John D MacDonald vs. Doc Savage

Babette Rosmond

Bronze Shadows was a fanzine published in the 1960's dedicated to the study of two of the biggest hero pulps ever published, Doc Savage and The Shadow. Created by the late Fred Cook, the 'zine ran from 1965 to 1968 for a total of 15 issues. Like most fanzines of the era, it was homemade, printed on a mimeograph machine and stapled together. It was only one of several such journals centered on Doc Savage and The Shadow.

But it was, apparently, the only one to ever end up in the hands of John D MacDonald, whose early pulp stories filled the pages of these two magazines from 1946 to 1948 when he was just starting out as a writer. This was thanks to the then-editor of both of these pulps, Babette Rosemond, who I have discussed many times in this blog. Here is a paragraph I wrote in 2018 on the subject:

"When writing about the early fiction of John D MacDonald, that period when he was just starting out and learning his craft, enough words cannot be said about the support and guiding influence of pulp editor Babette Rosmond. At that time she was an editor at Street and Smith, managing two of the publisher’s premier titles, Doc Savage and The Shadow magazines, crediting herself as B. Rosmond, probably because of her gender. Like every other editor MacDonald submitted stories to in the that six-month time frame between October 1945 and March 1946 when he couldn’t sell anything to save his life, she was among those who rejected many of his submissions, but her rejections were personal and encouraging. In one rejection letter she wrote, “I, too, am an admirer of atmosphere, but too much atmosphere and too unconvincing a plot make [your story] a weak yarn... However, I am extremely fond of the way you write -- so dry your tears and send me something else very soon." She was an early coach, mentor and -- eventually -- friend who not only helped him in getting a literary agent but counseled him to expand the scope of his stories’ locales.

"To put it in real perspective, of the 57 stories MacDonald had published in his first two years as a writer, 30 of them, or 53%, were purchased by Babette Rosmond."

The second issue of Bronze Shadows was published in December 1965 and one of its contributors made the suggestion to Cook to send a copy to MacDonald. The author responded with the following letter, recalling his time with the magazines, his relationship with Rosmond, and his early pulp career. Below is a transcription of that letter, prefaced and postscripted by Cook:

(John Keasler, whose article appears elsewhere in this issue, suggested that John D. MacDonald might be interested in receiving a copy of Bronze Shadows. Mr. MacDonald, the highly successful author of countless best-selling mystery novels, was sent a copy of #2, and reciprocated by sending along the following article, telling of his early pulp days and his brief association with Doc Savage.

I feel flattered and deeply appreciate the time and effort of such a busy and talented person as Mr. MacDonald, to pause and reminisce with a total stranger.)

JOHN D. MacDONALD vs. DOC SAVAGE
by JOHN D. MacDONALD

I'm glad John Keasler suggested that I receive a copy of Bronze Shadows. I had no idea that a Doc Savage cult was in existence,

You have my permission to use this small and peripheral memory of my association with Doc Savage, though it might give some of the more devoted members of the Savage Coterie an aching desire to take a trip to Sarasota to hit me in the mouth.

I began writing full time when I was sprung after six years in the Army in late 1945. My first attempt at fiction, written while overseas, was sold to Whit Burnett of the old Story Magazine, Consequently my initial efforts - some 800,000 words of unsaleable crud, all in short story form, all completed within a 4 month period, were full of dying blind musicians, incredibly sensitive and oblique dialogue, and everything from imitation Maugham to imitation Tolstoi. I was keeping at least 30 stories in the mails at all times, papered one small room with form rejection slips lost 25 pounds, worked up to 100 hours a week, and acquired a considerable reputation around Utica, New York as a prime case of readjustment problems. No one could understand why I did not put my perfectly good master's degree from Harvard Business to work.

Eight hundred thousand words accomplished in 4 months is in essence a crash training program. It is equivalent to 10 full length novels. No writer of reasonably serious intent can write a single page without learning something of value and improving his control. I sold my second story to Mike Tilden - God rest him - of Popular Publications for Dime Detective in February of 1946. The third one I sold was to one of the Standard Magazines pulps, and the fourth - which was the beginning of a lasting and valued association - was bought by Babette Rosmond of Street and Smith, then editing Doc Savage and The Shadow.

