Some Further Adventures of MacDonald in Auctionland

 

John D MacDonald’s fourteenth Travis McGee novel The Scarlet Ruse was published in January 1973 and was the last paperback original in the series. Its plot revolves around stamp collecting and a dealer who is swindled out of a valuable collection in his keeping. On October 28 of that year the following article appeared on the stamp collecting page of the Chicago Tribune and was written by the paper’s Helmuth Conrad. It’s instructive in detailing how long a novel could gestate in JDM’s imagination before coming to fruition, as well as illuminating the sheer volume of research the author did on any chosen subject matter. The piece was syndicated and was picked up by several other newspapers in the country, including the Miami Herald. It was titled (in the Tribune, at least) “Some Further Adventures of MacDonald in Auctionland."

Not long ago, I urged everybody to rush out and buy The Scarlet Ruse, a new mystery novel which draws heavily on stamp speculation for its plot and is authentic down to the tiniest detail.

Afterward, I wrote to its author, John D. MacDonald. and asked him for background on how he put the book together. He was more  than gracious and sent me a 700-word reply which I will condense as best I can.
About five years ago, MacDonald spotted a newspaper article on stamp investing, and that was the genesis of the Ruse plot. "My first step (while working on other books, of course) was to read all the reference works I could find, and to subscribe to the periodicals in the field,” he said. 

"Next, I reviewed some 10 years of auction catalogs, comparing the prices realized with the catalog values in Scott, Minkus, Gibbons, etc. Then I talked to dealers and collectors."

"My next step was to subscribe to the auction catalogs of Siegel, Harmer, HarmerRooke, Wolffers, Apfelbaum, Schiff, Mozian, Robson Lowe, and Stanley Gibbons, and to write down imaginary bids on items being sold.

"After all the study and experimentation, I began placing bids and acquiring lots and putting them in the safe deposit box, after authentication by the Philatelic Foundation."

MacDonald bought fine to extremely fine copies of classics issued by the United States, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and Barbados.

Now that Ruse has been published, he is beginning to sell off his holdings. “On some items, such as a superb, never hinged block of U.S. Scott 40, I expected to receive, after auction commission, about 175 per cent of the purchase price. I would doubtless do better if I kept the items longer."

A byproduct of MacDonald's meticulous research is that he is again hooked on collecting for fun, a hobby he gave up at the age of 14.

"And I am now toying with the idea of doing a nonfiction account of my specific and detailed adventures in auctionland," MacDonald said.

New Hero Debuts in 2 Paperbacks

 

The following book review was published in the May 31, 1964 edition of the Winnona [Minnesota] Daily News, the month and year that Travis McGee was introduced to the world in the first two novels of what would become a series. It was written by local columnist John R Breitlow, a man who obviously knew his JDM. It’s always interesting to read something regarding MacDonald from the pen of someone whose exposure to the author preceded the appearance of McGee, and Breitlow seems to know what he is talking about. Unfortunately he ends the piece with that tired old cant about MacDonald having much too much talent to be writing such tripe.

New Hero Debuts in 2 Paperbacks

By JOHN R. BREITLOW

THE DEEP BLUE GOODBYE and NIGHTMARE IN PINK, by John D. MacDonald. Gold Medal Books, 144 pages each, 40 cents each. 

The world of John D. MacDonald is a limited but fascinating one. Located mainly on the east coast with Florida as its base of operations, it contains large numbers of motels, modern offices and high-rise apartments, plus a proponderance of expensive boats. It is peopled by very worldly individuals, being mainly virile heroes, sinister villains, and attractive heroines with a tendency to meet a violent end.

Few of MacDonald's works begin life in hard cover, but they are found in profusion on thousands of paperback stands. Although their specific ingredients vary in fascination and timely detail, their general pattern has a constancy not unlike the great "Chateau - bottled wines” of Bordeaux.

A literary connoisseur might object to such a comparison on the qualitative level with considerable justice, yet the comparison is apt. MacDonald fans who regularly invest small sums at the newsstands of bus depots, drug stores and hotel lobbies, know exactly what they are getting and tend to like it just that way, to judge from the volume of sales and regular appearance of new titles.

Over the years, there has been such a similarity in John D. MacDonald's heroes that he has now taken the logical step which will save him inventing a new name and background every three months - he has inaugurated a series, having settled upon the name and character of Travis McGee.

Anyone who has read more than two MacDonald books has already met McGee. He lives on a lavish houseboat which he won in a poker game. He makes a precarious living by robbing thieves for a 50 per cent commission in an aura of slightly tarnished knight - errantry. Experienced with fishpole, fists and charm, Travis McGee is generally admired by women and respected by men. Some might call him a bum and others might label him the product of his age. Both would be correct.

John D. MacDonald introduces Travis McGee to the paperback world in two volumes which appeared on newsstands almost simultaneously: The Deep Blue Good-by and Nightmare in Pink. While usually strong on titles, MacDonald appears this time to have submitted to a publisher's whim. The only apparent reason for these colorful allusions is to justify the books' front covers, tinted to match the otherwise obscure titles.

The Deep Blue Good-by finds McGee helping two pleasantly - formed highly dissimilar females who have suffered damage to both purse and pride at the hands of one Junior Allen, a sinister character with muscle, sex appeal, a large cruiser, and the hidden charm of an angered perverted cobra. The loot involves some precious stones smuggled out of the Orient in the Second World War.

This particular crusade confronts Sir T. McGee with a successful New York contractor, a Texas playboy heading for destruction, and a motley gathering of young people whose quest for kicks lands them in troubled West Indian waters. (MacDonald's opinion of the adolescent generation is even lower than they warrant, if that is possible.) Also up for consideration is the author's rather philosophical treatment of what might be called the “Bunny Syndrome," rather harsh but not unfriendly view of the modern playgirl.

Nightmare in Pink, the second of the Travis McGee series, removes the kindly boat bum from his marina and sends him to New York to help the younger sister of a permanently disabled Korean War buddy. McGee falls for the girl (MacDonald is rarely above allowing his heroes to tamper with his heroines) but for reasons unclear they decide to go separate ways.

