"The Giant Who Came to Our House"

John D MacDonald wrote 27 short stories that appeared in the weekly newspaper supplement This Week, spanning a 16 year period from 1950 to 1966. I’ve written about most of these brief tales, fiction that included situational comedies, family issues, youthful reminiscences and, yes, even crime. Considering the vast circulation of This Week -- it was included in scores of American Newspapers from 1935 to 1969 -- more people probably read John D MacDonald stories in this magazine than in any other. As I wrote in a previous post, “[This Week] started out being carried by 21 newspapers with a combined circulation of more than four million. Over the the next thirty years the magazine’s growth was explosive: eleven million issues per week in 1955 and a high of over fourteen million by 1963. These numbers dwarf those of contemporaneous newsstand slicks -- four million got a periodical into the big leagues, with only a few like Life (5.6 million) and Reader’s Digest (ten million) exceeding that.”

The quality of these various stories ranged from the fairly inconsequential (“I Love You (Occasionally),” “A Matter of Life and Death,” “Who Stopped That Clock?”) to superior works of popular fiction, like “End of the Tiger” and “Blurred View”. Between those two extremes were the so-so stories, interesting on a fairly superficial level but leaving little or no lasting mark. “The Giant Who Came to Our House,” which appeared in the May 5, 1957 issue of This Week, probably falls into this category: it’s engaging, creates a wistfully-remembered childhood past, and tells an easy lesson. But it’s really more interesting as a dress rehearsal for a superior short story MacDonald would write six years later.

“The Giant Who Came to Our House” is told in flashback, a man remembering an incident from his childhood, unimportant on its surface but lasting in the mark that it has left on him. In this regard it mirrors previous works like “Looie Follows Me” and “The Bear Trap” and would provide the template for that six-years-later story, “End of the Tiger.”

It happened on a Sunday long ago, on one of those hot still days in late summer. I was ten that summer, and it was a bad summer for me because of my father. It wasn't that I was ashamed of him. I just felt sort of let down. I think my mother felt the same way, but there wasn't anything we could do about it.

Billy Barret’s problem with his father Sam began way before that Sunday incident long ago. Sam had run his own “mercantile store” in town before partnering up with another local retailer, an obnoxious feed store owner named Ed Wadley. Wadley is a kind of character familiar to readers of MacDonald’s work: big and beefy, loud and obnoxious and given to using demeaning names to others (he refers to Sam as “Shorty”). Readers of “Blue Water Fury” and “The Killer” will recognize him immediately. The two argue constantly about the direction of the business and Wadley always wins those arguments, many of them taking place at the Barret home and in front of Billy. But the incident Billy is recalling took place outside of the business relationship and involved a third party, an outsider to the family.

Harry Sturmer is a circus performer, a seven-foot-four, three hundred and twenty pound giant whose stage name is Big Tex. Out of work and penniless after his circus closed unexpectedly and robbed of his stash of money, he wandered by the Barret place -- a large house and a yard big enough to fit a barn and an apple orchard -- asking for work. Billy’s mom Sarah took pity on him and, needing to replace their other handyman, hired him on at a dollar per day. Harry sleeps in the barn and, between chores, writes to circuses around the region looking for work. Billy’s recollection of the giant is characteristic MacDonald: tersely but tellingly descriptive, evoking a deeper character in as few words as possible:

His voice didn't sound the way a giant's should. It was thin and kind of rusty sounding. All in all, I guess he was a disappointing sort of giant. Unfinished looking. And nothing fit just right. He was powerful, but slow and awkward and clumsy. His face was long and he had a sad look and he sunburned easy. Every time I asked a question, he had to think over his answer and then he made it short.

Billy gets used to having Harry around the place and over time comes to admire him. So it is no surprise that the “incident” the story is built around takes place at Harry’s expense and involved the noxious Ed Wadley.

On that particular Sunday Wadley is over and he and the Barrets are out on the porch talking, with Billy playing in the yard and Harry doing yard work out near the driveway. The contentious conversation is, as always, about the store and at one point Wadley makes a point loud enough for everyone -- including Harry -- to hear:

"Now honestly, Shorty, how much respect am I supposed to have for the business judgement of a man who'd hire a freak to take care of the work around this place?"

There was a strange silence. The whole afternoon seemed to stop, even the birds. I was close enough to barely hear my mother whisper, "That was rude, Ed Wadley. Very rude. You've hurt his feelings."