I would estimate that Babs bought forty to fifty short stories of varying lengths from me in 1946, 1947 and a portion of 1948. The first eight or ten were all based on a very personal knowledge of India, Burma, China and Malaysia. She wrote bright, charming letters, but in my mind's eye she was a meaty type in her middle years with a shamelessly evident mustache. From my letters she knew I was a Colonel and she later confessed she had me pictured as middleaged, erect, slight British accent, bulging blue eyes, guardsman's mustache and carrying the inevitable swagger stick.

After those eight or ten based upon the same locale, she wrote to me, saying, “Isn't it about time you took off your pith helmet?”

At about that time I went down to New York to meet the people I'd been dealing with - Mike Tilden, Harry Widmer, Alden Norton. And Babette, who turned out to be a slight, dark, spry gal in her twenties, a very wry and pyrotechnic conversationalist.

Also about that time I was beginning to realize that there were two basic approaches to pulp writing, hence but two kinds of writers. One was the dogged chap who reads and analyzes pulp stories, makes little charts and graphs, develops a clumsy and reasonably direct style and he [...] the stories like a carpenter making different sizes of tables for a furniture mart. The other breed was the group I belonged to, the ones who have no interest in formula or pattern or specific editorial requirements, who want to tell stories, and who, once they accept the minor limitations of the pulp market, take their tongues out of their cheeks and do the best job they can do, and worry later about who might want to buy it. The ratio of work to sales is not as efficient as in the case of the table-makers, because it is a variety of risk-taking, but you can generate considerably more pride in your work, and have more satisfaction in doing it. Working in this manner made the boundary line in those days between pulp and slick very vague. A novelette I thought had its best chance at Cosmopolitan ended up in Dime Detective, A novel I thought might hit Argosy, then a pulp, was diverted to Colliers by my agent, and purchased as a serial.

Insofar as reading pulp magazines, I discovered I could read only those stories by people who were working in the same manner I was. In 1947, Babs Rosmond asked me, very cautiously and tentatively, if I would like to try a Doc Savage. I have the vague memory that Lester Dent was ill at that time. I do remember that I certainly had need of the money. I told her that I would let her know. I got out some of the back copies of the magazine which I had saved because they had contained stories by me. (Some contained two or three by me, the additional ones under the house names Babs and I had devised: Scott O'Hara, Peter Reed, John Farrell.) For the first time I read two Doc Savages all the way through. I did some fretting and some pacing and finally phoned Babs at her office at Street and Smith and said that I could not fault them on the basis of action, or moving the people around, but I just could not bring myself to imitate a prose style so wooden, so clumsy, so labored, so inadvertently hilarious that it was like a parody of the style you might term Early Comic Book. I said that Doc seemed to me to be a truly great comic figure, and I was sorry to let her down, but....

She said she hadn't really believed that I would do it, and that in fact she would have been a little disappointed if I had given it a try, disappointed in me.

I hope the Bronze Cult will understand that I put the knock on the Hero on the basis that any cult has the historical responsibility of assembling the con as well as the pro. I had my chance. I've done some mighty wooden writing under my own name, but at least I never did it on purpose,

(Oboy! How about that? I was introduced to Mr. MacDonald in the pages of Doc Savage and The Shadow along with Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories. Personally, I have enjoyed his novels more than his short stories because he uses the broader framework to thoroughly develop ideas and characters. I particularly enjoyed The Girl, The Gold Watch And Everything better than most because of the deft development of a most fascinating idea, the complete stoppage of time.

I'm sure we all forgive Mr. MacDonald for this one foolish mistake in his then beginning career.... but then - who are we to argue with success?

Thank you, John, for sharing your start with us. At least for me, you've become a real person in place of just a name on a cover.)

As one might imagine, MacDonald’s comments on the literary quality of the Doc Savage stories elicited several responses, which were printed in issues #4 and 5. JDM again received copies and responded to the objections, which you can read here: Pulp Perspective Plus.