Nightmare in Pink actually has some frightening aspects to its plot, which involves the use of neurological drugs and surgery to control some large family fortunes and eliminate anyone who stumbles onto the scheme. McGee himself barely avoids this fate and in making his escape from a "Rest Home" of fiendish design, inserts a schizoid drug into the staff coffee maker. The results would be funny, if the clinical detail wasn't quite so realistic.

These columns have previously lamented the fact that John D. MacDonald obviously chooses to grind out this sort of thing when he could be doing something better. We consider him a good writer, and wish he would hurry and make enough money from his paperback empire so that he could quit being a hack. Until that time, we will, like Ian Fleming proclaims on the cover of one of the first Travis McGee books, automatically read everything John D. MacDonald writes. Everyone, it would seem, has his weaknesses.

Travis McGee, Boatman

 

It might be surprising for a John D MacDonald fan to learn that Travis McGee’s 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush -- which plays such a prominent role in so many of the 21 novels starring the author’s series character -- has only been depicted by cover artists a handful of times. It was certainly surprising for me as I was researching this piece: I could have sworn I’d seen it more often. By my count I can find only four illustrations of the Flush on any of the various editions published in the United States prior to 1988, and I don’t think there have been any after that. All of the illustrations were inked by the great Robert McGuinness.

The houseboat’s first appearance took place with the first paperback edition of The Turquoise Lament in July 1974. It showed a well-groomed Travis McGee standing on a dock with the Flush taking up nearly every inch of the background. Now I’m no boat person but even I, at the time, could tell that this depiction of a 52’ boat was way too small to be the Flush. A few years later MacDonald’s bibliographer Walter Shine voiced the same sentiment in his JDM Bibliophile column:

"We nominate as the worst artistic depiction of any story the monstrosity of a houseboat which decorated the paperback editions of Turquoise and the second edition of Scarlet. That spindly little 28' no 'count boat no more resembles the 52' custom-built ‘decadently luxurious’ Busted Flush than Walter Shine resembles Travis D. McGee.

"Insult to injury, the Grand Rapids Special-looking furniture shown on the sundeck in Turquoise is indoor furniture, no more suitable to the Flush than a quart of Plymouth gin is to a nursing mother's breakfast.

"Worst still, there appears no place where there could be ‘topside controls.’"

As Walter states, this same version of the Flush was reused for a revised paperback edition of The Scarlet Ruse, hitting the stands in May of 1975. Again, an overly short houseboat with no topside controls.

The first paperback edition of The Dreadful Lemon Sky, published in September 1975, features an image of the Flush seen from the front, and there does appear to be -- a place for at least -- topside controls and an upper deck canopy. 

Finally, in June of 1976 Fawcett republished Bright Orange for the Shroud (its 19th printing) with what MIGHT be an image of the Flush, along with two other crafts alongside it. Being no expert on watercraft I can only say that none of them appear to be houseboats.

In 1975 an article appeared in the boating magazine Rudder written by esteemed journalist and editor of Sail Magazine, Martin A Luray, detailing John D MacDonald’s exacting expertise in all things boating, and including several passages from the McGee novels to prove it. MacDonald was interviewed for the piece and he revealed a few things I had not known about why he chose Bahia Mar as the port for the Busted Flush. Also included was an insert containing specifications for the houseboat (nowhere near as complete as Walter Shine’s multipage details in his 1987 monograph Special Confidential Report -- Subject: Travis McGee) along with an illustration of what the real Busted Flush probably looked like, “established through investigation to be the original design of the boat.” Given the author of the article and the magazine it appeared in, I’ll have to assume that this is the most accurate image of the Flush ever published -- or, at least, that I’ve ever seen.

I’ve transcribed the entire article below and included an image of the insert with the illustration afterward. To view a full screen version simply give it a mouse click.

Travis McGee, Boatman

By Martin Luray

Elsewhere in this issue is an article on liveaboards - a deeply researched intensive piece with extensive quotes from a number of boating folk who have given up life ashore for life afloat. Nowhere is mentioned, however, probably one of the most famous liveaboards of them all — a 6'4" ruggedly handsome private investigator cum "salvage expert" named Travis McGee whose home is The Busted Flush, a “barge-type houseboat' usually berthed in slip F-18 at Ft. Lauderdale's Bahia Mar.

McGee was hard to reach primarily because he doesn't exist and neither does The Busted Flush (or slip F-18 for that matter). He is the figment of author John D. MacDonald, who has written about McGee in 16 novels (the latest, The Dreadful Lemon Sky will be published in paperback by Fawcett next month) and has given his seagoing character an expertise about boats and boating that makes him totally appealing to marine buffs who also dig well-plotted detective stories that have some ring of truth. In the McGee books, all of the nomenclature is always correct. McGee describes himself as a “boat bum,” but he is [a] good seaman, expert boathandler, able at maintenance and repair of boats and engines. He has a fine eye for good lines - appreciative of beautiful vessels as well as the lovely soul-damaged women that recuperate from time to time aboard The Busted Flush as it voyages to the Keys or the Bahamas. What fantasy for you and I as we sail through the fog and murky depths of Long Island Sound.

The origins of The Busted Flush are not too obscure; it was won from a "Palm Beach sybarite" in a poker game, described briefly in the first Travis McGee epic, The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) and later enlarged upon in The Quick Red Fox:

"I had won the craft in a long poker siege in Palm Beach. The man wanted another advance to stay in the game, this last time putting up his Brazilian mistress as collateral, under the plausible assumption that she went with the boat, but his friends saved me the delicate problem of refusal by leading him gently away from the game”

McGee is not always at slip F-18. Sometimes he is away from boating altogether in places like Chicago and Hollywood and even Speculator, N.Y. (The Quick Red Fox). Sometimes he is close to the sea with adventures in Hawaii, the South Pacific and the Caribbean. But his knowledge of boating shows up when he is aboard The Busted Flush and has her moving somewhere as in Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965), where much of the action takes place in Florida waters.

McGee on anchoring:

"In the night I was awakened by the creak of the lines as The Flush was trying to go around on the tide change, swinging further each time until pushed by the breeze. I always rig two bow hooks in such a way that she shifts her weight from hook to hook when she changes end for end."

