"Dead on the Pin"

Writers mostly had mixed feelings about the passing of the pulps. Many felt that those days were best forgotten. They had outgrown the pulps, gone on to more mature work. The pulps seemed like a youthful indiscretion. Some writers could only remember the hard work, the endless days hunched over the Remington, pounding words onto paper until the clanging of the metal keys was ringing in the ears. But there had been good work, too, and the camaraderie, and the creative challenge. Mixed feelings. - - Lee Server, from Danger is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. (1993)

John D MacDonald was never at a loss for words when it came to reminiscing about his days writing for the pulps. He spoke often of the crushing workload, the the poor payscale and the sheer volume of product he needed to come up with in order for him to be able to support his family. He fondly recalled the opportunity to learn a craft he had decided to embark upon relatively late in life, and the generous and helpful guidance pulp magazine editors like Alden Norton, Babette Rosmond, Mike Tilden and Harry Widmer offered him. He even shared his recollections within the pages of fanzines such as Bronze Shadows, remembering the people, retelling amusing stories and conveying a general sense of nostalgia of an era gone forever.

But when it came to actually reading, remembering or bringing to light the short stories and novellas he wrote for these magazine, it was a different matter. The earliest clamor from his fanbase for an anthology of these tales was met with foot dragging on the author’s part. He agreed to a science fiction collection, because, hey, it was just science fiction, a bias he clearly revealed in his then-notorious afterword to Other Times, Other Worlds. But when it came to the mystery stories, it took a lot more convincing. When in 1978 Francis J Nevins, Jr wrote a paper on “MacDonald’s Early Pulp Stories,” extolling the quality of many of these forgotten works, MacDonald’s response was not enthusiastic.

As to a collection of pulp stories, I really do not know if they would work well enough at this late date. I have the feeling they are just a bit too glib and easy to be worth keeping. I would not gather them up myself for presentation with any feeling of pride and/or satisfaction. And I would hope that by the time they are posthumous, they will be far too passe for collecting.

But Nevins, along with über-anthologist Martin H Greenberg, persisted and offered to do the “gathering up for presentation” since MacDonald was clearly unwilling to do so. JDM’s bibliographer non pareil Walter Shine, along with his wife Jean, helped supply copies of the stories and chimed in on suggestions as to which stories should be included. The list was reduced to 30, they were typed up in manuscript form and submitted to McDonald for his ultimate decision. Instead of being repulsed, JDM wrote that he was “astonished” that only three of them “did not merit republication.” (Talk about a backhanded compliment!) He agreed to move forward with the project, which eventually encompassed two volumes, published two years apart, titled The Good Old Stuff (1982) and More Good Old Stuff (1984).

MacDonald’s reticence is clear in his introduction to the first volume, where he actually writes that he considered himself to be “taking [an] occupational risk in having the stories published.” How such an otherwise intelligent man could have so misjudged his appeal to his fans is a mystery that will never be solved. But MacDonald’s reluctance was one thing, something that was eventually dealt with, but he reacted in another, more damaging way, in that he felt the need to “update” the stories. All of the stories suffered this editorial meddling, some more than others. Several of the stories' time-frames were switched from the early postwar period to the early 1980’s. Many small references were changed, usually from then-famous personages to more contemporary ones. Prices were increased, as were income figures, and mediums of entertainment were switched, mainly from radio to television. But, he assured the reader, nothing had been done to the prose itself outside of these contemporizing adjustments.

I was horribly tempted to make other changes, to edit patches of florid prose, substitute the right words for the almost right words, but that would have been cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was.

The readers of The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff had to take MacDonald at his word on this assertion, as only a few readers had access to the original pulp magazines in which these stories appeared. I certainly didn’t own any of these hard-to-find and expensive-to-purchase periodicals, but I began looking and began collecting and it was years before I obtained even a small portion of the original material. Thinking that I didn’t need to re-read the stories where the updating hadn’t been obvious, it wasn’t until I actually did so when preparing to write a piece on “The Tin Suitcase” (titled “She Cannot Die” in the anthology) in 2016 that I realized that the author was way more than just a little misleading in his “hands off” claim. When I got to writing about “You Remember Jeanie” I discovered wholesale changes that completely altered the feel and atmosphere of the original story.

“Dead on the Pin” is as nifty a piece of pulp writing as you’re likely to come across, a short, matter-of-fact tale that is wonderfully told and stylishly composed. It is a work of fiction that any mystery writer would have been proud to call their own in its original form. Yet MacDonald took his red pencil to it and made many, many changes. The overall effect is not as bad as it was with “The Tin Suitcase” or (especially) “You Remember Jeannie,” but the changes are nearly all unnecessary and are detrimental to the overall quality of the telling of the tale. The original appeared in the Summer 1950 issue of Mystery Book Magazine and runs an economic 2,500 words.

Joe Desmon is a veteran of the war (World War II, in the original) who has, since his return stateside, managed the Wonderland Bowling Alleys, “on the turnpike three miles out of town.” Because of a dearth of bowling alleys in town, he works long hours, hoping for the day he can own his own establishment and order someone else to do all of the things he does now.