Bronze Shadows issue courtesy of the John D. MacDonald Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

"Fatal Accident"

John D MacDonald wrote 14 short stories for the pulp magazine The Shadow, beginning in 1946 and ending in 1948. The Shadow was the first “hero pulp,” a fiction magazine built around a single character who was the star of a 60,000 to 70,000-word novel that led off each installment of the pulp. The balance of the issue was given over to unrelated shorter stories by pulp authors of the day, and it was here where MacDonald’s stories appeared. (Every Shadow novel was the work of author Walter Gibson, who wrote under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant.) During the postwar period the magazine was one of two Street and Smith publications edited by Babette Rosmond -- the other being Doc Savage -- whose interest in and mentoring of MacDonald during his early days as a writer was instrumental in getting his career off the ground. Between both Rosmond-edited magazines MacDonald’s work appeared 34 times.

Begun in 1931 in response to the popularity of a character on a Street and Smith radio show -- this “character” simply read stories straight out of one of Street and Smith’s pulps -- The Shadow began as a quarterly, switched to a monthly, then to a bi-weekly, then back to monthly, then bi-monthly and finally back to quarterly. The magazine’s name also underwent periodic changes, with titles including The Shadow, The Shadow Detective Monthly, The Shadow Magazine and Shadow Mystery. The magazine also changed sizes, starting out as a standard pulp, then switching to a digest in 1943, then back to a pulp for its final four issues.

MacDonald’s output for the magazine consists mainly of short stories, but he supplied at least two novellas: the 40,000-word “Never Marry Murder” and “You’ve Got to Be Cold,” which the author thought good enough to include in his second pulp anthology, More Good Old Stuff, appearing under his original title “The Night is Over.” Five of those 14 entries were published under a pseudonym, either Peter Reed or Robert Henry, both house names Street and Smith used frequently (and not only for MacDonald.)

“Fatal Accident” was MacDonald’s last story for The Shadow, and it appeared in the Fall 1948 issue, one of those final four pulp-sized entries. It’s a nifty little 3,700-word howdunit that is brought up a level by the author’s development of the protagonist, a Philadelphia police detective suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after investigating the aftermath of a multiple murder. And although that really has nothing to do with the plot itself -- how a guy murdered his wife by crashing their car while he was driving -- it gives the story an extra layer of substance that makes the rather creaky dénouement easier to swallow.

Told in the first person by the detective referred to only as “Tom,” we open with him on the road, a few miles north of Williamsport, following a Buick in a dense Pennsylvania fog. Tom is heading to a remote cabin in the woods, owned by a fellow officer, for a two-week vacation forced on him by his boss. His plan to "sleep twenty hours a day and eat like a horse" is really a means of recovery, of getting away from ten years of police work that has hardened him, although “you never manage to get tough enough to keep things from getting to you, from getting down through your thickened hide and stinging the few soft parts you had left.” The most recent case was the cause of the forced sabbatical.

I thought of the Miller kid and of the hammer murders in the shanty down by the river, and the gray, bloated look of the bodies that came out of the river. Violence. Diseases of the mind. Shifty eyes. A thousand lineups. You walk into small, dingy sitting rooms and you can smell the blood in the air and hear a woman moaning. It's a dirty business. Thankless.

The Buick in front of him slows, then runs off the shoulder and smashes into a mammoth tree, making a sound “like a million bricks falling into a greenhouse.” Tom quickly pulls over and runs to the overturned car, finding a man on the driver’s side and a woman in the front passenger seat. He quickly sees that the woman’s head is smashed in and that she is beyond help, but the man is alive and moaning, his mouth full of blood. He pulls them both out and hails a passing car, instructing the driver to phone for the police. When they arrive the man and woman are taken away in an ambulance and Tom is asked to come down to the barracks to make a formal statement. Once the patrolmen discover that he is a fellow cop, they have a drink and trade stories, and Tom, too tired to continue on, spends the night on a cot in the barracks.

Before morning one of the troopers returns from the hospital to write his report. The driver claimed that he fell asleep at the wheel, and when he was told about his wife's death "he cried like a baby." The couple were from Upper Darby, on their way to visit a relative in Elmira. Oh, and in his injured state the driver insisted that his car not be touched.