But Sam Barret was silent.

And my father didn't do anything. He didn't tell Ed Wadley to get off the place. I felt sick inside. I wanted to make it up to Harry somehow, but there just wasn't any way I could think of.

“The Giant Who Came to Our House” ends happily, as one would certainly expect in a Sunday morning read from 1957, and its themes and concerns go deeper than most of the previous stories MacDonald wrote for This Week. The subject of prejudice and standing up for oneself surely trump tales of marital misunderstandings and household pets. But the story, seen now from the perspective of time and an understanding of MacDonald’s entire writing career, reads more like a dry run for the superior “End of the Tiger.” The author obviously liked these childhood tales told from the perspective of a grown man and he continued to write them throughout his career. He even tried it after “End of the Tiger,” less than a year after the publication of that great story, with another This Week effort, “Wild, Wonderful Old Man,” with much less success. And as good as “End of the Tiger” was -- and is -- it paled against JDM’s greatest recollection tale, “The Bear Trap.” Now that was a piece of writing.

“The Giant Who Came to Our House” has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted, but it can be easily read by anyone with access to an online newspaper database, either at home or through your local library. Microfilm archives of most US newspapers are readily available and many of these dailies carried This Week. Some examples are the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Star.

"The Fraud That Paid Off"

John D MacDonald’s relationship with the Sunday newspaper supplement This Week was a long and profitable one for the author. In began at the end of 1950 with the publication of his short story “I Love You (Occasionally),” a brief, humorous situation comedy about a man who tries to impress his wife and ends up putting his foot in it. From 1950 to 1958 MacDonald had at least one story published in This Week every year, and most of them were of this ilk: harmless little family misunderstandings that cause friction before resolving themselves nicely with a typically MacDonaldean happy ending.

In their April 22, 1956 issue This Week published their 12th JDM short story, “The Fraud That Paid Off.” Fans of the author who happened upon this title in their Sunday newspaper supplement could be forgiven for thinking this a crime story, perhaps along the lines of some of the stuff MacDonald had been submitting to the mystery digests of the time, like “The Killer” in Manhunt or “In a Small Motel,” in Justice, or perhaps something akin to his two most recent novels, April Evil and You Live Once.

Alas, they would have been -- and probably were -- disappointed. The “fraud” in “The Fraud That Paid Off” was not criminal or even illegal, and the payoff wasn’t monetary, it was romantic.

Protagonist Johnny Brewer works in a job that was very familiar to the author: he’s a production chaser in an assembly plant, an industry MacDonald worked in during his stateside stint in the Army. Johnny is young, capable, well thought-of by his superiors, and single. He is smitten by a particular young lady secretary, a fact known to many at the plant, and especially known to Kathie Morrison, the secretary of the Production Manager, Johnny’s direct superior.

Johnny Brewer's endless efforts to make a date with The Princess were well known and frequently commented upon throughout the big plant of the Kallston Corporation. The Princess, Miss Virginia Conway, was secretary to the Plant Manager, highest resident brass at the plant. In looks she was faintly reminiscent of Grace Kelly, with Kelly's same air of cool, polite, delicious unattainability. When an errand brought her down to the production floor, she did not look out of place -- she made the entire production floor look out of place. Johnny's varied and diligent efforts had thus far been rewarded by a frostiness of blue eyes, a tiny, pitying smile.

After a particularly stressful day caused by a missed order and a transposed figure, Johnny arrives at his boss’s office to report that everything is under control. He trades familiarities with Kathie, a “smallish” girl with red hair and gray eyes. (Uh-oh.)  After he is congratulated by his boss, Johnny intimates to Kathie that he will be spending the rest of the day dreaming of a date with The Princess. The “light of warmth and pride” fade from Kathie’s eyes as she returns to her work, muttering “Good Luck.”

[She] balanced her chin on a small capable fist and scowled. She had tried once to tell Johnny that Virginia had all the ripe, rich warmth of a servo-mechanism, but had only succeeded in angering him... Kathie knew he deserved better, but Johnny was not very bright about people. She scowled and thought and plotted.