McGee gets his lines checked and then reflects on the ways of the seagoing world. "There are a lot of dead sailors who took things for granted. On a boat things go bad in sets of threes. When you pull a hook and then go hustle to get the wheels turning something will short out on you so that you go drifting, dead in the water. And that is the time when, without lights you drift right out into the ship channel, see running lights a city block apart coming down at you, run to get your big flashlight, fumble it and drop it over the side. A boat is something that never had just one thing wrong with it?”

McGee, of course, often singlehands The Flush, but on this trip he has two others on board to help him put the boat to bed for the night - this after a long expository blast about the destruction of the Everglades by human folly.

"I studied the chart and picked a spot. I went beyond Marco Pass to a wide pass named Hurricane Pass. The channel was easy to read from the topside controls. The Flush draws four feet and is heavily skegged to protect the shafts and wheels. It was low tide... the pass is so wide Roy Cannon (Island) has a sand beach. I edged north a little to get the protection of the headland which forms the north edge of the pass. At dead slow I ran the bow into the beach sand... we put out all four anchors, the two bow ones well up on the beach, wedged into the skeletal whiteness of mangrove killed by the sand which had built up. I carried the stern hooks out into the water neckdeep, wedged them in, stomped them firm. She would rest well there, lifting free with the incoming tide, settling back at the low.”

One imagines even McGee, strong as he is, being totally bushed from carrying those two Danforths into water neck-deep. But never mind, McGee survives potential hernia and shows us later how good he is at docking The Flush:

"When I balanced forward motion and downstream current, Arthur jumped to the dock with a line and I waved him on to the piling I wanted. With it fast, I cut off the engines and the flow swung the stern in. I put on a stern line and spring line. Chook asked about fenders and I saw that the rub rail would rest well against the pilings and I told her not to bother.”

So much for Travis McGee the navigator and boathandler. There is also McGee the maintenance and repair expert who supervises the rebuilding of the upper deck of The Busted Flush when it is torn apart by a bomb in The Dreadful Lemon Sky. And he is a good hand at fixing an automatic bilge pump, as he does aboard his friend Meyer's "aging cruiser John Maynard Keynes.” (A Tan and Sandy Silence, 1971):

"I got it apart again. I spun the little impeller blade and suddenly realized that maybe it turned too freely. Found the set screw would take a full turn. Tightened it back down onto the shaft. Reassembled the crummy little monster, bolted it down underwater, heaved myself out (of the bilge), sat on the edge of the hatch and had Meyer flip the switch. It started to make a nice steady wheeeeeeng, gouting dirty bilge water into the Bahia Mar yacht basin.”

When the pump turns itself off, Meyer says "Thank you very much and hooray."

As it turns out, John D. MacDonald, who I visited in Florida last spring, is no landlubber as a major national magazine mistakenly noted recently. He is a bona fide boatman who has cruised much of Florida's inland and coastal waters, the Caribbean and the Pacific. True, he owns no boat at the present, but the speedy Muñequita which appears in one of his books is based on the T-Craft I/O that was his waterborne vehicle for a number of years.

MacDonald and his wife Dorothy live on an island near Sarasota. One imagines living on a key as the ideal life of solitude for a writer, the isolated house among the mangroves, a lonely beach on which to walk and ponder. It is not like that. The island on which the MacDonalds live has slowly been taken over by developers, which accounts for McGee's wrath against real estate types and MacDonald's involvement with the local Save Our Bays movement. If there is any peace on the island, it is in the quiet cul de sac off the main highway where the MacDonald home, a large contemporary structure stands on 12 foot pilings. Oriented toward the Gulf on the west and toward another string of keys to the north, it is a house to be envious of, a proper place for a writer concerned with seagoing matters, comfortable, substantial, open to its environment. Every part of the house, in fact, is open-living room, kitchen, bedrooms on a balcony, library with a collection of current eclectic titles. Everything, that is, except MacDonald's work room which is partitioned off at one end of the house and contains his work tables, files and a research library.

At 58, with some 66 titles behind him (50 besides the Travis McGee series), MacDonald seems a person with deep feelings about the way we live which, as he says, he finds difficult to relate verbally. Like all good writers, his communicativeness is expressed in his books. A tall man with a gentle, meandering way of talking, yet known to be very firm about his principles, he is not a tough guy, or out to prove some sort of machismo like certain other detective story writers. He impresses simply as a creator of fiction in which his beliefs and whatever fantasies he may have about how we can slow down our destruction are channeled through Travis McGee.

We did a lot of chatting and when the talk got around to McGee, he said that the character came out of the marine environment in which he had lived between 1949 and 1964 when the first McGee book, The Deep Blue Goodbye appeared. Over the years he has done so much cruising to the Bahamas and Key West and Florida and Biscayne Bays that McGee's travels aboard The Busted Flush were reconstructed from memory with occasional help from charts. Instead of buying them, he'd leaf through them at one of the local chandleries.

About the choice of Bahia Mar as McGee's home port, MacDonald said, "We knew Bahia Mar from having stayed at Pier 66. We used to stay there when the weather was too bad to go across to the Bahamas. But Pier 66 was too glossy for McGee, he was better suited to be across the way among the liveaboards at Bahia Mar. His boat was based on one of those seagoing barges I used to see along the East Coast. I was trying to think in terms of having a place he could live on and move at the same time. Nothing static like Nero Wolfe and his orchids”

MacDonald is not a peevish man, but he has his not-too-carefully-hidden angers. The filling-in of Florida's natural estuaries. Poorly-built plastic boats. Lowering the state's water table through excessive building. Stripping the soil for potash which uses up enormous amounts of water (86 million gallons a day by one firm) not all of which is returned to the earth. REIT's -- Real Estate Investment Trusts, a condominium development system peculiar to Florida. A large national company's plant in Bradenton which puts "untold quantities of virulent, poisonous crud into the atmosphere.” Instinctively, one has to be on his side.

As I was about to leave, MacDonald pointed out a family of porpoises playing in the pass between his island and the next key. They tumbled over and over and suddenly a small one, a baby shot straight up, at least six feet above the surface. It was a rare moment. I reflected that if I waited long enough I would see them again-probably off the starboard bow of The Busted Flush as, with Trav at the helm, she heads for another rendezvous with the corrupt world of the non-boatman.