So it seemed like almost too much to expect when one day about three months ago this little guy showed up and asked if I could hire him to do jobs around the place. He was edging close to fifty with the top of his head up to about my chin. He was the sort of little man you would push out of your way, but not if you looked close. There were hard, blunt bones in his face and a pair of pale blue expressionless eyes and a tight slit for a mouth. He had a thick look through the shoulders, and his arms hung almost down to his knees, with big square wrists.

His name was Johnson and he willingly accepts the pittance Joe is able to pay him for brushing the alleys, mopping the floor, emptying the ashtrays and cleaning the restrooms. His only request is that he be allowed to bowl a few games when there was no other work to do. Joe looks at Johnson’s thumb and recognizes the “swollen, bent-back look of a man who has done a lot of it.” It was late, and Joe suggests they play a quick one.

Initially he’s not impressed with Johnson’s game. By the third frame Joe has scored "a fat 69" to Johnson's 27. Joe begins to get bored. "He had a nice hook but it was coming in too quickly." On the fourth frame, however, Johnson finds the pocket "for one of the prettiest strikes I've ever seen." He does the same in for the next four frames. He handily beats Joe.

Johnson does his work quietly and gets along with the rest of the staff. He is eventually allowed to give lessons, earning a cut of the fees. "Having him around eased the pressure on me, but he wasn't a fellow you could chum up to." When Joe suggests that he join one of the leagues that play at Wonderland, he is quickly dissuaded. "Just say that I don't like to bowl with people. Maybe I blow up under pressure. Put it any way you want, but don't go talking up my game. Understand?"

In the story's most satisfying and best written scene, a trio of young punks come into the alley one night and start clowning around, rolling a ball down an lane Johnson is sweeping. He avoids the ball but has the mop swept out of his hands. "Did I scare you, pop?" asks one of the boys. Johnson walks up and throws the boy into the racks. The others respond but are handily taken care of. They leave the place, minus their swagger and a few teeth.

Then, early one morning, Joe wakes up in his room to find a stranger sitting beside his bed. "Good morning, Joe," he said…”

“Dead on the Pin” is a model of economy and one of the best examples of the real quality one could find in the pulp magazines of the post war period. There’s not a wasted word, and the prose is impeccable, with perfectly structured sentences that have a unique rhythm, ringing in the mind’s ear like a kind of Runyonesque poetry. This is MacDonald at his best, or at least his best at this period of his career, so it’s a real shame that he felt the need to alter the story when it was reprinted in The Good Old Stuff. As I’ve done in previous pieces on GOS reprints, I’ll present a section of the story, first as it was originally written and then as it was altered by MacDonald. It’s the passage describing the first game between Joe and Johnson.

With my double and spare in the first three frames and his two splits and a miss, I felt pretty patronizing. When I made a strike in the fourth to make my fill on the third frame a fat 69 to his 27, I began to get bored. He had a nice hook but it was coming in too quickly.

In the fourth frame he found the pocket for one of the prettiest strikes I’ve ever seen. He did it again in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth.

He paused then and said, “Mr. Desmon, do you fire people you can’t beat?”

“What do you think I am?” I demanded.

“Just asking, ki— Mr. Desmon.”

He then plunked across the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth strike in a row, snowing me under 237 to 202.

I said, “You’ve got eight in a row. Keep pitching.”

He grinned for the first time. The grin came and went so fast that I almost missed it. He got the ninth, then blew the tenth and left the ball on the rack.

I kept an eye on him. He did his work and got along with the rest of the help. He got along by staying out of everybody’s way. After the first month I began to throw lessons his way, giving him a cut. He had perfect style, setting the ball down so smoothly that it wouldn’t dent a custard, and he was quick to pick out flaws and point them out. Having him around eased the pressure on me, but he wasn’t fellow you could chum up to.

Here’s the rewrite:

With my double and spare in the first three frames and his two splits and a miss, I felt pretty arrogant. When I got my strike in the fourth, it made my fill on the third frame a fat 69 to his 27. I started to get bored, but in his fourth frame, his ball ducked into the pocket for one of the prettiest cleanest strikes I have ever seen. His ball had been curving in too fast before that, giving him those thin Brooklyn hits.

And so while I got spare, strike, spare, he got three more of those boomers, where all the pins jumped into the pit in unison.

He looked at me and said, “Mr. Desmon, do you fire people you can’t beat?”

“What do you think I am? No. And I’m not beat yet.”

“Just asking, ki—Mr. Desmon.”

So he kept chucking them in there, and in the end he had put eight strikes in a row altogether, and he wiped me out, 235 to 202.

So I said, “Okay. And I think you could keep right on wiping me out. You’re not fired.”
He grinned for the first time. It came and went so quickly I almost missed it. He wanted to know if he could practice a little when his work was done. I told him to be my guest.

I kept an eye on him. He did his work and got along well enough with the rest of my people. He got along by staying out of the way. After the first month I began to throw some lessons his way, giving him a cut. He had perfect style, laying the ball down so smoothly it wouldn’t have dented the top of a custard pie. He could pick up the flaws and point them out and demonstrate how to cure them. He eased the pressure on me, but I never did really get to know the man.

