JDM in the SEP

Back in March of 2016 I wrote a piece on John D MacDonald’s 1961 Saturday Evening Post short story “Kitten on a Trampoline.” This work of fiction was MacDonald’s first to appear in the Post, and it’s interesting to ponder why it took so long for this most popular of general interest magazines to publish the author. Perhaps it was because JDM had such a good relationship with another popular periodical of the time, Cosmopolitan (in its pre-Helen Gurley Brown era), which had a long tradition of focusing on fiction. His work appeared in Cosmopolitan 36 times, the most of any other non-pulp publication. Beginning with “Kitten on a Trampoline,” MacDonald would go on to write a total of five stories for the SEP, including “Funny Man,” which would be included in JDM’s 1966 anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories under the author’s original title, “Afternoon of the Hero,” and 1961’s “Sing a Song of Terror,” which was later reworked as the opening chapter of the 1970 Travis McGee novel The Long Lavender Look.

When I wrote the piece on “Kitten” I neglected to look through the entire magazine, which I did recently, only to discover a brief entry on MacDonald in the SEP’s “Keeping Posted” section. It contains a photo of MacDonald I have never seen before, the author without his signature glasses. He looks kind of like a deer in the headlights.

I went through the rest of my Saturday Evening Post collection and found one other photo of MacDonald, included in the same magazine that featured his short story “The Obvious Woman” (which I haven’t written about yet). It has another glasses-less photo of JDM, this time looking much more at ease. I include them here for your enjoyment.

The entire run of The Saturday Evening Post has been digitized and archived, and is available for viewing for $15 a year, for those of you interested in reading the JDM stories listed below. You can sign up for the archive (including a current subscription) by clicking here. (I'm not a subscriber -- I include this only for readers who might want access to the stories.)

John D MacDonald stories published in The Saturday Evening Post:

April 8, 1961 “Kitten on a Trampoline”
September 9, 1961 “Sing a Song of Terror”
September 16, 1961 “Hit and Run” (one of two JDM stories bearing this title)
March 30, 1963 “The Obvious Woman”
May 21, 1966 “Funny Man”

"Kitten on a Trampoline"

John D MacDonald wrote or edited seventy-nine books in his thirty-year career, many of them paperback originals, all eventually having paperback editions, and all featuring covers illustrated by the great and near-great popular artists of the era. Names such as Mitchell Hooks, Victor Kalin, Robert Maguire and Barye Phillips are well known to those of us who study and prize illustration art from the last century, and the work these artists did for John D MacDonald books is among their best. Many were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to illustrate multiple titles, and multiple editions of the same title, but there is one artist whose name towers above the others when counting the sheer number of both titles and illustrations done for JDM’s work: Robert McGinnis.

Beginning in May 1959 with his cover art for the first edition of Deadly Welcome, McGinnis went on to illustrate 48 different JDM books with 63 unique paintings. The only other illustrator to come close to that number was William Schmidt, who provided 41 illustrations for 39 different titles, and almost all of them for the final physical editions the titles have seen so far. McGinnis, like MacDonald, was a workhorse, responsible for around 1,200 paperback covers, over 40 movie posters, and scores of magazine illustrations. His style is instantly identifiable, marked by a peerless esthetic, unique, perfect composition, an intuitive sense of color and, of course, his women: beautiful, sexy and unobtainable. (The only other illustrator who could give him a run for his money when illustrating these kinds of women is Maguire.) And although he is known more famously as the main illustrator of the Carter Brown and Mike Shayne detective series, he did covers for fifteen of the twenty-one Travis McGee novels, with first edition credit on three of them (Indigo, Lavender and Tan) and first paperback edition credit for two that originally were published in hardcover (Lemon and Turquoise.) His depiction of McGee on his cover for Turquoise is a fan favorite, although the Travis McGee in my mind looks more like John McDermott’s original illustration.

There are scores of sites on the internet featuring the artwork of McGinnis. Google his name and you’ll come up with over 300,000 hits. Most, if not all of his paperback work is reproduced on various sites (none officially) and his movie posters are equally well displayed. More obscure is the work he did for magazines, primarily illustrating short stories and novellas by famous and not-so-famous authors of the day. His work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, The Ladies' Home Journal and Argosy, among others, and only a few of these have been scanned for sharing on the web. One of the reasons for this is that he began his career in the late 1950’s when both fiction and its accompanying artwork in magazines was on the wane. There is one illustration, however, that is widely shared and well known by aficionados, both for its artistry and sheer audacity. That is the two-page spread he did for John D MacDonald’s short story “Kitten on a Trampoline.” Published in the April 8, 1961 issue of the bedsheet-sized The Saturday Evening Post, the illustration nearly jumps off the page at the reader with its multi-pane depiction of a bouncing beauty in various mid-air poses. It is representational McGinnis, beautiful to look at, and even if his depiction of the character is overly glamorized, it certainly must have inspired many a buyer of this particular issue to read MacDonald’s short story.