A Hero for Our Time

When John D MacDonald passed away on December 28, 1986, all but eleven of his 77 books -- novels, anthologies, non-fiction and a monograph -- were still in print in one form or another.* This included, of course, all 21 titles in the Travis McGee series. As far as I have been able to tell, these titles have never gone out of print and have enjoyed multiple editions over the years. While MacDonald was alive these various editions changed only insofar as their cover art and the accompanying blurbs. The Deep Blue Good-By, for example, went through 43 unique editions through 1987, including 38 in paperback (with five different cover illustrations), two Lippincott hardcovers, two large print editions, and one Detective Book Club edition. And I’m not even counting the two JDM trilogy anthologies that were produced. But if the McGee’s ever did go out of print, it would have happened sometime between 1987 and 1995, a period where my research is spotty and MacDonald’s popularity went into a steep decline.

Then, in the summer of 1995, Ballentine/Fawcett Crest began publishing brand new editions of the series, with new covers and, for the first time, additional material included. There was an introduction by fellow author and Floridian Carl Hiaasen and a brief piece by MacDonald’s son Maynard. That the covers stunk -- easily the worst ever produced for the titles, consisting of huge block lettering -- didn’t matter to JDM fans: the extras and the fact that they were available and taking up space in the Mystery sections of bookstore shelves was all that mattered.

To publicize this event, JDM biographer and editor of the JDM Bibliophile Ed Hirshberg wrote an article for the Tampa Bay Times titled “A Hero for Our Time,” which was published in the July 9, 1995 edition. I have transcribed it and present it below. Although it contains nothing that would have been new to readers of MacDonald’s works it does give a good sense of how far JDM had fallen off of the cultural radar, in that he even needed to be reintroduced to the reading public.

A Hero for Our Times
By Ed Hirshberg

Have you ever heard of Travis McGee, “that big brown loose-jointed beach bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, that slayer of small savage fish, that beach-walker, gin-drinker, quip-maker, peace-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly. scar-tissued reject from a structured society”?

No? Well now's your chance to get acquainted.

Starting this month with The Deep Blue Good-by, Ballantine/Fawcett Crest is republishing the entire Travis McGee mystery series written by Florida novelist John D. MacDonald. The classy new paperback edition of The Deep Blue Good-by includes such extra goodies as an enthusiastic introduction by Fort Lauderdale satirist Carl Hiaasen, a note from John D.'s son Maynard, and testimonials from Mary Higgins Clark, Sue Grafton, Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman and Donald Westlake.

The Deep Blue Good-by was originally published in 1964, closely followed that year by three more Travis McGee adventures: Nightmare In Pink, A Purple Place For Dying and The Quick Red Fox.

McGee calls himself a "salvage expert," who waits until he needs money, then "goes out and takes it from the taker, keeps half and gives the rest back to the innocent." That's his profession, at which he makes a very good living, enabling him to take his retirement "in chunks" as he goes along instead of waiting until he's too old to enjoy it. He lives on the Busted Flush, a 52-foot barge-type houseboat, luxuriously accoutred with a sunken bathtub and plush furnishings. He won the boat in a poker game with a rich South American who was afraid to call his bluff, hence the name.

A superb physical specimen, McGee is handsome in a rough sort of way. He is of that indeterminate age at which he remains attractive to most women of practically any age. He keeps his boat moored at the Bahia Mar Marina on the Inland Waterway in Fort Lauderdale, where a permanent plaque near Slip F-18 now marks the sacred spot.

What Travis McGee has, in short, is everything: enough money, a plethora of women and an interesting job doing good for people, all of which has made him a fascinating figure for millions of readers of both sexes. He is the kind of guy most women would like to be in love with and most men would like to be.

John D. MacDonald, who died in 1986, wrote 21 books about McGee, between 1964 and 1985. The books, each with a different color in its title, have continued to sell briskly (though not nearly as briskly as they did when the author was alive, despite the efforts of a passionate group of MacDonald aficionados.)

So why has Fawcett Crest chosen to republish the Travis McGee series? The publishing house obviously wants to win over a new generation of readers who has never heard of Travis McGee, but the timing is also right: These days we all need heroes like McGee.

MacDonald carefully crafted his character in a heroic mold. In the tradition of such mythical heroes as Hercules, Achilles and Theseus, McGee is of mysterious origins, has great physical strength, and is indefatigable in his amorous exploits. Despite his sybaritic and free-wheeling lifestyle, including his daily tot of Plymouth gin and tonic and the stream of women who pass through the door of the Busted Flush's snug cabin -- and occasionally detour into its king-size bed -- he is, however, fundamentally a decent man, a fit role model for a time starved for heroes.

Despite his weaknesses (and there are many), McGee is unquestionably one of the good guys. The people he chooses to help are usually the poor and the put-upon. Invariably Travis tries to help good people recover from injuries inflicted on them by bad people. He usually succeeds, though often at considerable and grievous cost to himself in the form of injuries, insults and other indignities.

Unlike the ordinary hero, who is usually a strong, silent type, Travis talks a lot. Actually, he is MacDonald's mouthpiece, expressing the author's opinions on a host of social issues. After his fourth McGee book, MacDonald brought in a sounding board for Travis because the author felt that his character was indulging in too many interior monologues. Meyer, a garrulous, hirsute economist, highly intelligent, with whom Travis can discuss the things that are bothering him, suddenly appears in A Deadly Shade of Gold and plays a vital part in the rest of the series. MacDonald once remarked that he felt he had every right to move his suspense novels in the direction of the so-called "legitimate" novels “of manners and morals, despair and failure, love and joy.... I shall continue with my sociological asides, with McGee's and Meyer's dissertations on the condition of medicine, retirement, face-lifting, earmites, road construction, white-collar theft, apartment architecture, magazine editing, acid rain, billyrock, low fidelity, and public service in America today."

Wide-ranging and all-embracing as Travis' interests are, his most persistent and passionate
opinions have to do with Florida's besieged environment. There are strong statements about what man's greed has done and is doing to despoil our state's natural resources - statements that are just as relevant today as they were when Travis or Meyer made them back in 1965. For example, in Bright Orange For The Shroud, the sixth book in the series, Travis speculates about the Everglades. Having failed to subdue it from frontal attack, "we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into the dragline canals that give him 'waterfront' lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying...”