With these changes one gets the impression that MacDonald is talking down to an idiot kid, someone incapable of understanding the nuances of the language or picking up on the obvious slang of the day. Why bother changing the sentence “Having him around eased the pressure on me, but he wasn’t fellow you could chum up to.” to “He eased the pressure on me, but I never did really get to know the man.”? What does it add to the understanding of the character or to what is happening? It certainly robs the original of its rough meter. Or how about “In the fourth frame he found the pocket for one of the prettiest strikes I’ve ever seen. He did it again in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth.” replaced with “in his fourth frame, his ball ducked into the pocket for one of the prettiest cleanest strikes I have ever seen. His ball had been curving in too fast before that, giving him those thin Brooklyn hits.And so while I got spare, strike, spare, he got three more of those boomers, where all the pins jumped into the pit in unison.” This isn’t “updating,” it’s explaining.

And did he really need to add “pie” after the word “custard”?

A few weeks ago I posted a transcription of an essay MacDonald wrote for Writers’ Digest titled “The Editor Over My Shoulder.” In discussing the role of editor the author asks the reader to imagine the writer as a tailor, designing and sewing suits of clothing in the middle of a carnival. The editor is a passerby, offering numerous bits of unsolicited advice, all analogous to what passes between a real writer and a real editor. With MacDonald acting the role of real editor with the Good Old Stuff anthologies, here are some of the pointless suggestions that apply to his own meddling:

“The pattern of that material looks awfully loud to me."

“Nobody wears that style any more.”

“It’s going to end up looking like any other cheap, readymade suit.”

“They’ll never let you into the best clubs wearing that, will they?"

“All the lapels are wider this year.”

And so on…

I would like to extend a special thank you to Trap of Solid Gold reader Keith Hann, who, after reading my pieces on “The Tin Suitcase” and “You Remember Jeanie,” decided to quantify the changes MacDonald made to the text of all of the Good Old Stuff stories. He transcribed both the originals (where available… he doesn’t have them all) and the Good Old Stuff re-do’s into separate Word documents, then used the software’s Compare function to produce a document highlighting in red all of the changes made to the original. When he sent me the comparison of “Dead on the Pin” my eyes bugged out at the amount of crimson on the page. MacDonald made over 75 changes -- some minor, many not-so-minor -- to the original text. Seventy-five changes to a 2,500-word short story. He really must have feared that the publication of The Good Old Stuff was an “occupational risk.”

"The Tin Suitcase" ("She Cannot Die")

The subject of John D MacDonald’s practice of updating many of the stories in his two pulp collections -- The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff -- has been discussed often here on this blog when writing about the various stories that made up those two anthologies. But to belabor the point, I’m going to rehash the issue as a preface to this particular posting as context for anyone not familiar with the issue.

In 1981 John D MacDonald, at the time one of the bestselling novelists in the United States and famous worldwide for his series character Travis McGee, was contacted by Francis M Nevins and Martin H Greenberg about putting together an anthology of MacDonald’s early short stories that had appeared in the pulp magazines of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Nevins was (and is) a mystery writer, a biographer and expert on the works of Cornell Woolrich, and was a student of MacDonald’s pulp work, having written several articles on the subject in the pages of the early JDM Bibliophile. The late Martin H Greenberg was, without doubt, the greatest anthologist and academic expert on popular American fiction of the last century. According to his Wikipedia entry, he edited or co-edited 1,298 unique anthologies in his lifetime.

MacDonald was, in his own words, “not transfixed with delight” about the idea, worrying about the “overall quality of such a collection.” He agreed to have the two men present him their ideas for such a collection and he put them in touch with his own bibliographic experts, Walter and Jean Shine, who had both a working relationship with the author and a practical knowledge of the holdings of the John D MacDonald Collection housed at the University of Florida. Together the four editors collected and read all of MacDonald’s pulp work (excluding science fiction, which had already been anthologized by Greenberg a few years earlier in Other Times, Other Worlds) and winnowed the pile to thirty stories. MacDonald wanted to review them in manuscript form, so all of the stories had to be typed up from the original tearsheets. He took the stories to his summer home on Piseco Lake in upstate New York and chose 27 of the thirty stories for the now two separate anthologies.

MacDonald wrote that he was astonished that these stories merited republication, but only up to a point. He felt it would “jar” the reader to come across a passage wherein a character paid twenty cents for a quart of milk, or put a mere nickel into a pay phone, so he updated certain aspects of the stories, but only in the ones that didn’t depend on the specific time and place in postwar America. Still, the wholesale changes that he did make were far more jarring to most readers than any reference to a penny candy or to a now-forgotten celebrity. In “A Time for Dying," which was titled “Tune Into Station Homicide” when originally published in New Detective in 1948 (MacDonald also restored all of his original titles to the stories, as many were changed by pulp editors, but at least the original titles were provided in the table of contents), a radio show is updated to a television show, even though someone as savvy as MacDonald had to know that the production of a live radio show in 1948 bore almost no resemblance to a television show in the early 1980’s. In “Trap for a Tigress” (“Noose for a Tigress”) he changed a recent war from Korea to Vietnam but retained the setting of a cross country train ride (updated to Amtrak) even though almost no one of any means was traveling this way in 1981. And in “The Scarred Hand” (“I Accuse Myself”) he updated references from radio to television but retained the threat of lobotomy, even though that particularly horrific medical procedure had long since fallen out of favor by the early eighties.

