JDM on Barzun

“[Any] attempt to make a crime story ‘a real novel’ is headed for failure. Every few months a publisher boasts that his author has accomplished the feat, but what the reader finds is a book with a fatally divided interest: the business of elucidating the crime stops dead while character and society are being depicted in depth; and when this part of the job is interrupted in its turn so as to resume work on the crime, one must make an effort to remember the small significant details and the progress of the inquiry. The seesaw, moreover, repeats, and in each phase, one is impatient at getting, or not getting, the appropriate kind of entertainment.”

-- Jacques Barzun, A Catalogue of Crime (1971)

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) was a renowned social historian of the last century whose interests spanned much of American popular culture. His 1971 work A Catalogue of Crime, (written with Wendell Hertig Taylor) was a landmark study of the works of the literature of mystery and crime fiction, containing over 5,000 entries on novels written in the genre. But as important as this book was in the field, it had its detractors -- many who disagreed with his opinion of certain books and others who took exception to his very understanding of what crime fiction was and what it represented. The above quote, taken from the book’s introduction (or more specifically, the “Introductory,” as it was titled) seems, to the fan of John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, to be a direct aim and fire at the author. When a paper written for 1978’s John D MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detective Fiction, held at the University of South Florida in Tampa, brought up Barzun’s assertion, MacDonald responded.

[The writer of the paper] uses the Jacques Barzun dictum that “anyone who attempts to improve on the mystery genre and make it a real novel suffers from bad judgement.” He [Barzun] further claims that replacing clues with psychology and sociology is “childish tinkering with the genre.”... This strikes close to home, as anyone would know who reads the McGee books, Any writer who claims that he is writing a suspense story and at the same time writing more than a suspense story is open to a justifiable criticism of pretentious jackassery.

I know what I am trying to write. I am accepting the strictures and limitations of the medium and then, within those boundaries, trying to write as well as I am able, of the climate of the times and places in which the action takes place. I try to put violence into its contemporary frame of history, believing that not only does this make the people more real, it makes their actions more understandable. On page 45 of the Fawcett edition of One Fearful Yellow Eye, I have McGee’s interior monologue about Chicago women, slums, Hefner and professional sports. I did it because I felt then, and still feel, that the flavor of the city and its times is essential to an understanding of what had happened there to Doctor Geis.

I do not accept Barzun’s ground rules. No one can tell me that it is not within my authority to try to move my suspense novels as close as I can get to the “legitimate” novels of manners and morals, despair and failure, love and joy.

There are no ground rules. The only stipulation is: Does it work? And this, too, is an empty question, because any book, any author, will work for some and not for others. Any creative form presupposes a selective taste, just as the taste of the author, painter, sculptor or composer uses his own selective taste in the elements of his finished work.

Nor is the critic, amateur or professional, much help in establishing whether a specific book works or does not work -- does what is intended or fails to do so. Criticism in all the times we know of has been of little avail in judging contemporary work because such work is seen in the light of fads, fashions and degrees of public acceptance or non-acceptance. Only hindsight seems to have a precarious validity…

At any rate I shall continue with my sociological asides, with McGee's and Meyer’s dissertations on the condition of medicine, retirement, education, facelifting, ear mites, road construction, white collar theft, apartment architecture, magazine editing, acid rain, billyrock, low fidelity and public service in America today, permitting a certain amount of wandering, but subjecting it to the blue pencil when it begins to feel as if it has gone on too long.

The odd thing, I suppose, is that I find it easier to do this sort of thing in a medium where it is not all that customary than to do it in the novels I write which are not in the suspense genre.

Maybe You Should Write a Book

In 1977 ex-Fawcett Publications editor Ralph Daigh wrote a how-to book on writing, titled Maybe You Should Write a Book. The first sentence on the front flap of the dust jacket provides his thesis:

If you have ever said, “Someday I am going to write a book,” and have not yet done so, or have written a book as yet unpublished, this is the book for you.

The first twelve chapters were written by Daigh and contain many fascinating inside-baseball facts and tales of the publishing business. The following eighteen chapters were individual essays written by some of the then-famous authors of the period: names such as James Michener, Joyce Carol Oates, Norah Lofts and Louis L’Amour. And, of course, John D MacDonald, who provided many great titles for Daigh back in the early 1950’s. MacDonald’s piece, which was titled “An Author With a Fan Club,” contains JDM’s standard biography, told by himself, which is revealing in and of itself as it contains a few bits of info revealed in few other places. (Such as the revelation that his writing predated “Interlude in India.”) The balance of the essay is an interesting nuts-and-bolts description of how he writes, where he gets his ideas, his rather drastic method of revision, and his approach to both realism and illusion. Long out of print, Maybe You Should Write a Book probably doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance of ever being reprinted, so I’ve taken the liberty and transcribed MacDonald’s entry in its entirety. It’s quite educational.

Writing is my trade and my joy and my despair, depending on how well or how poorly it seems to be going at any given moment.

I cannot imagine ever doing anything else.

Yet I had no idea of actually being a writer until I was twenty-nine. I read everything I could reach from the day I learned to read. I thought that to be an author would be the best thing anyone could ever do -- to put down the words for others to read. But I did not think it could ever be me. Not ever.

I wrote things, but it was as if I were imitating a writer, and thus it was a secret vice. It was not until almost half a life had passed that I realized all writers who share this same compulsion, this same dream, have the hidden, guilty suspicion that they are merely giving an imitation of what they hope to become.