*The John D MacDonald titles that were no longer in print in 1986 when MacDonald died were:

Title	Date of Last Edition
Ballroom of the Skies	February 1982
The Deceivers	January 1984
I Could Go On Singing	March 1963
Judge Me Not	June 1984
Nothing Can Go Wrong	March 1983
Other Times, Other Worlds	January 1980
Soft Touch	September 1982
Weep for Me	January 1959
Where is Janice Gantry?	December 1980
Wine of the Dreamers	February 1984
You Live Once	September 1981

"The Organized Following of John D MacDonald"

Here’s a transcription of a short piece that appeared in the August 27, 1971 issue of Publisher’s Weekly, written by Alice K Turner, titled "The Organized Following of John D MacDonald". It mostly covers background on the then-six year old JDM Bibliophile, the journal/fanzine dedicated to the work of John D MacDonald, and contains some original quotes from the author. What’s more fascinating -- to me, at least -- is the final paragraph, which reveals the genesis of Travis McGee’s appearance in hardcover. It’s a business arrangement I was unaware of. A special thanks to author Dan Pollock for sharing his copy of this article with me.

John D. MacDonald, creator of the Travis McGee series and many another novel, made a rare trip to New York the other day from his native Florida. Publisher’s Weekly asked him how it felt to be the only living icon (as far as we know) of an organized literary fan club. It felt fine, he reported.

“It's run by this nice couple out in California, Len and June Moffat. The whole thing started in the mid-60s with a mimeographed bibliography of my work which they sent round to 50 or so people, including me. Tony Boucher mentioned it in his New York Times column, which won a lot of interest. It slowly grew into a regular 'fanzine,' which now goes to about 800 people. No subscriptions-it comes out too irregularly-but they're up to number 18."

Mr. MacDonald is himself a regular contributor to the JDM Bibliophile, as it is called. He answers letters, criticizes critiques, satirizes satires, answers questions. “I like to do it,” he explains, “and besides, it would be gross not to. As a matter of fact, it helps with the mail. People who would otherwise be bothering me write to the magazine instead. So it turns out to be a service.

“Funny thing is, I've never met the Moffats. Last time I was out in California I kept meaning to call them. Something always came up and I was always pooped. So I've never even talked to them on the phone. In a funny way, I guess I wanted to keep it that way. They have, I think, an exalted image of me which I don't want to disgrace."

People who don't write to the Bibliophile sometimes write to Travis McGee himself at Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, where, as all true believers know, The Busted Flush is ordinarily moored. McGee mail is forwarded to MacDonald. Once in a while, there is a surprise.

“One was a letter from a Holiday Inn in South Carolina which began, 'Dear Mr. McGee.' And it turned out that some guy had signed in as McGee -- address and all -- and cut out the next day. He soaked them $16 for his room, plus $23 for phone bills. It gave me the strangest feeling—as if he were real for a second or two."

Mr. MacDonald has a chuckle McGee-like in richness. “About three years ago, I had published two or three stories in Playboy, and to my astonishment around Christmastime I got a bonus check for $150 in the mail. It made me feel very strange, as though I were a Playboy bunny and someone had just pinched me on the tail, then handed me a tip. I didn't know what to do with the thing. I couldn't send it back and I didn't want to keep it. So I wrote to Len and June, asking if they could think of anything to do with $150, and they wrote back and said, 'Gee, we've been saving to get our own Gestetner, so we won't have to print up the magazine on a borrowed one and we could certainly use the money for that.' So I sent it off to them--the right move for the right check."

For fans, the address is:
The JDM Bibliophile
c/o Len and June Moffat
Box 4456
Downey, Calif. 90241

Incidentally, The Turquoise Lament, arriving October 30 from Lippincott, will be the first McGee ever to make a hardcover debut. Under John D. MacDonald's usual (but unusual) contract, Lippincott picks up the McGees after Fawcett has first issued them and pays Mr. MacDonald only $1 royalty on the first 5000 sold, after which standard rates resume. The understanding with Lippincott, according to Mr. MacDonald, was that as a reward for this financially somewhat thankless task, Lippincott would one day get an original McGee. This is it. Fawcett gets it next summer to publish as a Gold Medal book, and from now on new McGees will appear in Gold Medal first, as before.

ALICE K. TURNER

Book's Author Likes Travis McGee Film

In August of 1970, two days prior to the public release of the film version of John D MacDonald’s 1966 Travis McGee novel Darker Than Amber, a private screening for VIP’s and selected members of the local press was held in Miami. The affair was hosted by the film’s producer Jack Reeves and he invited MacDonald, MacDonald’s wife Dorothy, and the film’s star Rod Taylor. The MacDonalds made it, Taylor didn’t: a week before the event he was injured in an automobile accident in California and his doctor would not consent to him traveling.

This article appeared in the August 13 edition of the Palm Beach Post and was written by staff reporter Dave Simms, who attended. The few bits of opinion JDM offered on the quality of the finished product are -- given the circumstances -- kind but vague, and in stark contrast to those he voiced later on.

Book's Author Likes Travis McGee Film

MIAMI - There is this eidetic image stamped on the back of my mind of the John D MacDonald photographs printed on the back of the suspense writer's books:

His eyes peering curiously upward through horn-rims as if he were pondering a giant sculpture of Travis McGee;

His mouth firm on the stem of a briar pipe as if he were expecting the sculpture to issue forth with a McGee-ism;

His shoulders draped in the beginnings of what appears to be, incongruous for a writer, a business suit, sliced at heart-top by the crop of the photograph.

So I'm walking through the tubular maze of hallways in Miami's squatty, pink Wometco Building, the image of the MacDonald photograph in my mind imaging Travis McGee and his hairy companion, Meyer, walking the same corridors, getting step by step closer to the private screening room.

It's the room where John D MacDonald awaits, in the VIP row in back, the pre-public showing of his first Travis McGee book to be made into a movie.

I expect a pipe with some burly aroma steaming from its bowl. And, despite the summer Florida heat and the business suit in the image, I expect a jacket of tweed.

