Time for Dying")

"Tune in on Station Homicide" originally appeared in the September 1948 issue of New Detective Magazine and was published under the pseudonym "Peter Reed," a house name necessitated by the fact that John D MacDonald had three stories in that particular issue and only one of them could bear his real name. It's a story about a love triangle and the attempt of one member to murder another, featuring elaborately-laid plots, split-second timing and improbable devices that would only be considered in pulp fiction. It takes place in the world of entertainment and features a very early version -- perhaps the first -- of MacDonald's "comic monster," a crazy, unpredictable and wildly popular comedian who is not really so funny off-screen, and who is driven by demons known only to himself. MacDonald used this character type in his 1954 novel All These Condemned and was still exploring it in 1966 in his short story "Funnyman." In "Tune in on Station Homicide" that character's demons are reduced to one: the overpowering, all-encompassing desire to possess the wife of another man.

Jimmy Hake has made it. A wildly-popular comedian and the star of his own radio show, Jimmy is a "round and comical man... [an] owl-faced, elfin, blundering character in whom every man saw a part of his own image." Jimmy came up the hard way, beginning as "a baggy-pants specialist in the burlesque circuit," later moving up to the clubs "for years and years... Rough. Rough all the way."

"Then one day you hit the top and what have you got? Weariness that feels like you have putty instead of marrow in your bones. High blood pressure. Shortness of breath. Dyspnea, to be exact. Technically you are forty-eight, but you feel seventy-eight... You have everything except the one thing in the world that you want. Anna."

Anna is the wife of Jimmy's head writer Bob Morrit, and her description could come from virtually any MacDonald work written over his 40-year career: "Silver-blonde hair and sea-gray eyes and a face that would be beautiful at sixty. That sort of face. You could tell by the line of temple and jaw, the set of the eyes." Jimmy has lusted after Anna for three years now and he once made a clumsy attempt at telling her how he felt. It was quickly and definitively rebuffed. He has lived with torment and desire for too long now and decides that there is only one way to have the woman of his dreams: murder her husband.

But it has to be done in a way that won't implicate him and cause any estrangement from Anna. The method he comes up with is one of those wildly-improbably JDM devices that seems logical on the surface but could really only work in the world of fiction. Jimmy has acquired a small amount of curare, the tropical, vegetable-based poison that causes instant paralysis of the lungs and quick death. Bob just happens to own a Swiss silent alarm wristwatch, the kind where instead of an audible alarm, a small mechanical plunger emerges from the watch and jabs the wearer in the wrist. Jimmy manages to get hold of the watch while Bob is taking a post-swimming shower and he files down the plunger to a point, applies the curare to the now-sharp device and quickly returns it to Bob's locker. Now all he has to do is wait for Bob to set the alarm.

The following day is the debut of Jimmy's new show, presented live, and Bob is absent. It is all that Jimmy can do to keep his concentration during the run-through, anticipating how he will react when someone comes in with the bad news -- and how he will console the grief-stricken Anna. He makes it through rehearsal and is awaiting the start of the show when he sees someone standing near the stage. It's Bob, who grins at Jimmy and asks, "About ready to roll?"

The twist in the story is fairly predictable, yet what makes "Tune in on Station Homicide" a superior work of mystery fiction is the third-person interior voice of Jimmy Hake. The prose MacDonald employs is pulp-poetic and evocative of his early influence, Cornell Woolrich. Some examples:

"Jimmy Hake needed all his acting talents to keep his voice and manner relaxed. Murder makes the breath short, makes the palms sweat, the voice tremble, the neck muscles bind... Murder is something that had been two-years a-growing. Murder is the answer to a question that couldn't otherwise be answered."

"There is no way out. No answer. There can be no deviation in her loyalty -- except if there is no longer anyone to whom she could be loyal... And like the simplest equation written on a school blackboard, the answer becomes... murder."

"At night Jimmy Hake would awaken, cold sweat oily on his body, his fists tightly clenched. Then, in the silence of the night, he would think of Bob Morrit... Not of Anna. Of Bob and of death."

MacDonald included "Tune in on Station Homicide" in his first Good Old Stuff collection in 1982 and, as he did for all of the stories anthologized there, restored his original title, "A Time for Dying." The story was also the victim of the author's needless "updating," and he changed Jimmy's radio show to a television show and changed the names of a couple of popular radio stars to "Merv and Johnny." Yet in order to do so he had to make a big deal about the show's debut being broadcast live, a common practice in 1948 radio, but rare in 1982. He also goofed at one point and failed to update a request for Anna to go home and "listen to" the television show's debut.