Because I had an inner listlessness about what I would do with my life, I responded easily to what my father hoped I would do. I went to the Wharton School of Finance and dropped out after almost two years, worked at small weird jobs in New York City, finally reentered college at Syracuse, got a B.S. in Business Administration, married Dorothy, went to Harvard Business School, received an M.B.A. in Business Administration, sired a son, went to work, got fired with alarming frequency, went into the army for five-and-a-half years and came back from overseas with three months' accumulated leave and a terminal promotion to Lieutenant Colonel.

The army had cured me, or partially cured me, of that malady which had gotten me fired so regularly -- a virulent case of Boca Grande (Big Mouth) -- and in the normal course of events I would have fitted myself back into the business world, carefully and diligently, yet without joy.

But great luck rescued me from my own blindness about myself. Luck and Dorothy. During the last of my two-and-a-half years overseas, I was with OSS in the China-Burma-India Theater. At one point, due to the secret nature of ongoing operations, we were advised that outgoing mail was being subjected to one hundred percent censorship rather than the usual spot check, and that it would be best if no mention were made in letters of climate, foliage, health, food, friends, and so forth.

It made letters grotesquely difficult to write, and as a relief valve, I wrote a short story in longhand about some people in New Delhi, a place where I was no longer stationed. I wrote it to amuse Dorothy and to give her more of the special flavor of India than I could manage in straight exposition.

It got through, and without writing me what she was doing, she typed it in suitable form and submitted it first to Esquire, where it elicited a personalized and encouraging rejection rather than a form. Next she sent it to Story Magazine, where Whit Burnett purchased it for twenty-five dollars and, months later, published it under the title "Interlude in India."

When I was set free at Fort Dix, we had a rent-controlled apartment in Utica, New York, three months' leave, and tentative appointments my father had made for me with several corporations.

It seemed a good time to try to be a writer. Dorothy encouraged me. No one else did. During the winter of 1945-46, in four months -- October, November, December, and January -- I worked twelve and fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and completed 800,000 words of typed manuscript. In February I sold a second story after months of keeping at least thirty stories in the mail to the magazines at all times. I had papered most of my small workroom with form rejection slips, and I painted them out when at last they began to really depress me. I lost twenty pounds. Relatives and friends discussed John's "severe readjustment problems." In short-story format I wrote the equivalent of ten full-length books in four months. Motivation was so overwhelming, I compressed years of learning into a brief time. By the end of 1946 we could just barely live on the income from writing. In 1947 extreme financial pressures were eased.

I am still learning. And I still feel as if I were almost a writer. One cannot apply linear logic to erase a deep suspicion that one is an impostor.

It is the memory of the amount of work it took to learn my trade that oftentimes makes me less than tolerant with the stranger who says earnestly, as though we share something special, "You know, I've always wanted to write!"

When my mood is especially astringent, I answer, "Really! I've always wanted to be a brain surgeon." The lay person can remove a splinter from a finger and can write a nice letter to Aunt Alice.

The most common question is, "Where do you get your ideas?"

I do not know where ideas come from. I have the feeling that somewhere in the back of my head there is an ancient cauldron where all the input of the years of my life boils and bubbles, with the random bits of things seen, felt, read, heard, discussed, all tumble together in ferment, appearing and disappearing atop the dark brew.

The thing which differentiates the human brain from the computer is the talent, or knack, or quirk, which the brain has for established logical and also illogical relationships. Emotion, humor, fear, hate-all these seem to come from unlikely juxtapositions of random bits in the storage banks, or in the cauldron, or whatever you want to call it.

The contents of the cauldron are not readily accessible to me until two or more random bits clot together in some associational relationship and float to the surface. Then I can take these items out, a coagulation, and turn the lump this way and that until I see a pattern that may or may not become a story.

The other day I retrieved some information bits in strange shape and form. A man once told me how he had fabricated his qualifications and made a quantum leap -- forward or backward -- from cab driver to assistant pursor on a cruise ship, and how, by mumbling and by writing in such a way no one could read it, he had successfully covered his areas of total ignorance until he learned the job on the job,. I once saw a ship's officer get out of a cable car in American Samoa, pallid and wet and visibly shaken, perhaps because by chance he was the only passenger aboard on that six minute, gut-wrenching trip. I had read somewhere about a myna bird who lived next door to a fire house, and who learned such a persuasive imitation of the alarm bells and buzzers, he could fake out the firemen. In the thick offshore smoke of the burning Everglades a few years ago, birds landed on our small boat, some of them too near death from exhaustion to be saved.

I examined this curious clotting of four unrelated things. I know there has to be some connective -- something in my mind which makes some congruent relationship -- faking, loneliness, fright, imitation, communication.

When I perceive the relationships, then this might become a story or an incident within a story. My fallow periods occur when all the lumps I retrieve either have too apparent and simpleminded a relationship, or ones so complex they are beyond conscious perception.

After I have the idea for a novel, the idea will determine the approach and the length. A story is something happening to somebody. If the change is physical, environmental, then it is a casual and trivial story. I must qualify this by saying that there are some monstrous exceptions, such as Kafka's Metamorphosis. If the change is deep and subjective and lasting, then the story can have as much power as is within the capacities of the novelist.