“Kitten on a Trampoline” is MacDonald doing mainstream fiction, with no crime, no bad guys, and without even a tough guy protagonist. He takes a fairly preposterous premise and makes it work, placing the action in his own backyard, depicting a world that must have been as foreign to him as that of, say, a marina in Fort Lauderdale.

The story is told in the first person by protagonist Paul Fox, a twenty-five year old traveling rep for the Owens Drug Company. He’s a typically MacDonaldean best-of-the-best, the company’s most successful rep, pulling down $20,000 a year (that would be nearly $160,000 today), working 90-hours a week, unencumbered by wife or family, living life “on a dead run.” And there are costs.

But I was chronically hoarse from giving my spiel to doctors and druggists, and I tried not to notice that I was going through three packs of cigarettes a day, or notice the persistent tremor in my hands or the deepening frown wrinkled between my brows. I hadn't been sleeping well of late, and I was bothered by nervous indigestion. My weight was down, and my temper was too easily lost. But you have to keep pushing and churning if you are going to get anywhere in this world.

Paul’s territory is the entire southern half of Florida and his company is based in Tampa. The story opens with him driving with breakneck urgency up from Naples to attend a four o’clock meeting at headquarters. At a stoplight in Sarasota he notices a movement far off from the side of the road in a roped-off parking lot. A crowd of people are surrounding a trampoline, watching a young woman jumping.

I saw the girl burst up into the air, higher than their heads. With her body straight out, she made a turn so slow and so elegant it seemed that I was watching it in slow motion, and then fell back out of sight and reappeared again in a slight variation of the first turn. I knew that the girl in the sunlight was the most astonishingly beautiful thing I had ever seen... I suddenly had the horrible realization that I was close to breaking into tears. I now know it was a clue to the extent of my nervous exhaustion. Something so precious had occurred that I couldn't even put a name to it. And here I was, running away from it.

He immediately turns around and joins the crowd of observers.

It was like a wild strange dance she was improvising as she went along, with a complete grace and total control in spite of the tremendous height she was achieving. She was young, she had a burnished tan and she was sweetly and strongly constructed. Her hair was a tousled brown-red mass. She wore a sleeveless yellow-print blouse and little chocolate-colored shorts. I could see her face clearly only at the apex of those leaps when she was turning slowly. It was one of those wide-cheeked Slavic faces of a totally deceptive placidity. She had a dreaming look, a contentment, a half smile. She drifted and spun in a better world than any of us could know.

When she finishes and dismounts, Paul complements her, but the girl is disinterested and dismissive. He offers to buy her a soda and she accepts by stating "I'm thirsty" in a so-what tone of voice spoken "with a faraway spice of accent." She grudgingly tells him her name is Wanda Markava, and he asks her to wait while he calls the office to tell them he won't be able to make it to the meeting. He follows her on her long walk home and at one point asks her if she was a member of a gymnastic team. She answers by doing a few flips on the grass and haughtily tells him that she is with the circus.

I felt like thumping myself in the head. This was Sarasota. It explained some of the strangeness of her. These were the most clannish people in the world.

She tells him she is with Rossoni and Markava, a small but well respected circus, and that she is a flier, on the rings since she was five, and considered a most promising prospect. Once home he meets the extended family, watches Wanda and her uncle practice for a while on the swings, and is eventually invited to dinner among the hectic extended family.

It was the most confusing house I've ever been in. There seemed to be four or five tiny living rooms, each with its own group. In one room three old ladies were gabbling at each other in a foreign tongue while they sewed sequins to heavy new material with a dazzling speed. People were singing, some were arguing, some were cooking and some were eating. Two television sets and a radio were going with the volume turned high. I estimate I met about one out of every four of them, and usually it was only the first name. They all had muscles, vitality and violent opinions. The children seemed able to run up the walls and across the ceiling, but I suspect that was an illusion.

It's not clear what exactly attracts Paul to Wanda besides her good looks -- certainly not her temperament or personality --  but he is smitten, and after he is driven home that night the Markava's find him the next morning again watching a practice session on the rings. Wanda asks, "How many meeting can you miss?"