But John D MacDonald is sitting there in a pencil-point-gray, pencil-point-thin jacket over a blue-black, carbon-paper-colored shirt. And he's chain smoking little brown cigars.

The projectionists is late and the pre-public showing of Darker Than Amber is delayed 15 minutes, a half hour, a few minutes more.

MacDonald is murmuring in outwardly relaxed conversation about politics, youth, movie contracts and columnist John Keasler.

The clothes and the conversation feign nonchalance. But the rapid succession of little brown cigars, impulsively extracted from a package-box, suggests a different mood.

I don't think it would be too unwarranted to speculate that John D MacDonald is a bit apprehensive, flutteringly expectant and maybe downright nervous.

"We're awfully sorry about the projectionist," says a man, obviously used to coordinating things, who's been darting around coordinating the long wait.

John D MacDonald is done murmuring. "I loved the book," he chants with good-natured sarcasm.

Creator of Travis McGee in 1964 (he's written a dozen McGee books since then), creator of mathematical-minded Meyer at the same time to travel South Florida, Mexico, elsewhere with McGee, the two quite probably MacDonald's alter egos, the writer is becoming good-naturedly impatient at the delay of their movie debut.

Lights down finally, screen ablaze with opening scene headlights. And credits. John D MacDonald gets almost a full screen of credit. And Darker Than Amber is rolling.

Travis McGee, the human hero National General Pictures hopes will become a household word for movie-goers, the human hero MacDonald readers already have made into a household word, is on the screen.

But more about the movie itself, which was shot in South Florida, after it opens publicly Friday.

Movie over, lights up. John D MacDonald pops up from his VIP chair. "Well, back to glaring reality," he says with conviction.

I ask, in comment form, "It seemed to me he leered once. I can't imagine Travis McGee ever leering."

"No," says MacDonald with a hearty laugh this time. "He smirked, maybe."

The whole movie? "I liked it better than I expected I would," he says, bunched up with some others at the entrance to the dining room of the M-S Sunward, the cruise ship on which part of the movie was shot and to which the private screening party is bused for lunch.

He indicates he liked it much better than Cape Fear, a movie made a decade ago, in pre-McGee days, from the MacDonald-written The Executioners.

But he says, "I'm a grown up boy... enough so I realize that if you translate a book into a movie accurately, the movie would take eight hours to run and nobody would stay."

MacDonald's wife says he was unhappy with the first Hollywood draft of the screenplay, but it apparently improved along the way.

John D MacDonald ponders a restaurant scene in the movie that isn't in the book. "I thought those two buddies of that kid in the bar were quite chicken." If he had written a similar sequence into a book, he would have written it differently.

He muses over something else and suddenly says in a gee-whiz kind of innocent tone, "You'd think they had to raid a blood-bank to get the blood for the picture."

He's laughing now a bit and people are shuffling around John D MacDonald, trying to impress him with how many of his books they've read and how much they know about Travis McGee.

I get the feeling John D MacDonald is not the type of writer who gets impressed with that kind of tactic. But he bends a bit today, after the screening, to be especially gracious and polite about it.

Because, for John D MacDonald, Travis McGee, after six years in paperback, is now alive and well on the movie screen.

"A Corpse on Me!"

Any writer who produced as much fiction as John D MacDonald did in his 40 year career was bound to repeat himself now and then. When you write nearly 470 short stories, novellas and novels it surely couldn’t be helped. Many bits of business that originated in long-forgotten and mostly neglected pulp magazine tales later showed up as pivotal plot points in later stories and novels, especially in the Travis McGee series. I’ve written before about some of these, including the oft-used jewels-hidden-in wax smuggling trick that first appeared in “The Flying Elephants” and was eventually the mcguffin of The Deep Blue Good-By. The gaslighting via pharmaceuticals that was so important to the plot of The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper was first invented back in 1948 for the novella “No Grave Has My Love.” The singular way to defend oneself against an attacking, leaping dog that McGee used in A Deadly Shade of Gold originated in a Doc Savage story called “The Chinese Pit,” published in 1947. And on occasion MacDonald didn’t even need to go back to the pulps for help: the entire first chapter of The Long Lavender Look was a rewrite of his 1961 Saturday Evening Post story “Sing a Song of Terror.”

So it’s no surprise when digging out an old story one hasn’t read in years, like “A Corpse on Me!” from the March 1950 issue of Dime Detective, to discover yet another antecedent to yet another Travis McGee adventure.

“A Corpse on Me!” begins with the story’s protagonist -- named Brendan Mahar -- observing a young woman walking down a city street. The prose is terse and wonderfully descriptive:

At four o'clock on that long-awaited October afternoon, Brendan Mahar saw her walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street, the suitcase dragging her shoulder down. Rain was a perpetual dreary mist, fattening to ripe drops on the dying leaves, darkening the gray stone wall that bordered the sidewalk, turning the litter of papers and leaves in the gutter to paste. There was an automaton quality about her walk and, even at a hundred feet, he sensed the expressionlessness of her face. She was hatless, her pale hair drawn tightly back.

The woman is Eileen Kraft and she has just been released from prison after spending four years there, jailed for being an accessory in a jewel heist. But instead of acting like the typical hardened female ex-con, Mahar observes Eileen’s complacent, disinterested attitude and, especially, her dead eyes. She must have been pretty once, but now her hands are puffy and bloated and her skin has an unhealthy pallor. Most noticeable is the ugly scar on the side of her mouth, the result of an attack by another inmate which was repaired haphazardly by prison doctors.

Mahar blocks her path and tells her he is going to help her, mentioning the name of a fellow inmate with whom Eileen was friendly. She is naturally hesitant, but woodenly agrees to come with Mahar, who has booked her a room at a local hotel. Mahar is a recovery agent working for an insurance company, although Eileen doesn’t know this and Mahar is eager to hide it from her. Once in the hotel room Eileen bathes and puts on some nice new clothing Mahar has purchased for her. They order room service and Mahar tells Eileen that he knows a plastic surgeon who can fix her damaged cheek. Eileen is curious about Mahar’s motivations but is too disinterested to ask too many questions. She is told that tomorrow she will see her old prison bunkmate, Betty Krastnov.