Once I have the story, along with that prickling feeling of anticipation which clues me as to how well I might be able to do it, I establish a clear sense of the ending, and then I try, through trial and error, to find the most useful beginning. The right point in time to start a story is tricky. Begin too far back from the dramatic peaks and the story becomes slow and labored. Begin too close to the tensions and the pace becomes frantic. There are no rules except the subjective sense of "feel." I revise by throwing away. I might, for example, throw away thirty thousand words of a novel in first draft because it begins to feel progressively worse and beyond repair. Or I might discard the final twenty thousand of the first fifty thousand words by rereading it enough times to be able to detect the approximate arena where it began to feel wrong.

I do not plan the middle portions of a book. Once I have found a solid beginning-place, and know where it will end, I then have multiple choices of how to find my way through the thickets and jungles of the middle portion. When such portions get too far off the track because a side trail becomes too enticing, I can take out that portion and set it aside as something to read over the next time I am in the process of selecting a story to write. For me, too much preplanning destroys freshness and spoils my own fun. I do not know what each day of work will bring. I know the compass direction, but not the specific destination of each day.

Nobody ever invented a character, whether protagonist or walk-on, out of whole cloth. I have never consciously patterned any character after any specific person I know. I assemble the odds and ends of input into the people in the books, and then they become alive to me to the point where, when I attempt to manipulate them into word or deed which does not fit, the words go flat and the deeds are fumbled.

When a character is not consistent with his own patterns and habits and style, then the reader becomes all too aware of the fact that he is reading a book. The writer's hand has become visible, tugging at the strings, contriving scene and situation.

I strive for realism while knowing at all times that I can achieve the illusion of realism, not realism itself. Selectivity in description imitates reality. It shows the reader what you want him to see. If I describe a boat by saying, "Below decks she smelled of stale grease, stale urine, and old laundry," I need not mention the condition of the brightwork or running gear topside.

Yet in these shorthand techniques of realistic writing, I must be careful not to make the writing too vivid, or once again I intrude. The flamboyant overblown simile or analogy is like tapping the reader on the shoulder and saying, "Look how beautiful I'm writing, fella!"

I achieve a further illusion of realism by trying never to write about places I have never been and by researching the nuts-and-bolts details of various skills, occupations, and professions where appropriate.

A further aspect of realism is the result of the writer's attitude toward his work. I know that I am involved in entertainment, but I also know that the more entertaining a book is the more readers it will reach, and if the entertainment is built upon some solid foundations of awareness of the world, then there will be a resonance about the work which can in certain ways alter the internal climate and the outward perceptions of the reader.

The fact of a writer taking himself seriously does not make of him a "serious" writer. Yet if he has any slight feeling that in his choice of materials or choice of approach he is patronizing and deluding the readership, then the flavor of truth and purpose and reality will drain out of his work. As literary history has shown us often and forcefully, critical acclaim has far less to do with lasting acceptance than does the internal disciplines of the work itself.

As regards the area in which I have often chosen to write, I would like to quote Nicholas Freeling: "We are all murderers, we are all spies, we are all criminals, and to choose a crime as the mainspring of a book's action is only to find one of the simplest methods of focusing eyes on our life and our world."

I have explained where I think the ideas come from and what I do with them once I have them reasonably well in hand. But I have not said anything about my appraisal of my own body of work. It is to me a long, tough, satisfying process of becoming. I have more control of my materials this year than I had last year. When the control improves, one can attempt the more delicate and sinuous confrontations without the dreadful risk of descending into inadvertent parody or situational grotesqueries. I have not done a book or a story that I could not now do more effectively.

There are internal rhythms in prose which tap the subjective emotional quotient of the reader, and create awareness of the identities of the human condition on many levels. These rhythms arise from the careful and selective simplicities, not from arcane juxtapositions. The words and the phrases are the architecture and the music. The more simple, the more elegant and effective. The more complex and intricate, the more self-conscious and ineffective. I keep the learning process going by writing poetry.

I will do as many more stories as time, energy, and self-knowledge will permit. It has meant sixty hours a week at this machine for more years than I care to confess. But there is not a day that I cannot get a quick, electric feeling of joyous anticipation when I roll the white empty page into the machine. A day, a week, a month, or a half year of work may leave me without a page I can keep. But sooner or later there will be a day when the satisfaction at the end of the day matches the anticipation at the beginning.

And that's what keeps my machine running.

Travis McGee as Traditional Hero

Last week I posted John D MacDonald’s remarks, made after a reading of the paper "Travis McGee as Traditional Hero," at the first John D MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detection in November 1978. Written by Erling B. Holtsmark of the University of Iowa, the paper opined that McGee was a descendant of a long line of ancient, Indo-European heroic types, a monster slayer who rescues maidens, eradicates the corruption and corrupt monsters that besiege the community, and wins the treasure. MacDonald eventually wrote a longer and more thought-out response which was published, not in the Journal of Popular Culture as originally intended, but in the inaugural issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection. As before, the author provides lots of interesting details on the genesis of the series and its two main characters.

Though I have had a certain amount of exposure to the classics, I certainly did not try to adapt ancient patterns to my contemporary fellow. It just came out that way. And maybe, for those ancient tellers of tales, it just came out that way too. Maybe we are dealing with a Jungian concept of the symbols mankind must have in his fireside tales of heroism.