Tom says his farewells and resumes his trip to the cabin, where he spends two weeks eating, resting, chopping firewood and getting a tan. On his way home he stops by the barracks to ask about the accident. He learns that the driver stayed in the hospital for two days and then headed back home with his wife's body. The car was a total loss and was sold for scrap. "The thing was open and shut. A simple, tragic accident."

And yet, somehow, it bothered me. Curiosity is an occupational disease with a cop, I suppose. I still couldn't figure out why [he] had slowed down before hitting the tree, why the jar of going off the pavement hadn't awakened him, and why he was so insistent on the car not being touched.

And so begins the investigation, on his own time, into the background of of the driver. It’s a situation very familiar readers of MacDonald’s short fiction (we few, we happy few…), recalling similar JDM policemen in stories such as “Hit and Run,” “The Rabbit Gets a Gun,” and “I Always Get the Cuties.”

“Fatal Accident” has never been anthologized but it was reprinted, once, in the April 1966 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In the American edition of the magazine the story was retitled “Never Quite Tough Enough,” but in their British and Australian editions they retained the original title. I can’t quite fathom why this was done -- “Fatal Accident” was MacDonald’s original title, so it wasn’t as if he dictated the change -- but it certainly leads to confusion. It’s cases like these that probably led to the oft-repeated claim that JDM published over 500 short stories during his career, when the actual number is closer to 400.

I don’t own a copy of the original issue of The Shadow -- one can purchase it on eBay for a mere $149 -- but I do have the EQMM reprint. I can only assume that it was a straight reprint and not a doctored “improvement” like those perpetrated on the Good Old Stuff stories.

"Backlash"

"Backlash" is an early John D MacDonald short story, one of two that appeared in the same February 1947 issue of The Shadow, or Shadow Mystery as it was called that year. As was the custom of the time, only one of these stories would be published with the author's real name, so one of them had to be credited to a house name. "Backlash" was the one and it was attributed to "Peter Reed." One assumes that the author had some say in which of his stories would have his name on it, just as one assumes that said author would select the story he was most proud of. And although that didn't always seem to be the case (see my piece on "Five-Star Fugitive") it certainly was for this particular issue. The other story -- "The Anonymous Letter" -- while not a classic, is an interesting and well-done tale whose power lies in its ability to evoke time and place. "Backlash," on the other hand, is a simple yarn about cosmic justice that contains both an ironic, twist ending and a highly unusual would-be murder weapon. In fact, said weapon is so obviously a plot device that the reader immediately begins wondering about it once it is introduced.

Like its companion piece, "Backlash" contains a character who spent World War II in the China-Burma-India Theater and that military stint has a direct bearing on the plot at hand. Both tales also feature men who are damaged romantically, undone by a woman upon whom they attempt to take revenge, and both feature unusual methods used to carry out their plans.

Ralph Boder has returned from the war in one piece and with a newfound romantic hope. Before the war both he and a man named Karl Downer vied for affection of a slim, dark-haired beauty named Bess Carney. When Karl returned home blind from a combat wound, Ralph naturally figured he now had the full attention of beautiful Bess. But that was not to be. MacDonald gives no other background other than a brief, quoted letter from Bess to Ralph that does all the explaining that needs to be done:

"Dear Ralph, I don't know what you mean. I never made promises to you. Because Karl was blinded is no reason why I don't marry him. The doctor says maybe someday he will see again. Please don't bother me any more. I love Karl. Don't try to see me. Your letter frightened me. Bess."
 

Whenever Ralph thinks of Bess with Karl he hears a roaring noise in his ears, and he has resolved that if he can't have her, no one will have her.

Ralph returned home with more than just a hope for Bess' attentions. He was also packing an unusual weapon, a homemade crossbow, purchased from "a Naga man from the hills" for a mere three rupees. He has spent weeks practicing with it, while living in a transient camp, and can now sink an arrow accurately from sixty yards. He plans to use his newfound archery skills and has one arrow named for Bess and another for Karl.

As the story opens, Ralph is checking into a hotel, making a scene as he insists on a room on the north side and only one or two stories up. His request granted, he enters his room, locks the door and quickly checks out the scene from the window. Across the street is a sidewalk cafe, easily within shooting distance. He then heads for a local drugstore and make an improbable call to Bess, disguising his voice with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece (does that trick even work?) He pretends to be an old army buddy of Karl's named Fowler and sets up a lunch date for the following day at the cafe next to the hotel. When Bess makes sure that the caller knows of Karl's handicap, "Fowler" responds, "Sure. I won't make any breaks. I hear he is going to be okay though." He tells her to select a table outside.