“Kitten on a Trampoline” was one of nine works of short fiction MacDonald published in 1961, the most he had produced since 1956. The year before saw only one novella (the excellent “The Trap of Solid Gold”) and the year after he produced only two short stories. Of course, these three years also saw the publication of no fewer than eight novels, so it’s pretty obvious where his focus lay. All but three of these short stories were mainstream, non-crime-related tales and most were published in the big slicks of the day. Nineteen sixty-one was one of the last big years of short fiction for the author, eclipsed only by 1964 when he produced eleven, and he never really focused on this form in any serious manner again.

As of this writing, Robert McGinnis is still alive, and at age 90 still working, God bless him. (He provided the illustration for only one additional JDM magazine work, a 1967 condensation of the novel The Last One Left that was published in Argosy.) As far as I can tell, he and MacDonald never met or corresponded with each other, and I have no information on what MacDonald may have thought of his work. However, in 1981 when JDM bibliographer Walter Shine was compiling a list of cover artists of the numerous different editions of MacDonald’s paperbacks, he wrote to McGinnis to ask for his help in identifying some that were unattributed. McGinnis responded “with alacrity” and ended his written response with the following request: “Thank John for me for the opportunity he created for an illustrator.”

“Kitten on a Trampoline” appeared only once and has never been anthologized or republished.

"Hit and Run" (1961)

"Hit and Run" is the only short story title John D MacDonald ever used twice. Back in 1952 it was the title of his first contribution to Good Housekeeping, a better-than-average police drama about a state trooper's long, lonely search for the killer of a pedestrian that was really a subliminal means to impress and woo the victim's widow. When the title graced JDM's entry in the September 16, 1961 issue of The Saturday Evening Post it used the same basic plot but jettisoned the love angle and focused on the dogged determination of the cop hunting the killer. It's probably a better-written tale and equally satisfying, yet on a completely different level. Gone is the attempt to create a character with a troubled past, replaced by one of MacDonald's quintessential ultimate professionals, whose long hours on the job are tolerated and understood by a supportive spouse.

Both tales center around a cop who is investigating a pedestrian fatality, but unlike Trooper Del Carney in the original story, Walter Post is a specialist, a special investigator for the Traffic Division of an unnamed Utica-sized city in an unnamed state. The case he's working on is the hit-and-run death of Mary Berris, a wife and young mother of two and which took place in front of her home on Harding Place.

"It was an old street of big elms and frame houses. It ran north and south. Residents in the new suburban areas south of the city used Harding Avenue in preference to Wright Boulevard when they drove to the center of the city. Harding Avenue had been resurfaced a year ago. There were few traffic lights. The people who lived on Harding Avenue had complained about fast traffic before Mary Berris was killed."

It was a rainy morning and Mrs. Berris was crossing the street, apparently to see a neighbor. The road was momentarily free of traffic when she attempted to cross. A car traveling at a high rate of speed heading into the city came up on her as she entered the road, startling her. She made an attempt to return to the curb, an action Post believes caused the driver to brake and skid, hitting her with a glancing blow with the car's right-front fender, throwing her twenty feet into the air before landing back down onto the curb. The driver corrected the skid and accelerated, leaving the scene to only one living witness, a thirteen-year-old girl.

Mary Berris lived for nearly seventy hours with "serious brain injuries, ugly contusions and abrasions, and a fractured hip." She developed a significant bruise that confirmed the way she had been hit and the doctors removed from her shattered headlamp glass that was later narrowed down to only three possible makes of automobiles. The young witness was able to remember that the car was "pale" and that the last two numbers on the license plate were "fat numbers... like sixes and eights and nines." Mary Berris never regained consciousness before dying.

During the first two weeks of the investigation Post enjoyed the full manpower of the police force in checking all the repair shops in the city, and the local press cooperated in keeping the public on the lookout for the death car.

"But as in so many other instances, the car seemed to disappear without a trace. Walter Post was finally left alone to continue the investigation, in addition to his other duties."