So four days later, when Johnny happens upon The Princess at the water cooler and clumsily tries to strike up a conversation, he is startled -- just as the reader is not -- when she responds warmly and agrees to dinner that night at the finest and most expensive restaurant in town. After a wonderful dinner with the very attentive Princess, the couple sit together on a banquette holding hands while listening to the piano. Then she leans "her golden head close to him and, with a slant of mocking eyes [says], 'You've kept it a very good secret, you know.'"

The trite, obvious plot and resolution of “The Fraud That Paid Off” is only slightly salvaged by MacDonald’s terse, economic prose and occasionally humorous observations. But there’s nothing of real substance here, only a quick read for a Sunday afternoon in 1950’s America. We read them so you don’t have to.

Not surprisingly, “The Fraud That Paid Off,” (MacDonald’s original title, incidentally) has never been reprinted or anthologized. Like all of his This Week stories, it is available through the microfilm and digital archives of the various newspapers that carried This Week during all or part of its run. You may have a local library that has access to one of these newspapers, so you can collect them all if you are so inclined. “The Fraud That Paid Off” aside, there are some real gems in there.

The artwork for this story was done by the great Fredric Varady, one of the premier magazine illustrators of the mid-twentieth century. I would have reproduced the main artwork for “The Fraud That Paid Off” but, unfortunately, it depicts the story’s final scene.

"The Magic Valentines"

In last week’s posting I discussed the broad variety of pulp magazines that John D MacDonald had stories published in, from mystery to science fiction, adventure to straight fiction, and even westerns and horror. But he never wrote a story for a love pulp, and for good reason, I think. It’s hard to imagine a more unsentimental writer than MacDonald, although even that opinion is belied by digging deeper into the author’s short works. He made many forays into the world of love, usually love gone wrong and its subsequent repair (see “The Cardboard Star,” “Forever Yours” or “What About Alice?”), other times it was love lost and the lifelong regret that loss produced (“The Bear Trap”) and occasionally he did write a straight-up love story like “The Magic Valentines.”

It appeared in the February 5, 1956 issue of This Week, the Sunday morning newspaper supplement that hosted many of MacDonald’s attempts at mainstream fiction. He began his long association with the magazine in 1950 with a run of family situation comedy tales and began penning more serious works as time went on. By the time “The Magic Valentines” appeared he had already written a mystery, a cautionary tale about anger and a family drama about teenage marriage, and he would go on to write about murder, assassins and even an extra-marital affair. “The Magic Valentines” is straightforward, tame and entirely adult in its sensibilities, and it fairly well avoids coming too close to being saccharine, although just. Its real strength, however, is in the cold, lonely world its protagonist inhabits, an atmosphere MacDonald establishes in his customary few words, and it is done so effortlessly that one is instantly drawn into the narrative.

Jerry Bowen works in the claims department of a large insurance company located in a tall skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. It’s the end of another dreary day and he has worked late to finish a report. Heading for the elevator he ruminates on his nebulous plans for the evening.

He looked toward the evening with distaste. Two years ago the town had seemed wonderfully exciting. Now he knew of at least three apartments where friends maintained seemingly permanent parties, where he would be welcome, but he did not want another of those evenings of predictable girls, predictable small talk, and the mild, highly predictable hangover. This was perhaps a night to hole up, eat a quick meal and read a book. But that seemed equally tasteless. He hoped it wouldn't be another of those restless evenings of walking too many miles through the bright, meaningless streets.

Before boarding the elevator he passes the typing pool and sees a lone female figure silhouetted against the city glow, quietly weeping. He approaches and discovers it’s Della Howard, the lovely girlfriend of Walter Crane, a “rather somber young man” who works in the Actuarial Section. Della and Walter have obviously had a falling out of some sort, and Jerry commiserates and bravely asks her to dinner. She agrees, but only if they go Dutch. They have a wonderful time -- at least Jerry thinks so -- and he asks if they can do it again sometime. Della looks him directly in the eye and says emphatically, “I’d like to, Jerry.”

There was a date, and more dates. Sometimes Jerry would see Walter Crane in the corridor. Crane would look at him with loathing. Jerry sensed the tenor of the office gossip. It did not bother him. Here at last, maybe, was The Girl. The end of long restlessness. The end of a search. Every hour with her was too short. He could not tire of watching the curve of her lips, the shape of her hands, of hearing the sound of her voice... The flavor of their first meeting continued. No kisses, no hand holding, no declarations of love undying . It somehow seemed better that way, more valid and more precious.