If the device of a Swiss silent alarm wristwatch seems a familiar one, it is. MacDonald reused it 25 years later in his novel The Scarlet Ruse. There it was owned by Travis McGee and was a gift from his friend Meyer, who gave it to Trav "because it amused him." Needless to say, Meyer did not poison the plunger. A similar but slightly different watch was owned by secret agent Derek Flint in the 1966 film Our Man Flint. There it served to awaken Flint from a deep Eastern meditation that mimicked death by temporarily stopping his heart.

It kind of makes Jimmy Hake's murder scheme a bit less fanciful somehow...

"Death's Eye View"

New Detective Magazine was a mid-tier crime pulp that began publication in March 1941. It originated with a focus on police detection but quickly morphed into a typical mystery fiction magazine featuring stories by authors such as Day Keene, W.T. Ballard, Bruno Fischer and other names remembered by only the most devoted pulp scholars. It published 73 issues before merging with Detective Tales in August 1953 to become Fifteen Detective Stories, which lasted only until June 1955 when it folded for good. It was later reincarnated into a men's magazine called True Adventures, one of those crazy 1950's types that usually featured covers of shirtless heroes battling commie-rat Ruskies while rescuing at least three or four unclad, breasty young women. True Adventures published no fiction -- at least that was the claim -- but the "true adventures" that appeared within its pages were obviously fanciful.

Twenty stories by John D. MacDonald appeared in New Detective Magazine, beginning with "Come Die With Me!" in the January 1948 issue and ending with the excellent "Death's Eye View" in February 1953. "Death's Eye View," which was originally titled "Death on the Ebb Tide" by the author, is a 16,000-word novella and was the featured work in that particular issue, complete with wonderfully pulpy cover art. The story -- which is basically a retread of his 1948 western tale "The Corpse Rides at Dawn," -- is an interesting and finely-detailed piece featuring a power-hungry tycoon, a do-gooder heroine, a rich, lonely widow and a handsome, itinerate boat captain named Kelsy McKewn. It allowed MacDonald to show off his vast knowledge of business dealings, boat mechanics and stock trading, and he used an extra female character to engage in some narrative misdirection that is relatively uncommon in early JDM. It's well-paced, suspenseful and doesn't seem to have a wasted word anywhere in the text. Of course, by 1953 MacDonald had written seven novels, six of them very good and one of them (The Damned) quite excellent, so it should come as no surprise that "Death's Eye View" is superior JDM.

The story begins quite dramatically as we are introduced to the two leading characters, swimming in their underwear somewhere off the east coast of Florida. Captain Kelsey McKewn had been hired by a twenty-three year old philanthropist Dale Lamson to pilot her forty-foot cabin cruiser from Miami to Ft. Augustine, but somewhere off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, about six miles offshore, Kelsy discovered a time bomb aboard and quickly managed to get Dale and himself over the side and far enough away before the boat exploded. Dale's bodyguard, the only other passenger, wasn't so lucky. Using the stars to guide them, Kelsy and Dale strip down to their skivvies and start swimming to shore. They have been out an hour and a half when we join them and the sun is beginning to rise. Dale is exhausted and wants to give up several times, but Kelsy urges her on, first using encouragement, later barking orders. Once they near the shore and feel the tug of the surf pulling them in, the utterly spent Kelsy stands up and then collapses back into the surf.

They've landed north of Lauderdale at Deerfield Beach and onto the private coastline of Mildred Coe, a 30-year old wealthy widow who happens to be out walking when the couple wash up on shore. She dives in to rescue Kelsy, drags him up on the beach and proceeds to spend twenty minutes administering artificial respiration. He comes around, throws up, sits back and smokes a cigarette (!) She invites the two of them up to her house to rest and change.

MacDonald introduces Mildred with an extended back story, the first character here to enjoy one, so the reader knows she is important. Her husband was killed in North Africa and she has retreated from the world, becoming withdrawn and lonely.

"She knew that she was thinking of herself too often lately, and that such intensity and self-interest was morbid... Old friends had lost their charm. Their worries seemed petty, their lack of emotional security almost frightening. Loneliness had done something to her, had made her think, had turned her into an entirely new person, slow to smile, a woman with quiet eyes... she had retreated once more to the loneliness, knowing that it was not enough, realizing for the first time that grief was no longer poignancy, was merely an old dance card, a pressed flower, something to take out and look at sadly in idle moments..."

