You Live Once

You Live Once is John D MacDonald's sixteenth novel, published in March 1956 by Popular Library as a paperback original. Following on the heels of the multi-character Cry Hard, Cry Fast, it was a return to the straightforward, first person narrative crime story that he had last employed in A Bullet for Cinderella a year earlier. In discussing that novel I asserted that A Bullet for Cinderella was not first-rate MacDonald, that it was a step backward in his progression as a novelist and, in particular, a stylist. I'm afraid the same is true for You Live Once. Taken on its own terms it is an interesting and suspenseful story, but read on the heels of the excellent Cry Hard, Cry Fast the book seems hurried, abrupt and disjointed. It features an everyman hero who suddenly finds himself in a dangerous situation, and MacDonald attempts to combine so many of the features from his earlier books that the reader gets the sense he wasn't exactly sure of the kind of book he wanted to write. We have the corporate executive and his problems, as explored in Cancel All Our Vows and Area of Suspicion, the insular small town society of Contrary Pleasure and -- again -- Area of Suspicion, all written around a whodunit plot that is reminiscent of All These Condemned. The novel had a somewhat troubled history prior to its publication (see below) so perhaps the author simply wanted to get it done and move on to other things.

The book has the feel of an overextended short story, featuring a well-worn literary device to kick-start the plot and get things rolling (a dead body). Along the way we're treated to a rich patriarch, hints of madness in an old-line family, a sadistic cop, a wanton wench, a private eye and a completely over-the-top bad guy. You Live Once also features what is easily MacDonald's worst and most embarrassing love scene, several pages so clumsily written and placed in the plot that he actually has the female say "Whatever this is, it isn't funny!"

The protagonist is Clint Sewell, a junior executive with Consolidated Pneumatic Products who has recently been transferred to the company's Tube and Cylinder Division in Warren, a fictional town in an unnamed midwestern state. His new boss, who was moved in after him, is Dodd Raymond, a one-time local who is back working in his home town, an unusual move for the company. Dodd springs from one of the old line families of Warren and travels in that elevated circle of country clubs, exclusive sub-divisions and fancy lakeside weekend retreats. He also has an old flame, "an easy loving belle" by the name of Mary Olan, who he immediately begins seeing secretly, something suspected by his wife Nancy. As a ruse and to throw Nancy and everyone else off the scent of his illicit affair, Dodd has convinced Clint to be his decoy, accompanying Mary to public events and to dinner foursomes with Dodd and Nancy. Clint does as he is told, and who can blame him?

"Mary Olan was smallish but sturdy... She is brown and rounded and firm. She has black, black hair and about all she does with it is keep it out of her eyes. She has a thin face, a wide mouth, black caterpillar eyebrows, a go-to-hell expression, limitless energy and several million bucks tied up in various trust funds. She has an air of importance. Waiters and doormen snap, pop and crackle when she lifts one finger, or one millimeter of eyebrow. In a faded bathing suit in the middle of Jones Beach she would still be unmistakably Somebody. She has an electric something that could disorganize the equipment in a research lab. Even the halfhearted kisses she had allowed me would each have melted an acre of perma-frost above Nome."

Mary's money has kept her from being called -- in the vernacular of the day -- "a bum," her behavior "sufficiently lurid" and featuring "one marriage, an annulment, other escapades and scandals." In their moments alone Clint tries to get to second base but is rebuffed repeatedly -- not by anger but usually by derisive laughter. Nancy's suspicions have impelled her to ask Clint to keep trying, to get her away from her husband, but what she doesn't know is that Clint is secretly pining for her (Nancy), but not badly enough to take any action. She is Mary's opposite in every way, a "candybox blonde... small perfect delicate features, silky floating hair... [and] a little-girl voice with overtones of a lisp cured long ago."

The reason behind Mary's wanton behavior is implied to have been caused by an incident in her past. Her mother murdered her father when Mary was two years old, then was institutionalized in a mental asylum. Mary was raised by her uncle Willy Prior, a wealthy, conservative and upright man with a wife and three daughters of his own. The three girls are prim and reasonably proper, but not Mary, who flaunts her disobedience in the face of her uncle. There is talk in the town that the family blood is tainted and that Mary may be just as nuts as her mother--- why else would she behave so?!

All of this background is filled into the early chapters of the book but unknown to the reader when we meet Clint, awakened on a Sunday morning by two policemen looking for Mary. She didn't return home the night before when she was out on a date with Clint. Clint explains that Mary dropped him off at the house at around two and left, with a promised drive up to the town lake the following morning. After the police leave Clint goes to get dressed, only to find the dead body of Mary Olan lying on the floor of his bedroom closet, with one of his belts pulled tightly around her throat.