MacDonald must have been surprised at the animosity from many readers over the changes he made in many of these stories. After all, he had been updating his novels for years. When Fawcett got the reprint rights to his books in the early sixties he went through all of them in order to excise period references. In All These Condemned he changed a reference to Marilyn Monroe from present to past tense. He frequently changed references to then-popular sports celebrities to more current ones. In Contrary Pleasure a reference to then up-and-coming female tennis star Maureen (“Little Mo”) Connelly was changed to Billie Jean King. And let’s not forget Area of Suspicion, which underwent so many changes that its first Fawcett edition featured the blurb on the cover “Specially revised by the author”. So he probably thought nothing of the updating of the pulp stories and was likely frustrated with the ones he couldn’t change.

These changes have a different effect than the ones in the novels, however. As Nevins observed in his Introduction to the first collection, “... MacDonald portrayed more vividly and knowledgeably than any other crime writer the readjustment of American society in general and American business in particular from a war footing to a consumer-oriented peacetime economy, and the redemption and return to the real world of all sorts of war-haunted people on the verge of self-ruination by drink and detachment… perhaps enough remains of the ambiance of the late forties and early fifties to demonstrate how the best crime fiction of any period bears witness to later generations about the way we lived then.” That “perhaps” was overly optimistic, and some of the stories are quite nearly ruined by MacDonald’s changes.

Take “The Tin Suitcase”. Originally published in the May-June 1948 issue of Doc Savage (under house name Peter Reed), all references to the protagonist’s war experiences were removed, completely altering the mood and motivations of the original story. In addition, there were literally dozens of other changes made that had nothing to do with the period, disproving MacDonald’s assertion that he did so only in cases that “might confuse the reader”. I know this from having read the two versions of the story side by side, an exercise I hadn’t tried before, and it got to the point where I decided to document all of the changes made to the original. Two pages of a notebook were filled before I gave up. If “The Tin Suitcase” is any indication, the changes MacDonald made to these stories were far more sweeping than I originally believed.

If your first exposure to the story came from the pages of The Good Old Stuff -- mine was -- then the plot of the story you read goes like this. Protagonist Jud Brock is employed as a low-level worker at the Brasher Scrap Metal Company in the city of Louisavale. As he is working out in the yard one day, a secretary comes out of the office with the intention of handing Jud his daily work orders. Stella Galloway is also a friend of Jud’s and they have gone out together on several dates. Suddenly a shot rings out and Stella falls to the ground, a bullet in her back. She is alive, but barely, and is taken to the hospital to hopefully recover. When the cops arrive we learn that Jud himself used to be a cop, but was thrown off the force after a breakdown following the murder of his young wife. He has taken the job at Brasher Scrap Metal as a means of recovery, and had mended well by the time the story begins, but it doesn’t stop the cops from needling him mercilessly when they discover him on the scene. Jud’s cop instincts take over and he gets the owner of the business to agree to let him investigate what happened, and even the cops grudgingly agree, as long as he stays out of their way. It is determined that the shot must have been fired by someone at the business, as no one from the outside could have gained entry to the yard when the attempted murder took place. MacDonald begins rolling out the various suspects, including  the business owner, a normally mild mannered chap who fires Jud after the shooting for a relatively minor act of insubordination, and a scrap purchaser who had worked with Stella at a previous employer. There’s also the possibility that the bullet had been meant for Jud himself, and that Stella had gotten in the way.

After the cops see what a changed man Jud is they become more agreeable to him using his considerable investigative skills to help them solve the mystery, and they begin gathering, then eliminating all of the possible suspects until there are only a few, and some things simply don’t add up. All the while, Stella lies in a hospital bed fighting for her life…

The most interesting part of “The Tin Suitcase” -- the best written and most engaging part -- is a lengthy account of how Jud lost himself and hit bottom. Even The Good Old Stuff version of it retains some of its original power:

They all knew the story of Jud Brock. He had put in six years with the Louisavale police, going on the force directly from college. He had advanced rapidly, had been transferred to Homicide, where he worked under Captain Davis. He was looked on as one of the bright young men in the department. Since Louisavale was a city of two hundred thousand, he could plan on merit promotions to the point where he would make a good living and have a responsible position. He was popular and he liked his work and he was good at it.

During his sixth year on the force he became engaged to Caree Ames. She was a slender, enchanting blonde, the only daughter of the city manager.

They were engaged for just two months before they were married. She seemed pleasantly but curiously anxious to be married, as though it would be some sort of haven for her.

Five weeks after the wedding and three weeks after they had returned from their Bermuda honeymoon, he came home to their new suburban house to find that a man with whom Caree had been intimate before he had ever met her had broken into the house, shot her twice in the skull, and then shot himself. She was dead. The man was still breathing. She had died almost within reach of the telephone. The man lived in a coma for five days before he too died.

He could not get that kitchen scene out of his mind, the two of them  on the vinyl pattern he and Caree had selected, both face down in the pattern of a grotesque T, the still-breathing  man lying across her dead legs.

Later he found out that quite a few people had known of her affair with the man who killed her. Her father had been anxious for her to be married. The man was demonstrably unstable, potentially dangerous.