I will try to explain as honestly as I can, how the characteristics of the McGee stories, as underlined by Holtsmark, came to be.

During the first few books of the series, there was no Meyer. As I began to work ever harder to try to obviate the need for endless internal monologues on the part of McGee, I began to realize that there had to be some middle ground between achieving all exposition through show rather than tell, and achieving it through all tell. I invented Meyer out of fragments in the vast scrap basket in the back of my head, vowing that I would not have a clown on scene, nor would I have someone dependent upon McGee emotionally, financially or socially.

I worked with Meyer, throwing away paragraphs and pages and chapters until he finally emerged, nodding in hirsute satisfaction, little wise blue eyes gleaming with ironic amusement, amused at himself and at my efforts, proclaiming like the bottle genie that he had been there all along, waiting for someone to perform the magic spell of rubbing the right words together.

Holtsmark tells us that the classical hero is a loner. Be that as it may, it is also a neat solution to the problem of a diversity of plot and situation. If one is enmeshing a hero in but one adventure, then it would not matter were he encumbered by wife, kiddies, tax consultant, bowling team and his very own Siamese twin. But to lug the whole emotional-personal environment along into further events involves more arrangement and manipulation than all that baggage is worth. I added Meyer only because the problems of tugging him along into the ensuing dramas was an effort overbalanced by his usefulness in establishing atmosphere and physical detail through dialogue.

We can find analogies in the television theater. Gunsmoke depicted Marshall Dillon as the classic hero, tough, moral, laconic and fearsome. Even with his retinue --Kitty, Doc, Chester (long ago) etc.-- he was the loner, often roving far. There was always the hint that long ago he had been a more pure loner, unencumbered by town and badge, or by the hints of a liaison with Miss Kitty. There, in a kind of outdoor theater, the world was brought in as evil people, and presented to the classic hero through the words and actions of his retinue, begging violent solution.

That long-departed series The Fugitive is a purer example of the loner as hero, seeking his own absolution, smiting evil along the way.

Without attempting an impertinence, my guess is that those tellers of tales about "Odysseus, Herakles, Philoctetes, Ajax and scores of others" were solving plot problems by making their heroes loners. And when he is a loner, he must have standards of behavior variant from the norms of his culture, otherwise the evil he goes out to correct would have already been taken care of by society.

As to the next characteristic, that of the lack of information about McGee's early years, I must confess that here I was guided by instinct rather than guile. It just did not feel right to me to be specific about McGee's early years, family, education and so on. If I were forced to conjecture about my probable reasons for this reluctance, I would have to say that by giving him a specific background, I would have thus related him in time and space to a very small percentage of the populace. This way, he could have been brought up in your development, gone to your schools, served in your battalion, dated your sister-long before life sent him off at an ever-diverging angle from the rest of us. There are the hints of the war service, the brief pro ball episode as a tight end, death of a brother. If we do not know the specifics in detail, then we can fill in our own. I am careful to also keep the physical image just a bit blurred, so that except for dimension, you can fill in your own ideas of him.

Curiously enough, when Otto Penzler was compiling a collection of biographies of detective heroes written by their creators, I thought about it for a long time and then said I did not want to do it. I suspect he was somewhat miffed, but I feel my instincts were right. Too much depiction would corrode the magic.

The next characteristic, the strong erotic element shared with the ancient heroes, is once again related to making a plot compelling. The constant reader is going to know, subliminally, that no matter how grievously I endanger McGee, he will survive-at least until I do a book with black in the title. The reader does not know whether or not a person for whom McGee has formed a strong attachment will survive. When there is nothing to lose, there is no menace. McGee's emotional attachment must be to someone who can capture the reader's fancy as well as McGee's. The casual roll in the hay, though it would not in our age especially devalue the damsel, would not elevate her to the status of object of great value either.

The hero must always be deeply, emotionally, tragically involved, or the novel of suspense becomes merely a string of set scenes of a meaningless violence. If the hero's motivations in a story are trivial, interest sags. The kind of strong motivation depends on the structure of the series. I have forfeited the chance in the McGee structure to have him struggling to avoid imprisonment for life for something he didn't do, or to regain a lost reputation, or to save his blood relatives from disaster, or to recover his own courage, or to save his own soul. So it must always be a threat of ugly disaster for himself and for those he holds near and dear, close friends or lady loves. The element of sensuality must depend upon the mores of the culture in which the hero appears. In times gone by the same effect might have been attained by his having been given a fragile scarf to tie to his lance before going into combat.

The fifth aspect, which Holtsmark covers in some detail, is the necessity of having a monster handy, a Junior Allen or a Boone Waxwell or a Paul Dissat. Here we deal with one of my own beliefs, that there exists in the world a kind of evil which defies the Freudian explanations of the psychologists, and the environmental explanations of the sociologists. It is an evil existing for the sake of itself, for the sake of the satisfactions of its own exercise. In our real world we have, for example, a two hundred and thirty pound teenager who roams the streets, mugging children for the pleasure of gouging out their eyes. For me it is less satisfying to say that this is the action of a sad, limited, tormented, unbalanced child than it is to see that this is a primordial blackness reaching up again through a dark and vulnerable soul, showing us all the horror that has always been with mankind, frustrating all rational analyses.