The student of John D MacDonald knows instantly she is a character to be reckoned with once her oh-so-familiar physical description is given, characteristics that could fit many dozens of JDM heroines:

"She was a tall woman of thirty, with slightly gaunt cheeks, tiny weather wrinkles around her gray eyes, blonde hair bleached almost white by the sun. Her body was brown and trim and slim, and had changed in no measurement since she was twenty... she walked with a free, swing stride..."

After sleeping and eating a big dinner prepared by Mildred -- steaks (of course), which they "eat like wolves" (of course) -- Kelsy and Dale are offered a ride into town to make a phone call and report the accident. Dale hesitates and then asks Kelsey to take a walk with her on the beach. She believes the the bomb was meant specifically for her and that it was the act of a man named Jubal Tabor, a wealthy Alabama industrialist who also happens to be her dead mother's first husband. Since the two obviously should have died in the explosion, and since no one but Mildred knows that they survived, Dale wants to maintain that illusion so that Tabor doesn't continue to come after her. It will give her time to think of a proper response. Kelsy agrees, they embrace and kiss and , whoa, how did that happen so quickly?

Jubal Tabor sits in his office in Birmingham, alone, high atop a building downtown. He's a seventy-year old self-made man, an unsentimental, ruthless millionaire who "did it the hard way." His physical description is almost Dickensian:

"With patience and care, a perfect replica of Jubal Tabor's face could be made. The only materials needed would be match sticks glued together for the delicate framework, grey paper glued over the framework, moistened so that it would draw tight, then allowed to dry. The naked skull was angular. The man was seventy years old. The face was seventy years old. The eyes had no age. The iris was the color of wet sand. The pupils were the shining black of the eyes of insects..."

His business empire is made up of large interests in dozens of international concerns, industries that include timber, coal, oil, steel, tin, rubber, plastics and electronics. All of these ownership positions are held by Robat Enterprises Incorporated, whose one thousand shares were originally split thusly: 300 to Jubal, 300 to his eldest son Powell, 300 to his other son Nick, and 100 shares to Dale's mother, to whom he was married briefly after his first wife died. He gave her the shares as a divorce settlement, "like a sentimental fool," and when she remarried and had a daughter, the shares were inherited by Dale when her mother died. Through happenstance too complicated to go into here (MacDonald spends nine pages on Tabor's background), the current ownership now has Jubal with 451 shares, his grandson Tony with 449, and Dale with the swing share of 100.

Jubal's grandson Tony was dragged unwillingly into the business at a young age. A quiet and obedient young man, he had wanted to go into ornithology, but Jubal quickly "put an end to that nonsense." For several years Tony "learned to trace his way through the corporate jungle with light-footed ease," and was quietly polite and compliant with his grandfather. But a year ago Tony went away for a week and came back a different person. He had met with Dale, and she had convinced him that the world would be a better place if Tabor liquidated it's holdings and used the money for better things: to "make some contributions to human knowledge." Money means little to Jubal at this point in his life, but the thought of losing power is unthinkable. He must do something, but Tony's stock, together with Dale's hold controlling interest and there is nothing he can do legally. The thought of harming his own flesh and blood is equally unthinkable, but Dale is another matter...

Meanwhile, Kelsy and Dale have taken Mildred into their confidence and secretly meet with Tony. They must expose Jubal and his attempted murder of Dale, but since he worked with intermediaries (who, we learn in a neat little parallel plot, are no longer around), they can think of nothing. They hire an investigator to confirm their suspicions and are convinced it was Jubal, yet there is no evidence a court could use to convict him. Then Mildred comes up with an idea: since Jubal still thinks Dale is dead, what if...

Well, one look at the cover of the February issue and you can probably guess the stunt they eventually pull. Although it's an old saw of a device and was used by MacDonald somewhat ineffectually at least once before, it comes across well and is almost believable.