Like Del Carney in the previous story, the investigation becomes a one-man affair, a personal challenge where the work is done in the off hours and during rare spare time. Del did it for the beautiful widow Linda Fairliss and Post's motivations are somewhat similar but not specifically voiced:

"This time he devoted more time to it than he had planned. It seemed more personal. This was not a case of one walking drunk lurching into the night path of a driving drunk. This was a case of a young, pretty housewife -- very pretty, according to the picture of her he had seen -- mortally injured on a rainy Tuesday by somebody who had been in a hurry, somebody too callous to stop and clever enough to hide... the broken husband... the small, puzzled kids... the child witness [who said], 'It made a terrible noise...' This was his work, and he knew the cost of it and realized his own emotional involvement made him better at what he did... He knew there would be no joy in solving the case because he would find at the end of his search not some monster, some symbol of evil, but merely another victim, a trembling human animal."

He narrows down the section of the city he believes the car came from, then compiles a "discouragingly long list of all medium and low-priced sedans" with the license plates ending in "fat numbers." It was twenty-eight days after Mary Berris died when he hit pay dirt. At the home of Mr. Wade Adams he knocked on the door and spoke with Mrs. Adams. Pretending to be doing a survey for the "automotive industry," Post asks about the cars the family owns. The family has two and the second, smaller car matches the description the young witness gave. Mrs. Adams, a "pleasant and confident" woman, volunteers that it's hard to keep a car in the garage, what with a working husband and a newly-licensed teenager, not to mention a daughter who is nearly ready to drive. When Post asks where the smaller car is that day, she tells him that her husband, a VP with an insurance company, drove it to work.

Relying on a strong hunch, Post heads for the insurance company headquarters. His training tells him that Mrs. Adams couldn't have been responsible -- "He had seen too many of the guilty ones react. They had been living in terror. When questioned, they broke quickly and completely" -- but the car, the family, the location of the home all added up to something he could feel in his gut. When he arrives at Adams' workplace, the first thing he does is locate the car in question. To the naked eye the fender looks fine, but upon closer inspection Post spies the telltale signs of new bodywork: slight paint smears on the chrome, a too-new look to the headlight lens, a hammered-out feel to the undercoating.

It was time to head in and pay a visit to Wade Adams.

Only that's not then end of the story, it's only about halfway done. The tale takes an abrupt turn with a moving scene in a high school, and in the end Walter Post has found his driver, but it is someone only the most astute reader would ever even think of. Yet if one takes the time to go back and re-read the story, the clues are there, hiding in plain sight. MacDonald has said that with a mystery story, he as a reader always wanted some chance, no matter how small, of "beating the hero to the punch line." He wrote his own mysteries that way and it was one of the reasons he disliked what he called the British "puzzle mysteries," where the means to solve a mystery are so esoteric that they are beyond the knowledge of 99% of the readership. And while acknowledging that there were many readers who were perfectly happy to be dazzled by the incredible genius of a protagonist -- see Sherlock Holmes, who MacDonald wasn't fond of -- he was not one of them and he didn't write his own stories that way. What he did like was spelled out in a 1980 piece in Clues: A Journal of Detection, where he wrote, "I am more strongly attracted by the why-done-it and the how-done-it than by the who-done-it, by a gritty realism than by formal gardens... "

Unlike the first "Hit and Run," the 1961 story bearing that title has been anthologized since its original publication in several collections, many of which are readily available from used book sources. These include A Treasury of Modern Mysteries (1973) edited by Marie R. Reno, Rogues' Gallery: A Variety of Mystery Stories (1969) edited by Walter Gibson, and 52 Miles to Terror (1966) edited by Ruth C. and G. Robert Carlsen. There are at least four other early collections and perhaps a few more modern ones I don't know about.

"Funny Man" ("Afternoon of the Hero")

"Welcome to televisionland -- where famous faces wear other faces, where girls are pussycats, bikinis are business suits, and kings run scared."

"Funny Man" appeared in the May 21, 1966 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, only two months before it showed up as the final entry in John D MacDonald's first short story anthology, End of the Tiger and Other Stories. Included under a different title -- "Afternoon of the Hero" -- it seems to be one of the two stories in that collection that were written especially for the book. "Triangle" appeared two months after the book hit the stands in July -- in the men's magazine Cavalier -- while "Funny Man" was published before Tiger, yet the magazine's table of contents makes reference to the collection's forthcoming publication. The story's change of title shouldn't seem odd, as probably over half of MacDonald's published stories had their titles changed by magazine editors over the years, yet for it to happen so late in his career is a bit curious, especially since it seemed timed to help promote the book. "Funny Man" was one of the last short stories JDM would ever write and it reflects the writer's maturity and craftsmanship as an author of short fiction, as well as representing a turn toward more adult themes and subject matter.