I admit to the primitive and superstitious aspects of my belief. But it does make it easier for me to depict a villainy that is without mercy or scruple, that grows strong through its own pursuit of evil, that is as heartstopping as the sudden breaking of the glass of the bedroom window a little before dawn. Blackness for its own sake is ever more difficult to deal with than quirks and neuroses.

This paper intrigued me and will continue to do so, while at the same time it has made me a little bit edgy. I do not want to give McGee the flavor of being contrived within a pattern laid down in pre-history. If he does work some subliminal magic in creating reader response, that is all to the good. But he has become a person. When I try to manipulate him, to take him outside his established patterns of thought and behavior, the book in process falls apart. In the past he has had no specific protest. He has just stood there. From now on, I suppose, he will shake his head and say, "John, that is not the way an ancient hero would act."

On the Background of Travis McGee

Back in 1978 Ed Hirshberg, a University of South Florida English professor and editor of the JDM Bibliophile, arranged the first ever Conference on the Works of John D MacDonald. It took place in November in Tampa and was, primarily, a one day affair preceded by an evening of cocktails and dinner. (Plymouth Gin was served.) Scholarly papers on both the works of JDM as well as other mystery writers were read by their authors and commented on by the guest of honor, none other than John D MacDonald himself. MacDonald’s comments were off-the-cuff, as he had not read or heard the papers prior to their presentation at the conference, and the intention was to have him eventually produce more lengthy and thoughtful responses in writing and have them published, along with the papers themselves, in a future issue of the Journal of  Popular Culture.

One of the papers, titled "Travis McGee as Traditional Hero," and written by Erling B. Holtsmark of the University of Iowa, postulated the idea that McGee was a descendant of a long line of ancient, Indo-European heroic types, a monster slayer who rescues maidens, eradicates the corruption and corrupt monsters that besiege the community, and wins the treasure. The paper was interesting not just for what Holtsmark had written, but for MacDonald’s responses, which reveal how he began the series with a full biography of the hero, how he developed the character of Meyer, and how he turned down a request to publish McGee’s bio in Otto Penzler’s 1977 The Private Lives of Private Eyes: Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys.

Below are MacDonald’s initial comments made after the reading. Next week I’ll post his long, written response that appeared a year later.

What was to me the most interesting thing about that paper was that it illuminated something to me that had been puzzling me a bit. When I first started the series I had a pretty well organized biography of McGee, from early childhood, family relationships, even to the occupations of his grandparents on both sides, where he grew up, where he went to school; also the emotional and psychic trauma of his early years. I had intended to imbed these biographical facts here and there in the books as the series proceeded.

As I went on, I found a reluctance to do that, which I did not understand. I just didn't know why I felt so reluctant. So I didn't do it. It sort of came to a head last year when Otto Penzler wrote to me and he said that I'm putting together a book; all of these people are going to write a biography of their protagonists. So-and-so is going to do so-and-so, and so on. We want you to do a biography of McGee. I dug out my old records on that and looked them over and I would have had to turn it from outline form into a sort of an essay. I wrote back and I said, "I don't want to do this." He wrote back and said, "Everybody's doing it. Why not? Why the reluctance?" And I said, "I don't know why I'm reluctant, but I don't think it's the right thing to do. I think people should use their own imagination to try to figure out in their minds what the background of this contemporary American character is."

When I read Mr. Holtsmark's paper, it was sort of a justification of my reluctance. Then I began to wonder, "How about these people who were devising initially these classic heroes of the past? I wonder if they had the same reluctance to go into the background of their people?" My classical education is very spotty. I was in the Wharton School of Finance and in Business Administration at Syracuse University and then took a Master's from Harvard Business School. So when I should have been studying classical heroes and monsters I was studying double-entry book-keeping and what insurance companies can do to you and for you. I don't know whether that particular aspect of it has been studied before, but it just intrigued me.

Why should there be a reluctance for me to tell the readers what my knowledge of the background of McGee is? I just don't know. But I begin to see, through that paper, a sort of possible justification for it.

Ceylon Memories

Another busy work week has thwarted my attempts at writing my weekly blog post, so I’m going to punt and post some of John D MacDonald’s own writing.

I’m slowly developing an essay on the next JDM novel in the order I have been covering them. This one requires my normal two readings of the work, in addition to reading the magazine version and, a rarity, watching the film version of the book. It’s Soft Touch and it will take a while before I have anything ready to read. There is an aspect to the novel that was a standard background point in much of MacDonald’s work, especially in his early short stories for the pulps, and that is a character’s military past, stationed in the China Burma India theater during the Second World War. This was, of course, MacDonald’s own past, and he drew on it heavily, even up to the point of the first Travis McGee novel.

MacDonald was stationed first in India and later in Ceylon. He hated India and loved Ceylon. In 1948 he wrote a brief memoir of the island nation (now known as Sri Lanka) in his weekly newspaper column for the Clinton (NY) Courier.

We picked up some students headed down the hill toward the village the other day, and they were talking about various types of summer work and the relative merits thereof.

We were reminded of Ceylon. The army graciously dropped us into that garden spot for a time. It is a fine island. We were particularly intrigued with the type of summer work that many of the students perform.

During the spring monsoon, the heavy rains swell the streams and semi-precious stones are torn out of the mountains and carried down the steep slopes. During the summer months in the vicinity of Ratnapura, in the heart of the gem area, the streams are alive with students picking over the pebbles in search of semi-precious gems. They find topaz, blue and yellow sapphires, cat's eyes and other varieties.