Ralph spends a fitful night of light sleep, his bravery supplemented by a bottle of cheap rye. The following day both Bess and Karl arrive at the cafe on schedule. Ralph takes a last slug of the rye and aims the crossbow at Bess, first at the V of her dress, then at her throat.

"There could be no mistake -- or Karl would have her. No one must have her."
 

Outside of its characteristic economy of words and the past life of its protagonist, there is little in "Backlash" to reveal it as the work of John D MacDonald. In early 1947 he had only been writing for a little over a year and had been published for barely that long. Much of his very early work reveals a writer searching for a style, one who was perhaps unsure of which particular field of fiction he would specialize in. The basic plot of "Backlash" could have come out of any comic book or cheap pulp magazine of the period and it was undoubtedly an effort MacDonald would have wanted to forget. Still, it's a brief diversion with some interesting techniques and a few telltale attempts at what would become his characteristic "voice". At 1,200 words, "Backlash" would have earned the author around $24 -- assuming the standard 2-cents per word that most pulp writers were paid-- which seems about right for this tale. Something he probably knocked off one morning before lunch.

The story has never been anthologized.

"The Anonymous Letter"

Of all the different types of pulp fiction magazines published in the first half of the last century, perhaps the most unique was a kind known as the "character pulp" or "hero pulp." Rather than focusing on a specific genre, such as mystery, western or science fiction, these magazines were built around a reoccurring character who was featured in each and every issue. The first of these pulps was The Shadow, known variously throughout the years as The Shadow: A Detective Magazine, The Shadow Mystery Magazine, or as simply Shadow Mystery. First published in April 1931 as an offshoot of the popular dramatic radio series, it set the template for these kinds of publications. Each issue began with a novel-length tale featuring the eponymous hero, followed by anywhere from four to eight unrelated short stories by other authors. The character story was always written by the same author, or at least it seemed that way because a pen name was invariably used to make it appear as if it were the product of a single imagination.

The Shadow: A Detective Magazine became an instant success, so much so that after only a year of publication the publisher Street and Smith switched it from a monthly to a twice monthly schedule to satisfy demand. It also spawned numerous imitators, first by Street and Smith themselves, later by other publishers. If the names of some of these now-forgotten titles sound like the names of comic books -- The Avenger, The Spider, Nick Carter, The Phantom Detective and, of course. Doc Savage -- it is probably no coincidence, as many literary historians have labeled these character pulps the direct ancestors to comic book super heroes.

By the time John D MacDonald began his writing career in 1946, the popularity of pulps in general were waning, and only a few of the character pulps were still around. Among those were The Shadow and Doc Savage, which would both cease publication in the summer of 1949. During MacDonald's first two years of writing, these two Street and Smith magazines were run by the same editor, a diminutive, insightful woman with a dry sense of humor named Babette Rosmond. She was one of the earliest editors to spot MacDonald's talent, even before he was able to produce stories worthy of publication, and she continued to encourage him even as she rejected his submissions. (An amusing example can be seen here.) The author's second story to appear in a mass market publication was in a Rosmond-edited magazine, and over her tenure as editor she purchased 34 stories from him. She was one of his early guides in the world of popular writing, famously directing him at one point to "take off [his] pith helmet" when she sensed him becoming too comfortable writing stories set in the Burmese theater of war.

"The Anonymous Letter" appeared in the February-March 1947 issue of The Shadow (then called Shadow Mystery) and its publication is notable not for the quality of the writing (it's good, not great) but because of the laudatory introduction she wrote as a preface to the story. It's a testimony to the respect MacDonald garnered even at the beginning of his career and it is prophetic in its predictions:

"When an author turns out several stories a month -- and they're all first-rate, which is unusual -- you'd think, rightly, that he'd been in the game a long time. But that's not the case with John D. MacDonald. Even though he falls into the first category, he definitely doesn't fall into the second, because he's only been writing about a year. Never even wanted to be a writer.