It's a character study with little resembling an actual plot, focusing on a popular television comedian named King Noonan. We join him as he awakens in his "half-acre of bed" in the "shadowy expanse of bedroom," part of his large estate located we-know-not-where. He's hung over and it's already late morning, but as he crawls to the bathroom he clowns to himself, a comedian always "on," audience or no. As the curtains open and the blinding light floods the bedroom, he covers his eyes and pleads in a mock-Balkan accent, "No, Andreyev, not the torture of the lights, comrade, I beg you." He pushes a few buttons to bring up music, enters his vast six-head shower, then rings for his personal assistant Robbie. Clearly King Noonan is someone who has made it.

Or not... MacDonald uses the device of a recent magazine article within the story to instantly give not only King's background, but to also establish the character's motivation and hint at how the story will be resolved. He reads it to himself after he has dried off from his shower:

"It would be too trite to say that King Noonan, one of the most fabulously successful comics of our time, is underneath his exuberant exterior, a lonely and complex fellow. And perhaps it is no longer fashionable to look for the basic motivating force. But, if backed into a corner, I would say that the King's engine is fear. He is not lonely -- not with that permanent retinue. Nor is he complex in the ordinary meaning of the word.

"King Noonan runs scared, and thus he runs very hard indeed. He is afraid of the effects of the abuse he inflicts on his big, durable body. He is terrified of death. He is afraid to think of the probable reasons for the failures of his marriages, the failures in friendship. Failure is indeed his demon. Failure professionally, personally, socially, emotionally. And so he drives himself in the pursuit of a perfection which will make failure unthinkable, and we are the ones who gain thereby.

"One day one of the demons will catch him. But, in the meantime, we are privileged to watch the chase and enjoy the by-product of his fear: that great comic art -- sometimes vulgar, sometimes as sensitive and delicate as great theater, always competent. Fear is the engine, and laughter is the long, bright road."
 

Noonan makes no comment, interior or otherwise, on the article but tosses the magazine across the room, then goes to pick it up and put it back on a desk. He looks outside and sees some of his "permanent retinue" out by the pool, along with a couple of bikini-clad young women he doesn't recognize. His assistant Robbie enters and they immediately begin going over his schedule for the day. Robbie seems a bit reserved, but that's only because King fired him several times the night before, acts the King can not remember. He also doesn't recall calling up the author of that magazine article and giving him holy hell. It's clear from the brief actions and descriptions we are given that King Noonan is not a nice fellow. He a brash, demanding and ruthless performer who treats his staff like serfs and masks his insecurities with gallons of alcohol. He gets a rubdown from his private masseuse, then meets with his television agent to discuss the next season of his television show.

After a few telephone calls he heads down to the pool and clowns around on the diving board. The new young women there are actresses brought over to audition for a bit in his Chicago show, the "stewardess act," and after he's done in the pool he meets with them individually. The first is Adele Bowen, "a blonde, young, wise-eyed, with a lot of facial business, conversational extravagance, the choppy gestures of the industry." Still poolside, he forces her into a lightning round of expressions, reactions and emotions, all done quickly, professionally and without a moment's hesitation. Then he asks her about her competition, the other young lady there, Priscilla Wendell. Adele speaks honestly when she says that, despite Priscilla's knockout of a figure, she cannot think of her as a pro. King tells her to wait around while he auditions Priscilla, only this audition is going to take place indoors, in his bedroom study. Priscilla tries to play it cool, "but her eyes swiveled too much, and her hands were damp, chilly and trembling..." He tosses her a script from his desk, already knowing that Adele will play the part...

"Funny Man" takes place in a world of talented yet insecure people, where friends and business associates are addressed as "baby," "sweetie" or "rat fink," and where verbal abuse is the expected norm. MacDonald visited this world at least once before, in his 1954 novel All These Condemned, where the character Judy Jonah is a similar yet far more sympathetic comic. She's the star of her own television series and a celebrity who has already reached the apogee of her fame. Judy lives with the same fears and insecurities, yet she is all-too ready to leave it behind for a more traditional role. In "Funny Man" King Donavan is riding high, loving every minute of power and glory, yet afraid to look down for even a second. When he eventually does, even for the briefest of moments, he turns it into a joke and reverts to form, back into his own comfort zone. The story is somewhat atypical for MacDonald up to that point in his career, yet it prefigures the kinds of more mature tales he would begin penning for Playboy the following year, those adult short stories that would make up his second anthology S*E*V*E*N.

"Sing a Song of Terror"

"To stay alive he had to outwit a madman."