But Jerry can sense a distance between them, a strain on the part of Della as she continues to try and get over Walter Crane. Then, on one especially wonderful evening, he kisses her, but he feels her emotional withdrawal and concludes “It was not the magic he had expected.” Later over dinner he raises the subject of the first kiss with faux humor and is surprised by Della’s reaction.

She looked seriously at him. "What's bothering you? Is that a crazy kind of apology for kissing me? I'm astonished you didn't a long time ago. I expected you to. And I expect you to kiss me again. Quite often, darling.”

But as Jerry looks into her eyes he realizes it is all an act, Della playing the part of spurned lover with “little girl earnestness.” When he walks her home he kisses her again, for the final time…

MacDonald’s original title for “The Magic Valentines” was “The Fourteenth of February,” and the story appeared in the issue of This Week one week prior to Valentine’s Day, so it is likely that this work was commissioned by the magazine for the holiday. That would certainly explain a story so out of the ordinary for MacDonald, who was rarely this florid in his handling of romance, even in his early days. There are echoes of another JDM protagonist looking for love and marriage, Clint Sewell from You Live Once, a novel that was published only a month after “The Magic Valentines” appeared. And the story as well as the protagonist and the setting ring of another famous lovelorn male in a very similar situation. C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, is a single, lonely male working in a huge, soulless insurance office in Manhattan, and he falls in love with girl who is seeing another member of the staff. The two stories take very different tacks, but the feeling of loneliness and unrequited longing are the same. I doubt if Wilder was copying anything in “The Magic Valentines,” though.

MacDonald’s assertion that he never wrote for the love pulps is a true one, at least if the surviving records are to be believed. As Lee Server wrote in his 1993 history Danger is My Business, love pulps were “the only rough-paper category aimed specifically at women,” and they were hugely popular in their day. Every publishing house had a line of love (or romance) titles. Babette Rosemond, an early JDM champion who was editor of both Doc Savage and The Shadow at the time MacDonald was trying to break into the fiction trade, began her pulp career as an editor of love pulps. (Her first novel, The Dewy Dewy Eyes, is a fictional account of her early career.) But when the love pulps died, they died, and their lack of legacy is almost as great as the popularity they once enjoyed. As Server put it:

Although they were enormously popular in their day, when the love pulps eventually disappeared, they left behind no trace of their existence. No great writers or continuing series characters were born in their pages, and it appears likely that no pulp romance story has ever been reprinted anywhere.

One of the most interesting things about the publication of “The Magic Valentines” is not in the story itself, as different as it is, but in the very brief author bio which accompanies it. It states that MacDonald was currently working on a forthcoming book, a “serious historical novel, set in Ceylon,” which was supposed to come out later that year. Of course, no such novel ever appeared and there is no direct reference to it in the Finding Guide to MacDonald’s papers. It joins a short but intriguing list of JDM novels that never were, or that were rejected and mothballed: The Golden Edge, The Blood Game (presumably a novel about the game of golf), the “big book about banking”  that MacDonald spent years on, A Matter of Trust (which may in fact be that banking book), and others (including two Deep Blue Good-By false starts).

“The Magic Valentines” has never been reprinted, but is accessible, like all of MacDonald’s This Week stories, through many newspaper archives throughout the country, assuming that the newspaper in question carried This Week. Many public library systems have access to their local newspapers and card holders can usually access these databases for free (and download images of pages). Or one could buy a membership to Pro Quest, which has many different newspaper archives available.

“When You Retire… Will This Happen to You?”

John D MacDonald’s 1977 blockbuster novel Condominium is fiction that works on many different levels. If we are to believe MacDonald’s biographer Hugh Merrill, the book was conceived as a revenge piece against a local developer who was attempting to build an eight-story condominium next door to the MacDonalds' dream home, into which they had moved only two years earlier. The couple fought this development tooth and nail, eventually launching a lawsuit, but it was all to no avail. The condo was built and the MacDonald’s had to live with it.

But the 447 pages of Condominium covers many other related subjects, such as building codes, zoning ordinances, hurricane formation, the venal business practices of amoral businessmen, and the great social plight of America’s retirees who have left the places they once called home to live out their lives in this retirement paradise called Florida. This is where the novel works best, in MacDonald’s detailed, insightful and mostly compassionate portrayal of old people starting the final phase of their lives in a place that is not quite what it was advertised to be.

