JDM on Rat Hunting

At Point Crisp [JDM's home on Siesta Key] we found we had some very unpleasant-looking rats living in the tops of the cabbage palms. Geoff [one of his cats] grabbed one and brought it in and let it go in the hall, and it ran into [son] Johnny's room and up the draperies and sat on top of the drapery fixture, squeaking. Geoff looked at it for a moment, then went out to see what might be in his dish. He seemed to be saying, "There's a rat for you. Have fun."

We grabbed him and shoved him into Johnny's room and closed the door. He began an immediate complaint to be let out. He had no further interest in the rat. Nor could we interest [other cat] Roger in it.

Johnny and I armed ourselves with a broom and the dubious pellet gun and went into the bedroom. We looked and looked and we could not find the rat. Yet there was no way it could have escaped. So we began a rat hunt. When you hunt a rat you do not stick your hand behind books and feel around for him. Finally we had looked everywhere except the bed, and when we began to take that apart, a rat-sized hump began to move back and forth erratically under the blanket. I raised the broom to give it a mighty swat, but Johnny yelled no and asked me what I thought his bed would be like if I hit it. So we prodded it out, and it ran over to a chair beside the white plaster wall. It paused for a moment near a leg chair, and I shot it, expecting no result at all. The pellet hit it in the throat. It sprayed an astonishing amount of blood halfway up the wall, ran in circles spraying in random, then collapsed and died in a little red puddle.
 

-- from The House Guests (1965)

Chapter Eleven

JDM on The Mind of a Writer

Intensive writing over a long period of time is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe without sounding somewhat precious about it. You feel disenfranchised by reality, a half step behind and off to one side of your own skin, your view oblique, with most possibilities of genuine reaction cooled by being filtered through the habitual appraisal mechanics of your trade. You find an off-hours world crammed with the enticing stimulations of good books, good art, good conversation, but that creative effort necessary to these appreciations is too much akin to the process that uses you up in your work, and so, too often, aware of sloth and guilt, you surrender to the undemanding unvarying flatulence of network television, to magazine fare styled for the lip readers, to social contact with people so curiously predictable in their attitudes you know their lines before they say them.

-- from The House Guests (1965)

Chapter Twelve

JDM on Tomcats

It's going to be a while before I get around to discussing John D MacDonald's five non-fiction works. Since I'm taking the books in the order they were published, and since MacDonald's first non-fiction book wasn't published until 1965, it means I have over 30 books to go through before getting to The House Guests. That's a shame, because there is some great writing in these volumes, some vivid recollections, sharp observations and many humorous passages.The five non-fiction books are:

The House Guests (1964)

No Deadly Drug (1968)

Nothing Can Go Wrong (1981)

A Friendship: The letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald - 1967-1974 (1986)

Reading for Survival (1987)

In addition there are hundreds of columns, articles, remembrances and letters out there, many with something worth talking about and bringing to light once again. I'm going to go ahead, perhaps once a week, and do a posting featuring something from some of the non-fiction stuff I have lying around. The books are the richest source -- The House Guests alone contains dozens of quotable passages -- but there's lots of other stuff that I will dig out which may be of some interest to somebody. And since I am getting to the last third of my short story collection, it will keep me posting for a little while longer.

Here is MacDonald's great little paragraph on the subject of tomcats, taken from the beginning of Chapter Three of The House Guests. I remember reading this back in 1975 and thinking "this could be a description of a JDM villain." Re-reading it today reveals a beautifully descriptive bit of writing that still holds up:

"The tomcat is a damned nuisance. He pursues his specialty to the almost complete exclusion of other interests. His is a nocturnal existence so rigorous, he spends his days flaked out, stirring once in a while to go see if anybody has put anything in his dish. He shreds upholstery in the serious business of keeping his claws and shoulder muscles in fighting trim. He develops a voice which will shatter glassware at twenty paces. His eerie howls of challenge disturb the neighborhood. He roams far and is sometimes gone for days in a row, returning sated, surly, smug and bearing the wounds of love and combat. He stakes out his territory with extraordinarily pungent little driblets of urine, and will occasionally stake out the house where he lives, either just for the hell of it or because another animal has been there during his absence. Owning a tomcat is curiously akin to working in some menial capacity for one of the notorious Lotharios of show business."