"However, while he was overseas in the O.S.S., he wrote a letter home to his wife... and she thought it was so good that she had it published... sold it to a national magazine, practically verbatim. And that's how MacDonald got his start. Where he'll wind up is fairly easy to foresee, because he has hit the jackpot with the tremendous volume of work he's turned out! He's sold to more magazines than can be listed here -- and we're very glad that we were in on MacDonald from the beginning.

"There'll be more by John D. MacDonald in future issues... so watch for them!"
 

"The Anonymous Letter" was written during MacDonald's "pith helmet period," as the setting for much of the story takes place in North India during World War II. The protagonist -- now stateside and referred to only as Bob -- recalls this period of his life after bumping into an old Army acquaintance named Dick Reals. Bob recalls when Reals first came up from Calcutta to replace one of the many servicemen working for the Quartermaster's unit who had come down with malaria. He was a likeable guy, a big, cheerful, open-faced kid who got along with everyone and who earned the respect of both his officers and his fellow grunts. But he was a bit different from the other truck drivers and lugs in the outfit in that he was married, and whenever the men of his "basha" lay around talking about their girls back home, Reals would launch into "a monologue that was as sincere a hymn of praise as any of the passages in Omar Khayyam."

"We would kid him about it. He would say, 'You unmarried guys have it tough. I got hitched to Margaret before I left. We had a week together on the Cape. I wish you could see her. The pictures I got don't do a thing for her. She's a little blonde, about five two and weighs a hundred and two. But she's not skinny. Every bit of her is soft and curved and sweet. I was almost afraid to touch her at first, but she's a husky kid for all her littleness. We have fun together. She writes every day. I can shut my eyes and remember just how she looks, her blonde hair all ruffled, looking up at me out of those dark eyes, with her lips moist and kind of half open...'

"Then one of the other guys would tell him to lay off, he was driving us all nuts, and we would all be quiet for a time, pawing through the lonesome thoughts that men must have when they're fourteen thousand miles from home."
 

But things change suddenly and dramatically when Reals receives a letter, an anonymous letter telling him that Margaret has been unfaithful to him.

The once good-natured kid instantly becomes a different person.

"When [he] changed, we thought the heat had him. The captain figured it might be cerebral malaria and had the laboratory at the station hospital take a slide. He was okay in his body. It was his mind that had changed. He got sullen and violent and disagreeable. The captain couldn't trust him on lone runs into Chabua and up to Ledo. He could only send him out in convoy."
 

His fellow bunkmates gradually figure out what is wrong when they begin seeing the unopened letters from Margaret piling up next to Reals' bedside, "... the ink address smearing into the fibers of the paper made damp by the humidity." His demeanor gradually begins to affect his unit, and after about a month of it they are ready to take any excuse "to beat the hell out of him." After he nearly kicks a "wog" to death he is transferred out of the Quartermasters' Unit to parts unknown. Glad to see the back of him, Bob figured he would never lay eyes on him again.

But as the story opens, the two men bump into each other in postwar America. It takes Bob a few minutes to realize who it is, and he then becomes slightly unnerved by Reals' appearance.

"His mouth looked slack instead of firm the way it had been, and his lips looked too damp. He had lost weight and his too gay suit hung on him. Maybe it was his eyes. He held them open very wide and as he talked to me I got the impression that he was looking beyond me, looking at something suspended in the air beyond my shoulder."
 

Against his better judgment he takes Reals up on an offer to talk over a few drinks in a nearby dingy bar. He knows that at some point he's going to want to satisfy his curiosity about Reals' wife Margaret...

"The Anonymous Letter" is a neat little tale, nothing special, but enjoyable if somewhat predictable. It only runs 1,500 words yet manages to paint a vivid picture of wartime India: the heat, the boredom, the constant danger of disease. And Reals is a pretty interesting character, in whom the student of MacDonald can see the building blocks for many subsequent damaged people. It's a quintessential example of the author's early period and proves that even early on, JDM "had it."

Rosmond's little preface mentions MacDonald's prodigious output, and it must a bit of a private joke to both editor and author to know that the story that followed "The Anonymous Letter" in this particular issue of Shadow Mystery -- "Backlash" by Peter Reed -- was, in fact, another MacDonald story appearing under a house name.