Yet despite the pulpy and outlandish plot elements in "Death's Eye View," the story never seems anything but believable and is engaging throughout. That's due to the author's meticulous background detail as well as the well-drawn main characters. As much of a "type" as Jubal turns out to be, he is recognizable and his background and motivations are deeply interesting. Mildred's partial withdrawal from life proves to be the most interesting characterization and her gradual change as the result of her involvement eventually proves to be the novella's centerpiece. Kelsy, who begins as the strong, independent MacDonald hero is eventually revealed to be a man for whom restlessness has become "a disease," a man who has failed in his own business and whose wisecracks turn out to be a defense mechanism. Even Dale, a beautiful, young woman intent on using her wealth to better the world, is shown to be someone who has compulsions she doesn't understand and who has "fallen into the habit of playing the part of a girl with too much money, too much time and too little direction." These are all people we usually don't meet in a detective pulp, but this was 1953 and MacDonald had already written The Damned and The Neon Jungle, both novels that featured multiple characters with deeply-detailed backgrounds. He was working on Dead Low Tide and his first "serious" novel, Cancel All Our Vows, and I'm sure writing stories with stock characters no longer interested him -- not that he was ever really guilty of that, but "Death's Eye View definitely reads like a mature work by a maturing writer.

The novella has been anthologized at least twice, originally in Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1953, edited by David C. Cooke, and later in 1984's Baker's Dozen: Thirteen Short Mystery Novels, edited by Bill Pronzini and, yes, Martin H, Greenberg. Used copies of the later are not too hard to find.

"This One Will Kill You" ("Death Writes the Answer")

John D MacDonald's short story "This One Will Kill You" originally appeared in the May 1950 issue of New Detective Magazine. One of 20 stories that were published in that monthly over the years, it's a type of mystery known generally as a "perfect murder" story. We could, I suppose, narrow that definition to a more specific type, the "how to murder your wife" subset. This kind of mystery has a long tradition, with such well-known tales as AA Milne's "The Three Dreams of Mr. Findlater," Stanley Ellin's "The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby," and John Collier's "Anniversary Gift" and, most famously, his "Back for Christmas."

These stories usually feature mousy, fastidious husbands, the kind who enjoy a good crossword puzzle, or their butterfly collections, but are either henpecked or mothered to death by domineering wives. They reach a point -- always on their own -- where they have had enough, and envision a perfect little world, if only the old bag wasn't around any more. These couples are always childless and the reader is usually left wondering at the outset, just how this guy managed to get married in the first place. The stories are typically puzzles in themselves, as we observe the main character devise a plot, set it up and (usually) carry it out. The story is not done correctly without some sort of twist or instant karma at the end that leaves the husband worse off than he was before.

Peter Kallon is one of those men who likes puzzles and contests, and the opening of "This One Will Kill You" finds him sitting in his efficiency apartment pretending to read a magazine, surreptitiously looking over at his wife Myra: "For the moment the excitement, the carefully concealed anticipation of the past month faded, and he wondered, quite blankly, why he was going to kill his wife." Six months ago his plot had begun as an intellectual game, but now he was more than ready to put it into action. Myra is not a nag, or domineering, but, for the "very tidy" Peter, she simply won't do any more:

"Eight years had thickened her figure, put a roll of soft tissue under her chin, but the years had done nothing to alter that basic untidiness which he had once found so charming ... Myra, even though childless, seemed to find it impossible to handle the housekeeping details of an efficiency apartment ... eight years of litter had worn away his quite impressive patience with the monotony of water dripping on sandstone... Murder became a puzzle."
 

Peter's plan begins by tricking the unsuspecting Myra into writing out her own suicide note, making her think she is helping him compose a letter to one of his clients. With that in hand, he devises a series of events that will keep the chronically fatigued Myra awake for long periods of time, leaving her enervated and hopelessly sleepy on the fateful day. Then there are the four strings connected to the gas stove...

Poor Myra is depicted as a hapless victim, deserving of nothing more than a good cleaning up, but for her husband, every little action of hers evokes disgust. MacDonald drops these little descriptions with delightful frequency:

"A strand of graying brown hair hung down her cheek. She sat with one leg tucked under her, an unlaced shoe on the swinging foot. She was reading a novel, and as she came to the end of each page she licked the middle finger of her right hand before turning the next page... Long ago he had given up trying to read any book Myra had finished."
 

She "scuffed her way into the kitchenette," poured herself a glass of water, drank it and returned, "wiping her mouth with the back of her right hand." She falls asleep reading, breathing "audibly through her open mouth." She can't tune a radio properly, writes in a "childish scrawl," her words "slanted uphill to the right edge of the paper," and she "was never on time, never able to move fast."

Monstrous! Well, to Peter it is, and his plan is meticulous, but you know it's not going to end the way he intended.

Like many of his early pulp submissions, "This One Will Kill You" bore a different title when MacDonald wrote it. He called it "Death Writes the Answer" and changed it back to that title when it was included in the first edition of The Good Old Stuff in 1982.