We tried it. The standard technique is to find a place where a stream curves and has thus heaped up a mound of small stones. You make yourself as comfortable as possible and then start picking up likely looking rocks and holding them up toward the sun. You spin the stone in your fingers and, when you get a glint of colored light through it at any point, you stuff it in a bag.

When the day's work is done, you take the stones down to the proper alley in Ratnapura where the grinders work, You have to watch those boys.If you find something good, they are inclined to tell you it is worthless in hopes that you will throw it away where they can pick it up.

We squatted in the blazing sun for about two hours, getting very bored with the whole process of trying to look through pebbles. We must have looked through a thousand of them. Then suddenly one jagged hunk of stone gave forth a little gleam of yellow light when we held it up. We felt like a forty-niner.

Down in that alley in Ratnapura, the boys who do the grinding sit on the ground by a crude looking lathe with a grinding wheel on one end. The motive power is a bow string with rawhide. The rawhide is looped once around the lathe spindle. The bow is shoved back and forth and the grinding wheel is crudely geared so that it spins, of course, in just one direction. The end of the bow is held in the bare toes of the operator leaving both hands free to hold the stone against the wheel.

An ancient citizen took our precious rock, which we were sure was a priceless yellow sapphire, and ground it without ever seeming to look at it. It made us nervous.

Instead of a sapphire, it turned out to be topaz, about fifteen carats. And a darn poor color.

The man charged eight rupees for the grinding operation (About $2.60.) We have our topaz here and it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever -- because we found it.

Had not the army suddenly awakened to the fact that we were in a garden spot and sent along a cruel travel order, we would still be ankle deep in one of those streams near Ratnapura trying to see through pebbles and acquiring a terrific sunburn.

It is our nomination for the perfect kind of summer work.

    *    *    *

Speaking of Ceylon...

Now that we are on the subject, it is a good time to do a sales job.

Go to Ceylon!

India, to the north, is a big, dusty miserable country that gives the impression of being a circus ground the day after the circus left.

But Ceylon is a garden spot. Lord Louis Mountbatten is nobody's fool. When he was the big wheel of the South-East Asia Command, he put his headquarters right smack in Kandy in the Ceylonese Hills.

In India you are expected to at least pick up a smattering of Urdu. In Ceylon it is recognized that Sinhalese is far too difficult to learn and nobody questions some of the British that have lived there twenty years without picking up a word of Sinhalese.

It isn't as hot as India and there are miles of perfect beaches where the white surf comes rolling in and you can, with a little practice, ride a surfboard for a quarter of a mile toward the beach.

For between thirty and fifty dollars a month you can rent a huge "bungalow" on Bambalapitiya Road in Colombo. Another nine dollars will provide a cook, a houseboy and a combination chauffeur-gardener.

For recreation you can play tennis and bridge at the Garden Club, dance at a very svelte nightclub called the Silver Faun, swim at the Hotel Mont Lavinia, shop in the bazaars.

So you see, it's very simple. All you have to do is save up a hundred thousand dollars and invest it at four percent. The income will enable you to live like a little king in Ceylon for the rest of your days, where you will enjoy all the languor of a tropical island plus all the comforts of city living.

 
I wonder how MacDonald got that topaz home. Did he hide it in the bottom of a wax-filled canteen?

On Writing a Series Character

Four years ago I wrote a lengthy piece for this blog about the genesis of John D MacDonald’s most famous creation, Travis McGee. The primary research tool for that article -- which I called The Difficult Birth of Travis McGee -- was a 1964 essay MacDonald wrote for the magazine The Writer titled “How To Live With a Hero,” where he recalled the step by step process of creating the character and the series. Published in September of that year, “How To Live With a Hero” saw print only a few months after the first three McGee’s hit the stands and a month before the fourth entry arrived.

At that early point in the life of McGee it was too early to tell if MacDonald could sustain the series beyond the handful of titles he had published or had already written and were waiting in the wings. He was philosophical about the possibility of failure, claiming that after writing more than a million-and-a-quarter words of McGee at least he had “learned just that much more about my profession, learned skills and attitudes and solutions which will inevitably be valuable in other areas.” But, as we all know by now, McGee was a success beyond the imagination of both the writer himself and his publishers. The fact that we are still reading him, writing about him and waiting patiently while a major film version of one of the novels is produced, is a testament to that success. In my own case (which admittedly is not the best example) I can honestly state that I have completely lost track of the number of times I have re-read the series, but I think ten would be a conservative figure.

Fast forward to 1983 and McGee was as established as any series hero could be, at least for one in print. Beginning with entry number 15 (Turquoise) the books were published in hardcover and beginning with 16 they unfailingly appeared in the Best Seller lists of the day. Number 20 had appeared the year before and the author had signed a contract to write two more titles in the series. (Of course he only wrote one more before he died. For the few bits of information known about that final, never-written, McGee, see my piece titled A Black Border for McGee.) In August a college professor who was writing an article about private detectives wrote MacDonald, asking the author what it was about the type of character in general, and McGee in particular, that made it interesting for MacDonald to continue writing these books. A month later JDM answered him and his response was printed in the JDM Bibliophile.