After considerable shock and panic, Clint decides that there is no way he would not be blamed for this crime, although he is certain he did not commit it. Someone is trying to frame him, someone who probably hated Mary enough to want her dead. This being a whodunit, that means almost everyone in town, with the exception of Clint. He wraps the body in a tarp and throws it into the trunk of his car and drives toward the lake where he and Mary were to have gone that morning. Along the way he pulls into a wooded area and throws the body down a deserted ravine. From there he goes to the lake and tries to pretend that all is well.

As the days go by Clint goes to work as the town's big preoccupation becomes "Where is Mary Olan?" A meeting is held by the police, a sort of inquest where they question anyone who had any contact with Mary. There Clint meets Paul France, a licensed investigator brought in by the police to ask the kinds of tough questions the local cops can't address to town royalty like Willy Prior. The inquiry goes on for some time and is eventually interrupted by a phone call. Mary has been found, by a troop of hiking Brownies, strangled and at the bottom of a ravine. There is apparently nothing to implicate Clint and he returns home after the meeting. After dinner he takes a walk and as he is returning approaching his apartment he sees the place surrounded by cops. Realizing that they've made some connection, he flees.

The only place he can think to hide out is the nearby apartment of his secretary Toni MacRae. Toni has been introduced in passing earlier in the book as someone Clint had tried to date but who rebuffed him with a standing rule never to date men she worked for. Still, MacDonald's description of her, as it typically does, gives away her future importance in the plot and in the life of the hero.

"She is a slim and pleasant morsel, and satisfyingly bright. She decorates and implements an office adequately. Italian and Scots combine to make an intriguing woman. Her mother gave her her coloring, her suggestively rounded figure with its promise of languor and lazy Sundays in bed. But from Papa she inherited a cool, canny eye, a lot of skepticism, and a brain that goes click like an I.B.M. machine... It makes for a peculiar relationship to share an office with a girl who is lovely and desirable, as well as efficient."

Unsure as to why Clint is throwing pebbles against the window of her rooming house apartment, Toni sneaks him in with a warning to keep his voice down in order to keep the landlady from hearing. Clint tells her the whole story and asks her to help him. When she agrees he suddenly realizes that he is in love with her, that it has always been her and, like some smitten high school kid, he tries to tell her.

"One minute she was a handsome gal with a good mind, good taste, and far better equipment than average. All that one minute -- and then she was suddenly Toni MacRae. Not a pastime, not a hobby, not a target for tonight. Toni. Part of my life. Most of my life. All of my life."

One has to go pretty early into the writing career of John D MacDonald to find anything as embarrassingly written as that -- and it's only a small part of the "love scene."

Toni comes around, admits that she's always loved and wanted Clint, cries, they make wonderful love and then start calling each other "darling." But Paul France is a good snoop and the following day, while Toni is at work, France convinces the landlady to let him into Toni's room. He discovers Clint, who manages to briefly escape before giving himself up. Then he's at the mercy of the local police, and the word "mercy" is not in their vocabulary.

This being a whodunit I won't reveal any more of the plot, but I think that any reader of mystery stories can pick out the killer early on in the narrative without too much trouble. There is a particular physical characteristic of a certain person described in a nearly gratuitous way that makes one instantly suspicious. I spotted it 35 years ago when I first read the book and it leapt out again when I recently re-read it. It's bad writing and is illustrative as to why this kind of mystery was not MacDonald's strong point. Yet there is a good reason to read this undemanding work, and it's not the plot or the characterizations or the sex or the dialogue. You Live Once is one of MacDonald's earliest attempts at illustrating and exploring the life of the corporate executive, specifically the new kind of gypsy exec who was becoming the norm in postwar industrial America. One of the reasons for Clint Sewell's insecurity and his quick assumption that he will not be believed is precisely because of his outsider status in the town of Warren. He is a man who is shifted about by the whim and the immediate need of a faceless corporate entity, a company that uses their policy of musical chairs as a winnowing process, promoting the superior, dumping the inadequate and using up the merely-efficient. It's one of the recurring themes in MacDonald's work and emerges frequently in later novels such as A Man of Affairs, The Deceivers and Clemmie, and it would reach its apogee in MacDonald's masterful short story "The Trap of Solid Gold."

There are a few passages that bring this lifestyle to light, revealing both its rewards as well as its hazards, with much subtext and style.

"Warren is a tight community. I was part of the new influx of postwar population, and a professional transient at that. The old part of town drew its skirts tightly around itself, talked about the dreadful habits of the 'new element,' and quietly raised its standard of living with the money we were bringing in. So I had battered myself into apathy with workouts at the Y, with sheaves of work I brought home from the office, with library books that I had never gotten around to reading before. When restlessness got its sharp fangs into me, I'd roam the Saturday bars. That is a forlorn pursuit, eying the tight-skirt little drabs in the neighborhood joints, or the enameled Vogue-like birds of prey in the dollar-a-cocktail lounges, nursing their pale poison during the five o'clock ritual of appraisal and rejection. The jukes hammer your head and your need is a sickness to be assuaged only by predictable shame."