As far as I know, "The Anonymous Letter" has never been anthologized.

"You've Got to Be Cold" ("The Night is Over")

Lakes. John D MacDonald loved them.

He loved their beauty and their tranquility, and in his fiction he employed them with both of those characteristics in mind, but he also loved the sense of separation they evoked, as well as the terrible frailty one could feel because of that isolation. Bad things can happen at a lake, including murder, infidelity, rape and kidnapping.

MacDonald loved one lake in particular, Piseco Lake in upstate New York, fifty miles northeast of Utica in the Adirondacks. It was there that he and his wife Dorothy owned a large plot of lakefront land, purchased with the winnings from a wartime poker game, which later became the family's summer home for thirty-five years. Every spring from 1951-on, John, Dorothy and son Johnny would escape the crushing heat of Florida and make the long trek by car northward. Their cabin was built on a remote shore of the lake and could only be reached via a long, twisting dirt road that encouraged privacy and allowed the nearby wildlife to flourish. MacDonald wrote a great deal of his published works there, and it was at Piseco that he and Johnny burned 800,000-words of unsold short stories from his earliest days as a writer.

But most important to the reader of MacDonald is the spell Piseco Lake cast over the fiction the author produced. Lakes serve as the setting of numerous short stories and novels, and anyone who has read JDM's "cat biography" The House Guests can recognize Piseco virtually any time a lake is used by the author. Of the works I have already written about in this blog Piseco served as a model for the opening scene in Judge Me Not, the place where Jane Wyant committed adultery in Cancel All Our Vows, the weekend getaway spot in You Live Once, and the setting for the entire plot of All These Condemned. Of the ninety-one short stories I've covered so far in this blog, ten of them feature settings at a lake.

Now I can make that eleven. MacDonald's early novella "You've Got to Be Cold" takes place almost entirely near a remote lake that was certainly modeled after Piseco. Appearing in the April-May 1947 issue of The Shadow, it is a rambling, wildly improbable tale featuring one of JDM's quintessential "damaged veterans" who, returning from World War II finds it difficult to adjust back to normal living. The lake setting emphasizes the hero's detachment from society and its distance from any hint of the modern world allows a primeval menace to permeate the the story.

Walker Post is a mess. He's a man who doesn't give a damn about himself or anyone else, and who is content to drink his life away in run-down bars. While fighting in the Pacific during the war he lost his mother and his wife in an auto accident and he has returned to a home devoid of any family. His former boss offers him his old job back, but after working there several weeks he walks out. "He thought it would give him something familiar to hold on to. It hadn't worked." After putting his furniture into storage and moving into a shabby furnished room, he begins to drink up the two thousand dollars of insurance money left from his wife's death.

"He hadn't tried to find work... He knew he wasn't drinking himself to death. Just enough liquor each day to cloud the pictures in his mind. Just enough to dull the constant irritation with everything around him. He slept in the cheap, sour room between the gray sheets. He ate heavy fried foods. He walked the streets slowly and wondered what there was to care about. In some distant corner of his mind he was uncertain and frightened. Some mornings he would remember and realize that it would have to end sometime. There would be no more money. But that was a long time off... He spoke to no one. He didn't read. He didn't go to movies. He sat and drank and ate and slept and walked, fighting down the mad thing in his heart that wanted to flash out at the people around him. He wanted to strike and crush and batter the faces of those around him."
 

He's about to get his chance to do just that. As a result of his surliness he manages to get into a bar fight and is nearly demolished before striking back. Not quite sure if he is winning or losing, the battered, nearly unconscious Post is pulled out of the bar and put into a car by an unknown man. His rescuer introduces himself as Dr. Benjamin Drake, who just happened to be passing by when he heard the ruckus. Drake senses Post's unhappiness and offers him a job working for him at a new "combination summer camp and health resort" just constructed on the site of an old, deserted lumber camp on remote Lake Meridin. After initially refusing, Post decides to take him up on the offer. The work will be physical and he can keep to himself if he wants to. Post tells Drake, "What's the difference what I do?"