Condominium was not MacDonald’s first take on the subject. Way back in 1953 he wrote an article for This Week magazine with the extremely clunky title of “When You Retire… Will This Happen to You?” Advertised by the magazine as a cautionary tale exposing a problem America’s leaders needed to deal with, it was strongly implied that this was a work of nonfiction. The reader is led to believe that MacDonald went out, tape recorder in hand, and interviewed a typical Florida retired couple, then wrote an article about them. With no other information besides having read the piece, I’m pretty sure that was not the case, that this is fiction, an  early precursor to the kind of thing MacDonald was trying to do in his Travis McGee short story “Terminal Cases” and in the more well-known final JDM “book” Reading for Survival, where important issues are presented and argued by fictional characters.

Appearing in the March 8 issue, “When You Retire…” is told in the first person by the interviewer. This setup is a device to allow the retired couple to do most of the talking, which they do with little interjection by “MacDonald.” They are the Talmadges, Bert and Pearl, who moved down to St. Petersburg from Michigan several years ago, moving into the first home they ever owned, albeit with a mortgage. Bert was a lineman for the power company and Pearl a homemaker. Their two children are mentioned only briefly, in a typical MacDonaldian aside that speaks volumes: the son died and the daughter, after a bad marriage, is estranged and living in Canada. They have agreed to be interviewed as a typical retired couple, ones who are slowly getting squeezed between a fixed income, rising prices and unexpected expenses.

"Thirteen hundred dollars a year seemed like enough, back then," [Pearl] said ruefully.

"It was, Pearl. It was"

"But now,” she says, "it's little things like haircuts for Bert. Since I got the arthritis in my hand this year, I can't cut his hair... There's only  nine years left on the mortgage, but this year the homestead taxes went up again.

"And his teeth. And the man said it would be nearly two hundred dollars to get rid of the termites. I guess we're just going to have to live with them. It's all those little things that make me so nervous when I get to thinking about them."

As the interview progresses we see just how close to the edge their life in retirement is. In order to bring in some extra cash Bert bought a moped and started a delivery service. But the heat and several near-collisions dissuaded him of that endeavor. This is followed by a wonderfully concise exchange that reveals the extremes to which they have gone in order to make ends meet.

Bert: I sold the bike for forty dollars after I painted it fancy, and put the money in the plants I showed you out back. I think we'll do better with those."

Pearl (darkly): "Better than selling those greeting cards, I hope."

Bert: "There were just too many doing that. Just like with the animals you make out of shells, and like delivering those circulars. I used to deliver every one, too, not stuff 'em under a hedge like some did. If I was better with my hands I could make out better. But I always did heavy work."

Pearl: "You did too much heavy work, Bert. You worked too hard all your life."

During the conversation the Talmadges mention some other couples they know who are under similar pressure. There’s the retired postman and his wife, who after he got ill, was unable to keep up with the mortgage payments and lived on a diet of rice in order to try and save money. And “Old Ralph,” a retired school teacher who catches fish and sells them to local restaurants.

"[He's] over seventy. Goes to the same place on the bridge every day. Fishes for his dinner first, and gets that usually, and then fishes for something extra [for] the fish house... Used to like it, Now he plain hates the sight of fish and the taste and being out there every day, but he can't figure how he can quit."

All of these points of quiet desperation don’t support the Talmadges’ constant reassurances of “we’re getting along” and “others are worse off.” The cumulative effect of all of this, especially to anyone who is close to retirement themselves, must be unnerving to say the least, especially since this was written over sixty years ago and little has seemingly changed. Well, actually, lots has changed, and potentially for the worse. The 1980’s and 1990’s saw the mass conversion of corporate pension plans into 401k’s, fixed benefit plans into fixed contribution plans, with the responsibility for managing those investments placed into the hands of the employee. The fact that most employees didn't have a clue as to how to invest for the long term didn't seem to matter to the businesses that switched plans or to the government that allowed it. The result was predictable: given a choice whether or not to save for retirement, most didn't, and those who did invested in the most conservative way possible, guaranteeing a nest egg that would not even come close to providing a decent middle class lifestyle upon retirement. At least the Talmadges' meager pension plan provided something, and it was good for life. Could any reader imagine Bert Talmadge managing a 401k?