Mahar and his partner Cam Stoddard have concocted this ruse for a purpose. Eileen’s husband, Boo Renaki, was part of a four-man team who came up with the idea for the jewel heist. He was working on and planning the burglary unbeknownst to his new wife. But a few days before the planned snatch Boo decided that he could perform the deed on his own and freeze out his partners. With an unknowing Eileen acting as getaway driver, Boo robbed a safe and cracked an unexpected janitor over the head before hightailing it. The janitor soon died from his injuries, so now Boo was guilty of both burglary and murder. Plus, he had three very angry ex-partners now wondering where he had gone to. The couple was hiding out in a remote cabin on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and soon after the robbery Eileen returned from shopping to find Boo dead and the cabin turned upside down. Obviously the former partners had discovered Boo’s whereabouts and snatched the jewels before getting their revenge. Soon thereafter Eileen was picked up and sentenced to prison.

Mahar and Cam have convinced Betty Krastnov to go along with a ruse to pretend that the three of them are crooks looking for the whereabouts of the other partners, certain that Eileen must either know something or hold some unvoiced secret that will help them recover the jewels. But once Eileen realizes that they are “crooks” and that all the help Mahar has offered was only a means to an end, she comes out of her stupor and storms out of the hotel room. Suffering defeat, Mahar calls the hotel dick and asks him to stop her, thinking that having someone on the right side of the law pressure her might succeed where he had failed. But she is too quick and exits the hotel and walks down the street. After only a few moments outside a car stops and she is picked up and shoved into the back seat. The chase begins…

“A Corpse on Me!” -- which was, surprise, not MacDonald’s original title: it was “Sentence for a Lady” -- is a good, fairly representative example of MacDonald’s maturing writing skills during the dying days of the pulps. While the plot is straightforward and fairly obvious, the writing is peppered with keen, expertly expressed observation and even social awareness. Eileen’s background is compassionately described by Mahar in a conversation with his partner:

Cam: "Is she a pretty rough type?"

Mahar: "No. The Krastnov woman was right, Cam. I suppose women's prisons all over the country are full of them. Sensitive kids who grow up in the wrong neighborhood, too innocent to see what's going on right under their noses, then getting mixed up in something pretty shoddy. They get clapped into prison before they find out what the world is all about."

Cam: "If you're through with the philosophy and sociology, we'll get practical."

And even MacDonald’s typically glib ending is written to be shadowed in some doubt.

(For the seasoned reader of John D MacDonald, the clue that Eileen is a good girl is made obvious in her description: a blonde with pale gray-green eyes.)

The bit that was later reused in a Travis McGee novel occurs far too late in the story for me to reveal it here. It’s not terribly original and was probably used by countless other authors of the era, but still it’s similar enough to ring familiar tones in the mind’s ear of a MacDonald fan. The novel is the excellent eighth entry in the McGee series, One Fearful Yellow Eye, and the mcguffin was stolen and hidden by Saul Gorba.

As far as I can tell “A Corpse on Me!” has never been reprinted.

"An Island of Her Own"

John D MacDonald's first appearance in Redbook took place all the way back in June of 1951, with a short story titled "Nothing Must Change." By this time MacDonald already had five-plus years of short story writing under his belt and was just beginning to embark upon his career as a novelist. This same year he produced books like Wine of the Dreamers, Judge Me Not and -- the very same month that "Nothing Must Change" was published -- his cold war potboiler Murder for the Bride. That there is nothing about "Nothing Must Change" that would reveal its connection to those novels outside of the name of the author should not come as a surprise considering the title of the magazine in question, which billed itself as "The Magazine for Young Adults." MacDonald never set out to be a crime writer in particular, and the fact that it is what he is most known for is more a product of happenstance and the fiction market of post-war America than of any intention of the author’s part. Still, from his earliest days as a writer, he wrote and had published stories that we refer to as “mainstream,” in that they were geared to a general audience.

And with the one exception of his final appearance in the magazine -- a reprint of the pulp tale “Killers’ Nest” (appearing under a different title in conjunction with the publication of The Good Old Stuff) -- all of MacDonald’s Redbook stories are mainstream: light, situational tales constructed around what seems to be a relative minor turning point in the lives of the everyday protagonists, always ending happily on a positive, redeeming note. Such was the case for “An Island of Her Own,” the second-to-last original story MacDonald wrote for Redbook, appearing in the magazine’s February 1962 issue. It’s publication between two dramatically different novels -- One Monday We Killed Them All and A Key to the Suite -- is further evidence of the author’s range of interests and breadth of talent.

The setting is Boca Grande and the islands of Pine Island Sound, west of Fort Myers on the gulf coast of Florida. This was a fairly primitive section of the state in 1962, with limited electric service and spotty telephone connection, and whose main industry was fishing, both sport and industrial. The first-person narrator of the story is Barney Wescott, a charter boat captain who lives aboard his source of income, the Baylady II. He’s in between charters when the story opens, swimming off the Boca Grande beach, when he is hailed by a woman on shore. It’s Mary Dawes, “one of those rangy redheads with a lot of drive and independence,” and Barney’s eagerness in swimming to shore indicates that they are more than just acquaintances. Mary owns one of the nearly 100 islands that speckle the northern portion of Pine Island Sound, just south of Boca Grande, part of an inheritance she acquired years ago from her grandfather. It contains “an ancient cottage,” a slightly less ancient guest house, an artesian well and no phone or even electricity.

Mary doesn’t live there but a few months per year. The rest of her time is spent in New York, where she is a junior partner in an industrial-design firm specializing in consumer packaging. “It’s a high-pressure operation and she is supposed to be good at it,” Barney tells the reader. Her time on her island is usually spent working, where she can puzzle things out without interruption.

Barney’s backstory is typically MacDonaldean: a former young executive working in New York, commuting from Larchmont, who has a transcendent moment of realization after his wife leaves him. He quits his job, moves to Florida and dials down his life to a low idle. “I have a healed ulcer, enough muscle to gaff a green tarpon, an unclouded mind and a restful disposition.” His desire to “set the world on fire” is far behind him, and his one unattained ambition, revealed by MacDonald only between the lines, is the wooing of Mary Dawes. (See Joe Rutland, the protagonist of 1954’s “Built for Speed” for one of MacDonald’s numerous antecedents. See also Gevan Dean in Area of Suspicion.)