For two months after the funeral he had continued his duties, walking through each day like a mechanical man. He had found he could not forget that scene; it was inextricably mixed somehow with some of the bloodier episodes which had happened during his years of police duty before he had met Caree.

During those two months, all the reality of the world around him took place dimly behind the shining screen of memory, and at last he had discovered that alcohol would dim the memories. At first he had been suspended for a month and had managed to get himself in shape to go back to duty at the end of the month. The second suspension was for six months.

After a long period of forgetfulness, he had walked into headquarters, his broken shoes flapping on his feet, his gray face dirty and whiskered, and found out that his suspension had been  up for over three weeks and that he had been suspended indefinitely.

Compare that with the original passage as it appeared in 1948:

They all knew the story of Jud Brock. Before the war he had put in two years on the Louisavale police force, going on the force directly from college. He had advanced rapidly, had been transferred to Homicide where he worked under Captain Davis. He was looked on as one of the bright young men in the department. Since Louisavale was a city of two hundred thousand, he could plan on eventually getting a very good position on the force. He was popular and fond of his job. He was engaged to Caree Ames, the sleek blonde daughter of the City Treasurer.

He was drafted in the fall of '40, went into the Infantry, earned a field commission in the Marshalls, was wounded in Saipan, placed on limited duty and transferred as a Captain to Air Corps Intelligence. In a Burma flight with the 10th Air Force, they were forced down and he spent two years as a Jap prisoner working in the rice fields near Rangoon. He was liberated in early '45, after a stay in the General Hospital in Calcutta, was shipped home and discharged at Dix with the rank of Major.

He married the blonde Caree Ames. She had acted odd about his return, and had seemed very anxious to be married. Three weeks later, during his first week back on the force, the man with whom she had been intimate during Brock's years overseas had broken into Brock's new house, had shot Caree and then himself. Caree had died immediately and the man had lived in a coma for five days before he too died. It was only then that Brock learned what had existed between the two of them while he had been away.

Brock had come home and found the two of them on the kitchen floor, the man still breathing, lying across Caree's dead legs.

For two months he had continued his duties, walking through each day like a mechanical man. He found that he could not forget the way the two of them had looked on the kitchen floor and it was inextricably mixed with memories of some of the unbearable days of captivity, and somehow through it all he recaptured that moment of intense surprise when the Jap mortar shell had dropped into the soft sand beside the shallow hole he had scooped and had tossed him a dozen feet in the air...

During those two months all the reality of the world around him took place dimly behind the shining screen of memory and at last he had discovered that alcohol would dim the memories. At first he had been suspended for a month and had managed to get himself in shape to go back to duty at the end of the month. The second suspension was for six months.

After a long period of forgetfulness, he had walked into headquarters, his broken shoes flapping on his feet, his grey face dirty and whiskered and had found out that his suspension had been up for over three weeks and that he had been suspended indefinitely.

Notice how when MacDonald changes one thing it forces him to  make other changes he wouldn’t have made otherwise simply for the sake of “updating”. By eliminating the war years he eliminates the affair Jud’s fiance had while he was overseas, requiring the author to have Caree now be killed by a former boyfriend. One could argue that it was Caree’s unfaithfulness more than her murder that caused Jud’s breakdown, a subtle bit of business that adds a deeper layer to the reader’s understand of the character, now missing altogether from the altered piece. The horrible memories of the POW camp are replaced by MacDonald’s odd addition of the dead couple “on the vinyl pattern he and Caree had selected, both face down in the pattern of a grotesque T, the still-breathing  man lying across her dead legs.” It’s clear in the original that Jud’s war memories are a large part of his breakdown, especially with the added bit about the mortar shell. It’s as if MacDonald had removed a vital support in a building, only to have to shore up the weakness elsewhere by other means, thereby weakening and changing the finished product entirely.

Some of the other changes MacDonald made throughout the entire story are in keeping with his intention of updating: increasing the cost of something from forty-four dollars to eighty-eight; changing a reference from boxer Primo Carnera to Superman; changing the phrase “gay as a lark” to “happy as a lark”; and, in the one war reference he couldn’t eliminate, changing “war surplus” to “Viet Nam surplus”.

Others make no sense and belie the author’s assertion in the Foreword that he “was horribly tempted to make other changes, to edit patches of florid prose, substitute the right words for the almost right words,” but didn’t because “that would have been cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was.” How else to explain some of the following alterations?

Original:     Two men with a detector were left back…

Update:    Two men with a metal detector were left back…

Original:    "I'm sorry. I'll pay you the hundred and twenty-one bucks. I'm sorry."

Update:    “I’m sorry. I’ll pay back that money. I’ve got it in savings. I’m sorry.”

Original:    "... the gal who turned him down getting palsy with... well, with a common laborer."

Update:    “... the woman who turned him down getting chummy with… well, with unskilled labor.”   

Original:    "She's had two more plasma transfusions, but she's losing moisture so fast that 

                 she'll be due for another one soon."

Update:    “She’s had two more plasma transfusions, but she’s losing fluids so fast that she’ll be due  for another one soon.”

Original:     “... a few times we went to the coke bar at the Pentagon…she was a nice neat girl and  very quiet.”

Update:    “... a few times we went to the cola bar at the Pentagon… she was very nice in a quiet way, very tidy and polite.”