“When You Retire… Will This Happen to You?” is an interesting curio, a JDM short story that has never been included in MacDonald's list of fiction writings, except by me. (It's on my list of JDM short works in the Trap of Solid Gold Resources.) It's not going to win any awards or be something the reader would ever go back to for re-reading, but it does contain some good JDM characterization, developed mainly through the words of the characters themselves. And it does describe a particular American social problem in an era long past, one that has not really corrected itself in over sixty years of trying.

The story has never been anthologized, which is no surprise. But as with all of the work MacDonald had published in This Week over the years, “When You Retire… Will This Happen to You?” is available to anyone with access to a newspaper database, provided the newspapers available were ones that provided This Week in their Sunday editions. If you don't have such access, perhaps your local library does.

"The Straw Witch"

In a week or two I will be launching a new link in The Trap of Solid Gold Resources you see in the right hand column of this blog, a listing of all of John D MacDonald’s science fiction and fantasy fiction. It’s going to contain all of the stories and novels that Martin H. Greenberg included in his appendix to Other Times, Other Worlds -- MacDonald’s 1978 science fiction anthology -- as well as several additional titles that were omitted but are clearly science fiction. It will also include a couple of stories that lean more toward fantasy, and some that barely qualify as representative of either genre. “The Straw Witch” will be on that list.

Originally published in the January 12, 1964 issue of This Week magazine, this very short story is one of MacDonald’s better works, as is most of the author’s fiction of this period, and qualifies as fantasy only in the individual reader’s perception. It’s one of those “was it real or only imagined?” kinds of stories, with the payoff coming in the final paragraph of the piece. Some may argue this point, but I think I’m on pretty solid ground here, and even if you want to dispute my assertion, you’ll have to agree that it is otherwise an excellent, well written story.

The protagonist is a paid assassin named Williamson, on a mission in an unnamed country to kill an ambassador. Two prior attempts by other had failed and now the security around the man was impregnable. His large country home was now guarded around the clock, with the grounds lit by floodlights at night, and his transportation provided by a bullet-proof limousine. He never appears outside of the home except to go or to come home from the embassy. Williamson has found a safe place in a wooded area where he can observe the house at night with high powered binoculars. Every night he is there, observing, trying to find some weakness he can exploit and take out his target.

The long nights have got him thinking and remembering. Specifically, he has begun recalling a brief period during the last war (WWII?) where he learned his trade as a clandestine killer of civilians. On a mission that had gone terribly wrong, he found himself hiding in the cellar of a house for several weeks with his partner, an old, grizzled Irishman named Gulligan.

Gulligan, like an old hound, had caught the whiff of death. In the darkness his mind wandered, and he talked on and on. Gulligan was a sour old hulk, an Irish murderer, a life-long saboteur and conspirator, just the sort of malignant riff-raff they sent on missions like that one. They never sent their clean young men to assassinate civilians.

Gulligan’s rants revolve around the imminent death he foresees for both himself and Williamson, and he slowly recalls the myths of his homeland.

"I don't know how they summon all the others, Billy boy, but for the ones like you and me, for us they send one of the straw witches... On the nights when the moon rises full and yellow they gather where there's a black pool, and quaggy ground so no fool can approach them. You can hear them on a still night, making their little sing-songs of laughter, sitting with their pale beautiful feet in the black water, all of them with silver needles knitting straw in the moonlight, fashioning it into wee gallows ropes and dainty shrouds... When yours comes for you, lad, you won't be thinking she's a straw witch. No, you'll have your mind on but one thing, and she will take your hand in hers and be in such a sweet hurry to take you to a private place. But when you reach to her, her thighs will be as smoke, her breasts no more than the wind passing, and it is only her lips you will find with a snow taste to them, cold as pebbled snow, and with a quick and clever suck she takes your wind away and your murderer's soul."

Gulligan sickens in the dark cellar and begins to rave. Williamson “felt for the socket at the base of his skull” and quickly, silently kills him. He saw no straw witch come for Gulligan, but he does recall the man’s dying words: “Darlin’ darlin’”

After a full month of observation outside the ambassador’s estate, Williamson finally comes up with a plan. Every night at the same hour the man opens his door to let his dog out. He’s too far away for a rifle shot, and even if he wasn’t, the target is wary enough to only crack the door wide enough to let the pet outside before quickly closing it again. But the dog is free to wander all over the expansive grounds of the estate, and if Williamson can manage to get close to him he believes he can accomplish his mission successfully...