The following day Drake picks up Post and they head to the camp. The path to the lake is nearly invisible, an old, overgrown dirt road off of an old country lane, protected by low hanging bushes and a fallen tree trunk that turns out to be fake. After another quarter of a mile of dirt road and a four mile walk down a nearly invisible trail, they arrive at the "resort."

"It lay below them, a thousand yards away. It was small, possibly a mile long and a half mile wide. A large patch of the sky had cleared and the still water threw a deeper blue back toward the sky. It ran east and west... Wooded hills rose steeply from the lake on every side except the west. Ahead Post could see the outlines of weathered gray buildings against the evergreens. It was very quiet, strangely quiet. Post felt a momentary uneasiness."
 

As well he should. Dr. Drake drops the veneer of kindness and begins ordering Post down to one of the buildings. He warns him that there is only one way out of the place, the way they came, and that to attempt to leave will not be tolerated. That's kind of a moot point right now, as Post's long months of drinking have softened him up to the point that he is ready to drop. He meets two other "workers," big tough guys who eventually become Post's prison guards. There are only two "patients" there, both well-to-do businessmen in separate and remote cabins, one accompanied by his wife, the other by his daughter.

When Drake leaves for a few days Post decides he's had enough and tries to leave, only to be stopped by one of his co-workers, who shoves him to the ground and warns him of further violence if he doesn't get with the program. When Drake finally returns and learns of Post's attempt to leave, he pulls out a newspaper clipping from his pocket. It's a story about a barroom brawl and how one Walker Post killed another man in a fight, and how the police in three states were now looking for him. Post is stuck.

To further summarize this sprawling plot would take forever, and I'm not going to attempt it. Suffice it to say that Drake's plan with his patients has nothing to do with curing them and everything to do with getting huge sums of money from them. Walker and the second patient's daughter eventually combine forces to try and escape, but the reader can guess that the minute she's introduced: "tall... slim... high cheekbones... gray eyes..." The JDM female archetype.

Although MacDonald permitted "You've Got to Be Cold" to be included in the second Good Old Stuff anthology (under his original title "The Night is Over") he was not proud of this particular work, calling it "clumsy" and admitting that the characters' motivations were "unreal." Francis M. Nevins, Jr., who was one of the editors of the two Good Old Stuff volumes, had a much better opinion of the story, calling it "smoothly written, sharply paced and impossible to leave unfinished." He also termed it "a fine example" of JDM's early use of the psychologically damaged veteran, his "self-ruination" and eventual redemption. I'll agree that it is a nicely-written pulp yarn with a couple of interesting characters, and that it has a uniquely interesting premise, but it does seem a bit drawn out at times and the structure wobbles every now and then. The knowing reader certainly comes away with a fresh reminder that pulp magazines paid writers by the word.

MacDonald's biographers rarely -- if ever -- discussed or even mentioned individual works of short fiction in their books, but Hugh Merrill gives "You've Got to Be Cold" a sentence in The Red Hot Typewriter. Unfortunately, it's a perfect example of the careless writing and sloppy research that makes that work so suspect. He prefaces his observation by claiming that the pulps were MacDonald's apprenticeship and that "...like any apprenticeship, he learned by imitation.

"His asylum in "You've Got to Be Cold"... bears an astonishing resemblance to the hospital run by Dr. Anthor (sic) in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely."
 

Well. First of all, as anyone who has actually read the Chandler novel can attest, the hospital in Farewell, My Lovely was not run by Jules Amthor (or even Jules "Anthor"), and the only thing "astonishing" is the fact that Merrill would compare a rustic and remote group of cabins by a small lake with a mental hospital in Bay City, California. There are no locked rooms in Benjamin Drake's "health resort," and Walker Post is not held there as a patient. It is not an "asylum" in any sense of the word and for Merrill to make this connection leads me to suspect that he has never actually read Chandler's book but has instead relied on one of the movie adaptations for his reference here. In the 1975 film version of Farewell, My Lovely, the location of Marlowe's imprisonment is indeed run by Amthor, but the character was changed from a phony psychic to the madam of a brothel. In the book the hospital was run by a Dr. Sonderborg.

If MacDonald was copying another writer in "You've Got to Be Cold" it certainly wasn't Raymond Chandler.