I could go on with lots more, but you get the point. Cleaning things up? Yes, probably. Trying to make it seem he was a better writer at the time than he was? You be the judge.

So now I’m left with the gnawing feeling that I should go back and reread all of the Good Old Stuff stories in their original pulp form, where I have that opportunity. Unfortunately I don’t own a lot of the stories in the original magazines, so I’ll have to guess. But what I once thought was minor tinkering, where I could read an updated story and make substitutions in my mind with what was written for what had probably been written, no longer seems the case. Certainly not with “The Tin Suitcase.” The only real improvement I can see in MacDonald’s update is his restoration of the original title, “She Cannot Die.” Unfortunately, the better title is attached to the inferior story.

(A special thanks to Trap of Solid Gold reader Eric Gimlin for supplying me with a copy of the original story.)

"Night Watch" ("Check Out at Dawn")

When John D MacDonald’s later day pulp fiction collection The Good Old Stuff was published in 1982 it was met with generally good reviews in the press of the day. Most of them were hedging, warning the reader that although this was very good MacDonald, it was early MacDonald and not up to the literary standard he had achieved by the time the collection was published. And although we JDM fanatics of the era had been clamoring for just such a collection for years and would have purchased it even with universally bad reviews, the more occasional readers of the author were more circumspect. Book critic Patricia Holt, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle enunciated a fairly typical opinion when she wrote:

Most of these stories really are dated… [but] reading the young MacDonald is a fascinating experience… There is MacDonald’s absolute clarity of detail, his obeisance to realism and his attempt to convey what this life represents… The problem (or perhaps the joy) is that in this early work we get both the best and the worst of MacDonald’s first glimmerings of style… If you know MacDonald’s stuff and have an interest in how it all came to be, this “Old Stuff” is pretty good.

“Pretty good” seemed like an insult to me at the time, but as I have aged and read much more of MacDonald’s early output, I think this a fair assessment, at least for someone who doesn’t live and breath the author’s work, no matter when it was produced. But there are exceptions, and if we take the notion that The Good Old Stuff represents the best of the lot, then surely there must be a few transcendent works included with the otherwise excellent stories. I would argue that one such example is the 1950 short story published as “Night Watch" in the May issue of Detective Tales, and included in the anthology under the author’s original title “Check Out at Dawn.” It is a relatively simple tale that is told with such a masterful confidence in the creation of character and atmosphere that it reads more like something that could have appeared in one of the mystery digests in the later part of that decade. The “clarity of detail,” and “obeisance to realism” that Holt wrote about in her review are the strengths of this story, not to mention MacDonald’s conveyance of “what this life represents.” He creates utterly believable characters in an utterly believable situation with utterly believable motivations and flaws, and he does so with writing that is both atmospheric and direct, creating his small little world with both economy and style. And he does it all in 3,000 words.

Note how the opening paragraphs set both the scene and the mood, descriptive yet almost impressionistic:

At five minutes of five the disc jockey topped off his program with a recording by the All Stars. Barney Bigard’s clarinet was sweet and strong, to the counterpoint noodling of Earl “Fatha” Hines. He kept the car radio tuned so low that the rhythm was a whisper, the tune like a memory in the mind. As the piece ended he turned off the radio, cupped his hands around the lighter from the dashboard as he lit another cigarette.

When it was finished he eased the car door open and stood out in the crisp, pre-dawn air, the wet spring-smell of the woods. Four months of waiting and watching. The tiredness was deep in him, and the boredom. A leaden-muscled, sag-nerved tiredness.

Behind the house three hundred feet away, the roosters screamed brawsy defiance at distant hen runs, and lonesome through the dregs of night came the far-off sigh and pant of a train.

The man stepping out of the car is Barry Raymes, an FBI agent (although this is only implied) with two years experience in the bureau. He is on the night shift of a round-the-clock surveillance of a small house in the Georgia woods with a single occupant, a young woman named Marra Allen. She is the girlfriend of one Craik Lopat, a criminal fugitive wanted for robbing a payroll and murdering a guard, and Lopat is expected to return to the house and claim his girl. These are backwoods people and their contrast with Raymes is established beautifully by that introductory paragraph featuring him listening to jazz. But after four months of observing and interacting with Marra (she knows the agents are out in the woods) he begins fighting something he instinctively knows to be wrong.

In the night watch you could think of taking this Marra Allen, with her ignorance and her superstitions and her unlettered tongue, and becoming Pygmalion, because there was no denying that her slip loveliness was more than just an attribute of youth. The bone structure was good, and she would take beauty to her grave… In the long night, you could think of her breathing softly in sleep on her bed and think of how her warm breath would come from lips parted just a bit, probably, and the golden hair spread over the pillow…

The routine has been the same since the surveillance began: relieving another agent at midnight and spending the long night behind a screen of trees. Then, at dawn, once the kitchen light comes on, Raymes knocks on the door and Marra lets him in so he can search the small house to make sure Lopat isn’t hiding there. Then, she cooks a breakfast and Raymes joins her before being relieved by the day-shift agent. After every morning meal Raymes puts a fifty-cent piece under his plate, an unspoken payment that Marra doesn’t remove until after he has left.