“The Straw Witch” was the second in a great burst of excellent short works MacDonald produced for This Week, after a five year hiatus from writing for this newspaper supplement. Up until “End of the Tiger,” which appeared in October of 1963 JDM had written one or two stories per year for This Week, beginning in 1950 and taking a break in 1958. Then, between “Tiger” and “The Quickest Way Home” in 1966 he wrote no less than twelve uniformly excellent works of short fiction, including two I have written about: “The Loveliest Girl in the World” and “Blurred View.” In all likelihood this run of stories was due to the magazine’s new Fiction Editor, Stewart Beach, a longtime writer and editor who had been around the literary scene since the 1920’s. Back in 1929 he had written a book titled Short Story Technique and obviously thought MacDonald’s was very good. In 1957 he edited an anthology of This Week stories titled This Week’s Stories of Mystery and Suspense and included JDM’s 1955 entry “There Hangs Death.”

Finally, as I say about every JDM This Week entry, these stories are readily available through various newspaper archives, and can be accessed via a commercial entity such as Pro Quest, or through local library systems that provide access to a particular newspaper that carried This Week during the 1950’s and 1960’s. And, in the case of “The Straw Witch,” this story was included in MacDonald’s 1966 short story anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories which is available as an eBook, or, if digital reading is not your thing, used copies of the paperback can usually be found for very reasonable prices.

In fact, with this posting I have now covered every entry in that excellent anthology, and for those who are interested you can access the postings individually either through the Books by John D MacDonald or the Short Stories by John D MacDonald lists available through my Resources..

"Blurred View"

John D MacDonald wrote short stories and novellas for over 70 different general circulation magazines during his 40 year writing career, magazines that covered every special and general interest one could imagine. He wrote for the pulps. He wrote for men’s magazines like Argosy, Cavalier, Climax and Playboy. He wrote for special interest magazines like The American Legion Magazine and the Catholic The Sign. And he wrote for the mainstream slicks like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, Redbook and Cosmopolitan, Family Circle and The Ladies’ Home Journal -- magazines prominently displayed on every newsstand in the country and whose circulations reached into the several millions. This was where the real  money was for an author of fiction during the middle part of the last century, and MacDonald was paid well.

But no magazine had the circulation that This Week boasted. That’s because of its delivery model: it was included as part of the Sunday edition in scores of American newspapers, heavyweights like The Los Angeles Times,  The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Star, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Boston Herald. Begun in February of 1935 it started out being carried by 21 newspapers with a combined circulation of more than four million. Over the the next thirty years the magazine’s growth was explosive: eleven million issues per week in 1955 and a high of over fourteen million by 1963. These numbers dwarf those of contemporaneous newsstand slicks -- four million got a periodical into the big leagues, with only a few like Life (5.6 million) and Reader’s Digest (ten million) exceeding that. This Week was about 80% fiction when it began but gradually started including non-fiction as time went on. By the time John D MacDonald got his first This Week story published in 1950 it was down to, at most, two short stories per issue.

That first story, “I Love You (Occasionally)” which appeared in the December 1950 issue, set the template for the kinds of tales MacDonald would write for the magazine for the next few years. These were light, breezy tales of suburban families, all nearly identical (father, mother, and two children of opposite genders) that concerned some comic misunderstanding usually caused by the father. The titles of the other early stories illustrate this better than I can: “He Knew a Broadway Star,” “What are the Symptoms, Dear?” and “She Tried To Make Her Man Behave.”

Eventually MacDonald’s This Week stories began to take on a more serious tone, beginning with his seventh story for the magazine, “The Man Who Almost Blew His Top,” (great story, lousy title) which concerns an incident of 1950’s road rage and how it enlightens a man to a growing alienation from his family. By the time “Blurred View” was published in the February 23, 1964 issue, the author had seventeen This Week stories under his belt and many of them dealt with crimes of one kind or another. And like MacDonald’s writing in general, the This Week stories got better and better as time went on.

“Blurred View” is told in the first person by Frank Fletcher, the protagonist -- and the bad guy. He’s married to Gloria, a gregarious, flamboyant, hard-to-control television actress, beloved by her many industry friends but no longer by Frank. He’s an artist, but probably not a very good one and his work is in a “lull” right now. Gloria’s income and her shrewd investments have allowed the couple to build a beautiful cliffside home in San Francisco, complete with a large studio for Frank.