First, I think it important to note that there are perhaps thirty published attempts at a continuing series hero for every one that manages to endure. The ones that endure meet certain ancient prerequisites for the mythic hero. One must not know too much about his past. Just a hint here and there of past deeds of greatness. He must be an honorable man without being a prig, moral without pretense to sainthood, brave without being a damned fool. And he must be in opposition to the authority of his times. A loner. Most of all he should be likeable, with the ability to scoff at his own pretensions.

The writers most likely to stumble upon that useful pattern are the ones reasonably well educated who consciously or unconsciously borrow from the writings about the mythic heroes of the past. People of all times have much the same tastes in heroes.

Now to take it from the reader’s point of view - the reader brings to the reading of a new book about his friend a whole fabric of past association. He knows the man. He does not have to work his way very warily into a book, wondering if he is going to like this new dude, if the man is going to do the right things at the right time. If he wins too big, the hero is too heroic. If he loses too much, he is depressing. Even in the anticipation of the events which have not yet unfolded in the new book, the reader has a sense of familiarity with what will probably happen - not the specifics, but the general outline of trial, error and conflict.

Now back to the writer's point of view. I have done twenty books about Travis McGee and I am under contract to do two more. If there will be any more after twenty-two, I do not know. It is restricting and difficult to work in the first-person mode. One cannot cheat. Everything must be seen, appraised, evaluated through the eyes of McGee. This keeps the writer out of the hearts and minds of the other characters. As a novelist I get a great deal more creative satisfaction out of doing such novels as Condominium, The Last One Left, The End of the Night, Slam the Big Door and the upcoming One More Sunday, which Knopf will publish in May.

The second distressful aspect of writing the McGee books is the chore of maintaining freshness while dealing with a fairly rigid structure. One is involved in a folk dance which must necessarily be concerned with a limited number of ingredients. They must be arranged in a way which is genuinely fresh, not a simulated freshness. In other words, I must enjoy what I am writing, and not give an imitation of enjoyment.

On the other side of the ledger, I like McGee and I like Meyer, and I have spent more time with them than I have with any other friend I know. Consequently, when I try to force them to do and to say things that are not within their characters as they have been drawn, then they turn puppety, and the structure of the book sags. I know in my gut when this is happening and so I have to then go back and identify the place or places where I pushed them into uncharacteristic behavior, and scrap everything that happened after that deviation, then give them a chance to act like themselves-which they are ever anxious to do.

If I force them into contrivance, they not only disappoint me by making my book sag, they disappoint the reader. "What the hell happened to McGee?" they ask in angry letters.

I believe that series characters, after three or four successful books founder because the author becomes restive working within that framework and tries to alter the basic structure - the way 007 was screwed up by a change of viewpoint in one of the later books. Some writers try to add new components that do not belong in the genre - political opinions, science fiction and fantasy, lady or tiger endings. One or two bummers and you are out of business, just like the movies.

It would be less than honest to leave out the money part. The money part of a successful series is nice. It enables me to live in the style to which Travis McGee is accustomed. But, beyond sustenance, I have never written for money alone. I have written to please myself, and would keep on doing it even if there were no markets left at all. The only change would be that I would probably do less of McGee and more of the multi-viewpoint novel. Aiming at the money is the primary way of creating a weak book.

The Junket

In the summer of 1973 following the recent publication of the fourteenth Travis McGee novel (The Scarlet Ruse),  the book’s publisher Fawcett sent MacDonald out on a cross-country publicity tour to tout the event. Scarlet was, of course, the last McGee to be published as a paperback  original: the following effort, The Turquoise Lament, was hardcover, as were all subsequent McGee’s. MacDonald, a homebody if there ever was one, hated these tours and each one seemed worse than the one before it, especially once his health issues started appearing. His wife Dorothy accompanied him on this trip, but not on all of them as she had her own laundry list of health problems to deal with.

But this trip was unique in one respect: Fawcett had written MacDonald’s itinerary so that it included visits to various company printing and distribution centers, where the author could rub shoulders with the low-level men of the publishing world: the salesmen, printers and drivers who actually put JDM books into retail establishments. With nearly all of the author’s novels still in print in 1973, this accounted for a lot of titles, and a lot of sales. And MacDonald enjoyed this part of the junket, writing to pal Dan Rowan “It was one of your typical rotten publicity tours. The good part was the early morning talking to the drivers and the route men. The bad part was everything else.”

The schedule was grueling, including stops in Atlanta, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and New York. At each stop he would meet with a member of the press, one who in all probability had never read a word of his writing and whose research usually consisted of a paragraph of blurb supplied by Fawcett. A case in point was the article written in his stop in San Diego, where columnist Jim Degraw of the Copley News Service described JDM as “not a big man. About five-feet-8. Slightly stooped.” MacDonald was six-foot-2, so Degraw was only slightly off…

Reading many of these articles only brings home to the student of JDM just how tiresome they must have been for the author. The same questions asked, the repeating of the first-short-story sold, the MacDonald-McGee comparisons, the description of his writing habits... it’s a wonder John didn’t explode. But each article reveals a courteous, friendly man who was obviously “on” for the press. Almost all of the stories include a sentence or two about how nice the author was. But once the meetings were over it was a different story. MacDonald admitted to Rowan that during the trip he “had four crashing migraines, and several fits of the uglies.” He compensated himself and Dorothy on this “shitty trip” by spending lots of money on twenty dollar lunches and thirty dollar dinners and expensing it back to Fawcett. When they returned to Sarasota they immediately packed the van and headed for the relative solitude of their summer home on Piseco Lake in upstate New York.