She seems amused by the four-month watch and the daily search of the house, but is generous and hospitable to Raymes and willingly serves and eats with him. She calls him “mister” and Raymes calls her Marra. But they share a table and nothing else, although wisps of Raymes’ growing fondness are revealed obliquely.

They ate in silence, and as on every morning, she lowered her face almost to the plate for each forkful. In another woman it would have amused and partially revolted him. In Marra it seemed oddly pathetic. It seemed as though a girl of breeding sat there, intent, for some strange reason, on playing this part that had been given her. And in the depths of her gray-blue eyes he saw the deadness, a nothingness, as though a part of her had been dead -- for four months.

But Raymes, on this particular morning, takes things a step too far and reacts in a way that breaks the unspoken truce between them. And on his next visit everything changes…

The ending of “Night Watch” is a surprise, almost right out of left field, but when one rereads the story it is obvious that the pattern is established in nearly every seemingly random description of the characters. That MacDonald did not broadcast this climax earlier in the tale is a testimony to his growing skills and his mastery of understatement and economy. It reminds me a lot of his later short story masterpiece of atmosphere and character, “In a Small Motel,” and recalls to mind Geoffrey O’Brien’s observation of the author’s singular talents:

MacDonald proved himself from the start the kind of storyteller who makes other aesthetic considerations irrelevant. To read him is to hear a spoken voice -- pausing, digressing, joking, all the while drawing you into the yarn. It’s not that the story is so remarkable; you've heard something like it before, you may even recognize chunks of it from another of his [stories], and after a while, it will blend into all the others. The anecdote may be utterly banal. It’s the voice that grabs you, the sure rhythms with which it measures out the story.

Reading “Night Watch” also recalls to mind another contemporary review of The Good Old Stuff, by Henry Kisor in the Chicago Sun-Times, where he wrote, “[These stories] show us not only that [MacDonald] has come a long way, but also that his enormous talent was always there.”

The May 1950 issue of Detective Tales not only contained “Night Watch” but two other MacDonald stories, one of which was “Breathe No More, My Lovely,” the introduction of the author’s third series character, Park Faulkner. That story also made the cut for inclusion in The Good Old Stuff, making that particular issue especially collectable. “Night Watch” appeared under one of MacDonald’s house names, Scott O’Hara, while the third, “The Long, Red Night” was “written” by John Lane.

One final note on “Night Watch.” As most JDM readers know, MacDonald updated the settings for several of the stories collected in both of The Good Old Stuff anthologies, ripping the time and place out of postwar America and placing it into the 1980s. This unfortunate practice, which all but ruined a couple of the stories, is mercifully absent from “Night Watch,” even retaining that opening paragraph with the protagonist listening to Earl “Fatha” Hines on his car radio. (On AM, since I doubt if there would have been many radio stations in rural Georgia playing jazz in 1950.) And even though MacDonald asserted that he made changes in all of the stories in The Good Old Stuff, I’ll be darned if I can locate a single one.

The Good Old Stuff is readily available as a used book, and the eBook version is currently “in print.”

"Murder in Mind"

John D MacDonald once claimed that he had never written about a place that he had not once lived in or visited. Science fiction stories notwithstanding, this would -- if true -- cover a lot of ground. The careful student of the author’s work and biography can see through a lot of the fictional towns, cities and rural locals as matching places where he grew up, lived, fought and vacationed. There are the rust belt cities of the northeast that are featured in many of his early novels, all stand-ins for Utica, Rochester, Fayetteville, Albany or Syracuse, New York. There’s Mexico, of The Damned, The Empty Trap and “Border Town Girl.” And of course there’s Florida, with several thinly disguised versions of Sarasota (April Evil) and Clearwater (The Brass Cupcake).

But if one remembers that the MacDonald family owned lakeside property in a very remote section of the Adirondacks along the shores of Piseco Lake, another vast set of locales is added to the mix. Purchased in 1944 by Dorothy MacDonald, using funds husband John won in a poker game while stationed in Ceylon during the war, an actual residence wasn’t built on the property until 1951. From that year on the MacDonald family spent nearly every summer in their Piseco Lake “camp,” and every winter in Florida.

So its no surprise that remote lake house locales figure heavily in the JDM grabbag of settings. I’ve written about this before. They are featured importantly in novels such as Cancel All Our Vows, All These Condemned, You Live Once and Judge Me Not. Lake houses are a place of intrigue in “Betrayed,” murder scenes in “I Always Get the Cuties,” and redemption in “Forever Yours.” From a literary point of view lakes can be idyllically peaceful and reaffirming or menacingly isolated from civilization. In 1948 MacDonald wrote a beautifully conceived set piece that took place entirely in a lakefront setting, one nearly identical to the MacDonald Piesco camp. It was called “Murder in Mind” and it was published in the Winter issue of Mystery Book magazine, a pulp with a somewhat interesting history.

“Murder in Mind” can be classified as one of MacDonald’s “howdunits,” although it also works as a rare JDM whodunit. Howdunits  typically involve a crime committed in a way that either defies explanation or seems cut-and-dried, but is in fact an elaborately designed masterplan created to make discovery impossible. Impossible, that is, until one of MacDonald’s typically bright and driven protagonists comes along and solves the puzzle.