Frank is having an affair with a New York widow named Helen, a woman a few years older than he. She is small and plain but had a good figure and is quite wealthy. So what’s an unhappy, unproductive husband to do? He murders his wife. He drugs her and once she is unconscious he picks up her body and brings it out on to their terrace and dumps her off the cliff. There is an inquest, where Gloria’s television friends turn out “in numbers that astonished the officials,” and the ruling determines her death to be either accidental or a suicide. After the funeral Frank takes a long recuperative trip to the Islands, where he meets up with Helen, who is unaware of Frank’s crime and who drops more than a few hints about marriage. Figuring that Gloria’s wealth will support his bachelor life sufficiently, Frank is non-committal, but that doesn’t stop Helen from planning to move to San Francisco to be near him. Frank returns home to the scene of the crime.

After I had been there alone for five days, a seedy little man arrived in the afternoon. He drove up in a battered little car and came to the door carrying a big manila envelope in his hand. He was trying to say he had something to show me. He was humble, and nervous, and had a little recurring smile like a sudden grimace. He smelled sweaty. Something about him alarmed me. Reluctantly I led him back through the house.

His name is Walsik and he is an assistant manager at the local Thrifty Quick. Several months ago he dropped a case on his foot and was laid up for weeks at the home of his brother in law, a San Francisco doctor, who just happens to own another cliffside house near Frank, with a distant view of Frank’s terrace. Oh, and Walsik’s hobby is photography, and he has a camera with a 1600 mm lens, and he was testing it out on April 10, the day of Gloria’s death.

And you can guess what is in the envelope he is carrying…

Without giving too much away (but I probably am), “Blurred View” is another in a long line of JDM stories and novels where characters use modern technology to warp reality in order to elicit a confession of guilt from a wrongdoer. Think “The Telltale Heart” with a tape recorder. And with MacDonald, sometimes it is tape, other times photography. In “Linda” it was tape, and the trick didn’t work on the title character but it did on her lover. In “Double Hannenframmis” the only crime was a bad relationship, but the reaction to the recording ended one relationship and began another. With film, the trick was actually used by the bad guy in The Turquoise Lament, a ruse later unravelled by Travis McGee. And in MacDonald’s 1950 short story “Breathe No More, My Lovely” photography is used in the exact same manner as it is in “Blurred View.” With the same results.

“Blurred View” is a beautifully written 1,900 words, the perfect example of a tale told without a single unnecessary word. It is told in flashback, beginning at Gloria’s funeral, shifting back to the inquest, then to the post-funeral legalities and on to the stay in the Islands, all done in the space of four very brief paragraphs. The structure of the short story is brilliant, and reveals itself even more on repeated readings. The author once wrote about how he came up with where to begin a story or a novel and it is still instructive reading today:

“Once I have the story… I establish  a clear sense of the ending , and then I try, through trial and error, to find the most useful beginning. The right point in time to start a story is tricky. Begin too far back from the dramatic peaks and the story becomes slow and labored. Begin too close to the tensions and the pace becomes frantic. There are no rules except the subjective  sense of “feel.”

Read “Blurred View” and you will understand how he mastered that particular problem. And in 1964 MacDonald was at the peak of his powers as a writer.

MacDonald thought enough of “Blurred View” to include it among the stories in his first short story anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories. Included were three other This Week stories, “End of the Tiger,” “The Loveliest Girl in the World,” and “The Straw Witch,” which should give one a feel for just how good his work for this magazine was; the very nature of the newspaper supplement forced him to be as concise and precise as he possibly could be.

And if you’re interested in reading “Blurred View,” End of the Tiger and Other Stories is now available as an eBook on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Also, used copies of the paperback, which saw eight separate printings from 1966 to 1987, aren’t too hard to find. And there’s another way, by which one can read not only “Blurred View” but all of John D MacDonald’s This Week stories. Thanks to the digitization of much of the runs of city newspapers throughout the country, formerly microfilmed versions the stories are available online. You can purchase them like I did through a service like ProQuest, or if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has (or had) a newspaper that carried This Week, you may be able to access these digital versions through your local library system. The Washington DC Public Library, for example, has the entire run of the old Washington Evening Star (which I used to deliver when I was a boy!) available to their members, who can access the archives from home and download PDF versions of the stories for free. Perhaps one day we can view the old pulps this way.