His stop in New York City, which included a kind of a tryout for his subsequent interview on The Dick Cavett Show, resulted in the following article, which was syndicated throughout the country. It is more expansive and detailed than most of the other fare that resulted from this tour, although once again we are dealing with a reporter who has read little or no work by his subject -- a fact that he practically admits. The piece contains errors that even the casual observer of JDM wouldn’t make, but the piece is worth reading nonetheless, especially for the end of the penultimate paragraph, which I’ll bet is something even serious students of the author didn’t know.

The Paperback Revolution

by Leslie Hanscom

(New York) The paperback revolution, its success rooted in a method of mass distribution with which hardcover publishers can't compete, has given birth to a new kind of literary reputation. A writer can now achieve celebrity by appearing only in paperback, without benefit of the prestige that comes from appearing first in hardcover. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of the author who would be famous if no such thing as a hardcover book existed is John D. MacDonald, the crime suspense writer who has lately been touring the country paying thank-you calls on the great folks who made it all possible.

MacDonald's paperback publisher, the House of Fawcett, has been steering him from city to city to meet and ingratiate the distributors, route men and truck drivers who are responsible for delivering what he writes to the discount drug stores and corner tobacconists. It was a kind of courtesy call that is not without precedent; Joseph Conrad once came out to Garden City to thank the employees at the Doubleday plant. But it doesn't happen often, partly because not every writer is equipped to charm truck drivers (Conrad panicked in Garden City and made a speech that was remarkably inarticulate for a lord of language). In MacDonald's case, however, the meetings must have been a blazing success. Any writer whose works sell 46 million copies has to know something about hitting it off with the common folks, and besides that MacDonald comes on as the most winning of nice guys.

The other afternoon, at the conclusion of the tour, he was imbibing a martini in the lounge of the

Algonquin, a spot which, in defiance of all revolutions in the book world, remains the rallying

place of writers, editors, and publishers at the cocktail hour. Here, too, he seemed easily to fit in,

although a stranger might have taken him for a publisher rather than a writer. A tall man in

glasses with a tufting of snowy hair at the top of his head, he looked also -- in his attire of sports jacket and mod checked pants -- like a successful early retiree to Florida, where, indeed, he does live, although in a state far from retirement. As for the resemblance that everybody looks for  -- a likeness to Travis McGee, the amateur detective of his invention who accounts for many of those eight-digit sales -- there was none to be seen. On the tour he had just completed, MacDonald said, the only really wearisome thing was the repetitious question: "Do you live a life like Travis McGee's?"

The detective, whose 14th adventure, The Scarlet Ruse, has just appeared, lives alone on a houseboat in Miami, from which he goes forth to meet great perils. MacDonald lives in a house in Miami, designed by Dorothy, his wife of 35 years, who was sitting across the cocktail table from him, looking like his description of her as "my protector and preserve." "No, I don't live like my heroes," MacDonald said. “I like to be home, feeding my duck and my goose, leaving the typewriter when Dorothy rattles my dish." Actually, there are two homes. The other is a summer place in the Adirondacks to which MacDonald moves to spend the fall "after the vacationers are gone." In both places, the work goes on, in a contented, unending routine which has enabled him to produce 63 books so far.

A lady editor from Lippincott came over to the table to add relish to his martini by telling him jubilantly that The Turquoise Lament -- which will be the first of his books to make its debut in hardcover -- has been chosen as an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. "Good," he said kissing her, "that will let me spread my propaganda to the world even wider." (MacDonald likes to interrupt his crime suspense yarns with philosophical digressions about life and society, but when asked about what doctrine they convey, he laughs it off as an unserious question. The MacDonald message, as I am told by a colleague who has read much of the author's vast output, seems based on Mammy Yokum's golden rule: "Goodness is better than badness because it's nicer.")

At John D MacDonald's end of the writing game, which is where the writer writes for money but tries to do it with conscience and craftsmanship, the important thing, as he sees it, is to bear in mind that there is an audience out there. This explains his practice of including the name of a color in each of the adventures in the Travis McGee series. "It's a simple code," MacDonald said. "Nothing annoys a reader more than buying a book and then finding out that he's read it. The colors are a way of helping readers keep the titles straight." But there are 14 Travis McGee novels already; hasn't he exhausted the palette? "Oh, no," MacDonald said. "I looked at one of those leaflets of house painter's samples and found out there are more than 30 colors still to go. I don't know what the titles will sound like when I get down to colors like fuchsia and puce, but we'll wait and see."

That same tender concern for the reader doubles MacDonald's labor by causing him to discard a good deal of what he writes. "Once at the place in the Adirondacks," he said, "I burnt a backlog of about 2 million words. My son helped me, and it almost killed him. He was in prep school then and hated the idea of writing a three-page composition. To see all that writing go up in smoke broke his heart." The first Travis McGee novel published was the third that the author wrote. "In the first one," MacDonald said, "McGee came out sort of stolid and germanic. I did it over to lighten him up, and now he was too much of a wise guy." MacDonald said he had no use for a detective who wasn't likeable, as he found Ian Fleming's James Bond not to be. "That snob, that Fascist, that conspicuous consumer," MacDonald said, "he isn't a man I'd like to have a drink with."

Most readers find Travis McGee to be such a man, and in that sense, there is a likeness between him and his creator.