The relatively brief short story is told in first person by a police detective the reader knows only as Joe. Joe is a county cop and works out of the village of Hoffwalker (a stand-in for Speculator, the county seat of Hamilton County, which contains Piseco Lake.) His senior partner is detective Burt Stanleyson, who has just been called by a man vacationing at a camp on Lake Odega, telling him that his wife has just been killed by a stray shot from a hunter coming from the opposite shore of the lake.

It is late autumn and trees around the lake are “stripped naked.” The camps that dot the shore of Lake Odega are mostly vacant now and the only activity that brings people up here at this time of the year is hunting. That is what brought Ralph Bennison and his now-dead wife Alice to the lake, to rent the Tyler camp for a week and to try out Ralph’s new Remington. When the cops and Ralph arrive they find Alice lying where she fell, dead on her back in the middle of a trail.

There were streaks of drying mud on the right sleeve of her pale yellow sweater. There was more mud on her freckled right arm. Death had flattened her body to the ground. Her tweed skirt was pushed up halfway between knee and hip. Her heels rested in the mud and her brown sandals toed in… The chill wind off the lake hurried the dry brown leaves across the trail. A leaf had stuck to her hair over the right temple, where the hair was sticky with new blood.

As Ralph Bennison sits on a log with his face in his hands, Burt Stanleyson stands over the body while Joe observes the two men. He notices their similarities -- both are big men -- but contrasts Burt’s wrinkled gray suit and manner of confidence in a wooded setting to Ralph’s department store wool hunting shirt and his matching breeches and high shoes. “He had the city label on him, all the way from his big shiny fingernails to the bright new leather of his knife sheath.”

When Ralph asks bitterly why the two cops aren't on the other side of the lake looking for the hunter who fired the shot, Burt says nothing and leans down to look closely at the bullet wound. He also lowers the skirt to cover Alice's knees. Ralph continues, explaining in detail how everything happened.

"Look here," he said. "Alice and I were walking down the trail with the lake at our right. She was ahead of me. The trail is muddy and uneven, and I was watching my feet, like I told you. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her fall on her face. I jumped toward her, thinking that she had tripped. As I jumped, I heard a distant noise like a shot. I rolled her over and held her head in my arms. I saw she was dead, and realized that she had been killed by a stray shot. Then I came after you. Why aren't you after those people across the lake?"

Burt patiently explains that it is late in the day and that trying to round up two dozen hunters at that hour would be nearly impossible. Besides, nobody would admit to firing across the lake. Then there’s the time and expense of doing ballistics testing on all of their rifles. Burt thinks that the best thing to do is to play up the publicity and hope that “some man’s conscience will punish him.”

He asks Ralph about the reason for their trip to Lake Odega and asks, since they were up here to hunt, if they brought two guns. No, answers Ralph, only the one. Why then, wonders Burt, does Alice have a bruise under her eye, as if a gun stock had hit her there on recoil. Ralph tells Burt that she did some target practice behind the cabin and pulls back her sweater to show the cops a purple bruise on her right shoulder. By this time Joe is completely confused as to Burt’s demeanor and line of questioning. If the senior cop was inferring that Ralph may have shot his own wife, that would seem impossible, as the wound indicated that the shot came from a great distance. Burt then asks some personal questions.

Burt: “What’s your business?”

Ralph: “Well… nothing at the moment. I used to be in the investment business.”

Burt: “Married a gal with money, hey?”

Ralph: “Look here, Stanleyson, I resent this questioning. What’s that got to do with finding out which one of the hunters across the lake shot her?”

Burt: “Then she did have money?”

Ralph: “Suppose she did? We both had money.”

Burt sighs and looks up at a tree, then walks down to the shore of the lake and stares “moodily at the water.”

OK, this is not really much of a whodunit. With the fact that there are only three living characters in the story, and two of them are policemen, the title alone (remarkably it’s MacDonald’s original) should give things away. And beware of a MacDonald character who is unemployed and living off his wife’s money! I suppose the question was never intended to be about guilt but about the way things were planned. The story ends with two full pages of Burt and Joe chatting over a couple of glasses of bourbon, with Joe asking questions and Burt explaining things. Everything makes perfect sense when coming out of the mouth of the older cop, and when one goes back to reread the story, obvious clues are found in abundance.

MacDonald wrote lots of stories just like “Murder in Mind,” tales of involved crimes and their unwinding. They include “The Bullets Lied,” “I Always Get the Cuties,” “There Hangs Death!,” “Black Cat in the Snow,” and best of all, “The Homesick Buick.” “Black Cat in the Snow” even uses a nearly identical setting as “Murder in Mind.” Many of the solutions involve ballistics, not surprising coming from the son of an executive of an arms manufacturer. And many others use the framing device of the junior, observing narrator and the wiser senior partner who acts in a placid, confusing manner, only to be proven the wise man in the end. Not uniquely MacDonald, to be sure, but one he loved to use and reuse. “Murder in Mind” is one of the earliest example of all of these literary “types.”

The story was anthologized in MacDonald’s first mystery pulp collection, The Good Old Stuff, which is available used nearly anywhere one looks for used books, and is now for sale as an eBook. Thankfully there was nothing to “update” in this particular story, so one can read it and picture an upstate wilderness in 1948, not 1982.