That's pretty much the plot for "Sing a Song of Terror," John D MacDonald's second of five stories published in The Saturday Evening Post. Appearing in the September 9, 1961 issue, it runs 6,250 words and is a nifty and suspenseful little set-piece that MacDonald liked so much he used it again several years later. This late-period work of short fiction shows the confident author in complete control of his ability to plot narrative, create suspense and draw a finely-detailed and completely believable character.

Dillon Pritchard is driving alone at night down a secondary road somewhere in South Carolina. He's a vice president and sales manager of the Atlantic Industrial Pump Corporation and he is doing what he does for most of the year: heading to yet another branch office to meet with yet more salesmen. Married and the father of two daughters, his family sees him only sporadically throughout the year and that fact is wearing on his wife Martha. But Dil is a dedicated and hardworking man and he always promises that "next year" he will be home more often. Somehow, it never happens.

He's doing sixty-five and has been on the road for six straight hours when suddenly something appears in front of the car.

"At that moment the running girl burst into the white cone of headlights, running pale and fleet from right to left, so sickeningly close to the front of the car that his instinctive swerve to the right came after he had missed her flying heels. His mind retained an image of her like a still picture, her motion frozen, with wild fair hair, face half-turned in an endless grimace of terror."

The "big swift rental sedan" begins to swerve and Dil ends up in a ditch, the engine dead. He silently curses the girl for the time she will cause him to miss, and he recalls that the last town he passed was fifteen minutes behind him. Wet and muddy, he attempts to climb out of the ditch and onto the road, the moonless night illuminated by the beams of the car's headlights.

"When he was a few feet in front of his headlights, he heard a sound as if two flat, dry boards had been slapped together. There was a simultaneous tug at the sleeve of his lightweight jacket, a clang behind him and the unmistakable treble howl of a ricochet."

"Without an instant of hesitation," Dil whirls and scrambles up the opposite bank of the ditch and into the cover of some nearby trees. All his old instincts and "unthinking patterns" instantly return to him from his days in North Africa, Sicily and up the Italian boot, when Pfc. Dillon Pritchard served his one hundred and sixty-one days of combat duty during World War II. But there is a difference between the "stringy, tireless, battle-tough" Army private and the "executive weight and softness" of the man today. He gradually acquires his night vision and does some thinking. The running girl was obviously fleeing from someone intent on killing her, and this person was now planning the same fate for Dillon. Remaining hidden he calls out "Why did you shoot at me?" only to be answered by three quickly spaced shots, all in his general vicinity. A truck drives by, the driver sees the wrecked car in the ditch and stops. He is quickly shot down as he approaches the car on foot. When another car screams by, Dil uses the opportunity to take off into the vast field behind him.

"Suddenly there was a thin, quavering cry that prickled the flesh on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. 'Gone kill yah!' the man yelled into the whispery, fragrant night. 'Gone kill yah!'"

He eventually stumbles upon the girl, a terrified teenager who moans, "He's kilt about ever' body." She points to her nearby house and weeps, "They're all kilt in there. There's no telephone along here. There's my pa's gun. I'm scared to go in there." She tells Dil that the gunman is Bert Tallis, a loner who lives off in a shack and who has not been "real right in the head since they sent him back from Korea long ago." When Dil is finally able to sneak into the girl's house to get her father's gun, he discovers that Bert has been a busy, busy man...

If this plot sounds familiar -- and it certainly should for anyone reading a blog on John D MacDonald -- it's because the author reused it nine years later as the first chapter of the twelfth Travis McGee novel The Long Lavender Look. The location is different and Dil, unlike Travis, is alone, but the other elements are the same: the car speeding through a hot southern summer night, the girl running in front of the car and nearly getting clipped, the swerving car eventually ending up in a roadside ditch full of water, and a killer on the loose, looking for the girl and now after the occupant of the wrecked car. There have been other precursors of scenes, events and methods that were later used in Travis McGee stories -- the appearance of the Muñequita in The Last One Left, the story of the cruise ship to Nassau from "A Touch of Miss Mint," later used in Darker Than Amber, the melting of wax over hidden valuables in The Deep Blue Good-By, found in at least two early stories -- but this is the only instance I'm aware of where the author used nearly an entire short story as the basis for a chapter in a novel. As anyone who has read Lavender can attest, it's a great way to begin a novel and it works equally well as a self-contained story.

"Sing a Song of Terror" -- originally titled "To Stay Alive" by MacDonald -- has yet to be anthologized.