It began two years before, at the end of one of Mary’s two month stays in Florida. After a day of sailing, swimming, sandwiches and sunning on the beach, they kissed, with “increasing enthusiasm” until Mary broke it up abruptly.

“Why?” I demanded. That is ever the forlorn question of the spurned male. “Why, honey?”

“Because you are a sweet guy, Barney, a very simpatico and amusing guy, and as I have just learned, a very exciting guy.”

“You’re reading the wrong lines. Those are mine.”

“And because I am not a random girl with random habits. I am a for-keeps girl, and it just isn’t in the cards.”

“Shuffle and deal again. Maybe it is.”

“No, Barney. I work at something I’m good at. I like to be good at things. I wouldn’t be good at all the being a wife. Everything I heat sticks to the pan. Children terrify me. And anyhow, I’d either have to drag you North or be a dead weight on you down here. So we stop right now, before we’ve done any kind of damage to anybody… We’ll be friends, the way we have been.”

Once the two of you have played that familiar scene, it leaves you in a kind of emotional limbo. You can’t get back to where you were and there’s no place else to go. In the two years since it happened I’ve found no one I could classify as a reasonable adequate facsimile, nobody with eyes so blue.

So, Mary has called Barney from his swimming idyll in order to hire his services. Her own boat is getting worked on and she needs the Baylady II. She also needs Barney. Her sister Liz had been scheduled to come down for a week, accompanied by someone in need of rest and solitude, but Liz can’t make it so the companion is arriving on his own. “She collects hopeless idiots and they sponge off her shamefully, and she’s sending one down because his nerves are supposed to be unraveling…” Uneasy with the idea of spending a week on the island alone with a “wounded duck,” she wants Barney living there as well.

“If I can decide right off he’s harmless, you won’t have to stay over, Barney. But I want to be ready in case he looks susceptible to tropical passion.”

“I thought you could handle anybody, girl.”

“Well, you were easy, Barney. But you don’t know Liz’s friends.”

As Mary and Barney wait in a Boca Grande bar for the arrival of the “wounded duck,” Mary reveals that she doesn’t know the guy’s name or even what he looks like. Just then then a man enters, wearing a “dark city suit” and carrying a topcoat and an aluminum suitcase. “He looked young, benign and fat.” Mary asks Barney to “herd him this way, please…” Barney does as he is asked, noticing that, close-up, the stranger is more massive than fat, and he looks at Barney with cold blue eyes. As introductions are made the man is incredulous that they don’t know who he is. Morgan Stonebarger -- The architect! He is officious, presupposing and downright rude. And he apparently didn’t know that he was going to be living on Mary’s island.

But he agrees and they motor on over in the Baylady. Mary and Barney begin to respond to Stonebarger’s orders and incredulity with increasing sarcasm, which only infuriates him more. And when they arrive at Mary’s island and enter her cottage, Stonebarger is immediately intrigued by her work area.

“... he walked by her and went to the big tilted drafting table. We both followed him. He looked at the nearly completed drawing pinned to the board. He turned and smiled at Mary Dawes. I had the curious feeling he was actually looking at her for the first time.

“A hobby, Mary?” he asked. “Or isn’t it yours?”

Her throat worked visibly as she swallowed. “It’s mine. A poor thing, but mine own. I prefer it to knitting.”

“Container for what?”

“A new hand lotion. Expensive.”

“The draftsmanship is fairly good,” he said, “but the conception is tasteless. It’s a fraudulent version of decent classic proportions. We call it Supermarked Moderne.”

“What?” she said. She looked stunned. “Who are you to -- Listen, the market research behind that design is --”

“It will sell,” he said. “Of course it will sell. There is almost no limit to the ability of the American public to absorb contrived bad taste. But the true area of integrity in design is to create something that is clean and beautiful and also salable.” He looked around at her working sketches of other projects, taped to the alcove walls. “But you do not have that kind of talent, my dear. And don’t be upset. Few do.”

At this point Mary is boiling but Stonebarger ignores her, picks up a charcoal pencil and begins making adjustments to one of her drawings, then another, eventually to all of the sketches that paper her walls.. “We eliminate this rather horrid and pointless bulge, balance this line, widen the base and at the same time give it more of a look of grace and delicacy…”

Mary explodes, orders him out of the cottage and into the guest quarters where he is to stay. Barney accompanies him and notices that Stonebarger is genuinely surprised. “I believe that I’ve actually upset her,” he said. “Maybe when she quiets down you might let her know that I would charge ten thousand dollars to a commercial enterprise for that amount of consultant design service.”

To go further and reveal more would spoil the story for anyone lucky enough to find and read it. I honestly didn’t see where this tale was going until a big reveal later on. Suffice it to say that, despite the fact that this was 1961 and Mary Dawes is, in MacDonald’s world, a relatively independent, self-sufficient female, it all ends glibly, as one would expect in both a JDM tale and for a story in Redbook.

“An Island of Her Own” was published two years before the appearance of the first Travis McGee novels, yet readers of those books will no doubt spot a particular similarity -- outside of the story’s setting in Florida and around the state’s gulf coast. Mary Dawes’ profession, designer of consumer packaging, was later used in the second McGee novel, Nightmare in Pink, as the profession of Nina Gibson, sister of McGee’s army buddy Mike Gibson. Like Mary, Nina works for a Park Avenue firm and her residence in New York is a kind of a second office, complete with a drafting table and sketches pinned to the walls. Yet Nina herself sounds a bit more like Stongarger than Mary when McGee, in the apartment for the first time, studies one of her sketches, a drawing of a jar, which McGee notes was “striking… with a severe and classic beauty.”

"Do you like that one?" she asked.

"Very much."

"You've got a pretty good eye, McGee. The client didn't like it. We go around telling each other that good taste will sell. Maybe it will, at the right time and the right place. But what is truly commercial is a kind of vulgarity upgraded just enough to look like good taste. And the best ones in the business are the ones who can toss that kind of crap off naturally, and really believe it's great."

There are also echoes of MacDonald’s first Redbook story here, “Nothing Must Change.”

“An Island of Her Own” has not, to my knowledge, ever been reprinted.