Wow. A paragraph like that is worth the cover price of the book. Clint continues,

"During my five transient years I had come to learn that the more complex the civilization grows, the more violent are the effects of loneliness. I has learned why CPP, GE, DuPont, Alcoa, Ford, General Motors, Kodak and all the rest of them wanted us safely married. Still, there were a lot of us still single, minds honed keen by Sheffield, Towne, Stanford, Harvard Business School, MIT, and by day we made things run and move and grow. But by night we paced the neon sidewalks where nylon whispers on hips and ankles, and lipstick shows black when the light overhead is red... A few times I had reached the point where the act of marriage became a goal in itself, apart from any specific woman. Marriage to a faceless being who was nevertheless all too vivid from the neck down, who by warmth and closeness would still the gnaw of the blood."

No wonder Clint jumps at the chance to date Mary Olan: It opened a door to "a world previously denied [him]."

What little reception You Live Once was accorded when it was released in 1956 was lukewarm. The only contemporaneous review of the novel came from the reliable Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, who complained that JDM's foray into the world of whodunit was "none too fresh or surprising." When the book was republished in 1961 a reviewer for the Hamilton Ontario Spectator complained that the book was "poorly plotted and the characters... wooden enough to worry the reader as they make their appearance." He also rued MacDonald's "decision" to allow the book to be republished, sparking a rare response from JDM, who wrote that "no publisher's contract in existence gives the author the power to veto further printings of work under contract."

MacDonald's original title for this work was You Kill Me, and like a previous novel that Popular Library had re-titled (A Bullet for Cinderella), it was allowed to appear under its original name when the book was reprinted in the early Sixties. And, like A Bullet for Cinderella -- which had become On the Make -- the originally-assigned title was restored to all subsequent printings when Fawcett obtained the rights to the JDM catalog in the mid Sixties. You Kill Me featured a slightly altered version of the original's cover -- again, just like On the Make. That cover, featuring a wild-and-crazy Mary Olan lifting her skirt in front of a background shot of Clint Sewell carrying her dead body, was illustrated by a now-unknown artist (unknown, at least, to me and to MacDonald bibliographer Walter Shine). The subsequent Fawcett reprints depicted a dead Mary being carried into the woods and was done by the always-superb Robert McGinnis. It was used -- in one form or another -- on every future edition.

For book collectors, identifying a true first edition isn't that hard -- it bears the Popular Library number 737 -- but the book was unique in the MacDonald world in that there were two versions of that "first" published. One contained a green tint on the inside of both the front and back covers, the other was white. I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this idea and I don't think that one is more valuable than the other. A second printing was run a mere eight months after the first (in November 1956), possibly indicating the popularity of the title. The total number of books printed under the Popular Library label (including the 1961 You Kill Me) was 314,000, a huge increase over their run of Cry Hard, Cry Fast (189,000 copies) and the paperback version of Contrary Pleasure (225,000).

I mentioned above that You Live Once had a troubled history. According to Walter Shine, the original manuscript for You Live Once was written in early 1955. It was submitted to Popular Library, who approved it and paid MacDonald his advance, but they requested extensive rewrites. This was not unusual at the time -- or probably now -- but the fact that this was mentioned indicates that the extent of this request may have exceeded that which MacDonald was accustomed to. While working on the revisions requested, JDM's agent showed the original manuscript to Cosmopolitan magazine, who liked it and wanted to publish it, but in a shorter version. In fact, the length they were willing to print was about one third of the original length of the novel. So MacDonald first began working on the Cosmopolitan version -- it was his first novel to be "previewed" in a magazine, and under the title "Deadly Victim" -- which eventually appeared in their April 1955 issue. After he was done with that he then began working on the Popular Library rewrites. He told an audience in a speech in November 1955 that "...I am getting very tired of the characters in this book."

It was, however, a good thing for the author, as Cosmopolitan went on to "preview" seventeen more of his novels over the years, including many of his finest works of the 1950's and five Travis McGee novels.

Incidentally, You Live Once was the third of only four John D MacDonald books published by Popular Library and the last of his novels printed by them. The final PL JDM paperback published was the July 1956 anthology Border Town Girl. Consisting of only two novellas -- the original "Linda" and the reprint of an old Dime Detective novella originally titled "Five Star Final" -- it was, perhaps, a last contractual obligation in a troubled professional relationship.

You Live Once is out of print but easily obtainable from used book sellers.

April Evil

April Evil was the first non-Travis McGee John D MacDonald novel I ever read. It was way back in 1974 and I had just finished reading The Dreadful Lemon Sky, the most recent McGee then published, and I knew it was time to tackle the rest of the MacDonald canon. I usually like to read the works of an author in the order he or she wrote them, but a friend of mine -- the same pal who had introduced me to Travis-- owned a copy of April Evil and recommended it enthusiastically. At the time I had no idea where the work fell in the order of writing, and even after I finished it I really couldn't tell that it had been written eight years before the first McGee. I thoroughly enjoyed it and, despite a few shortcomings, felt it could stand with the best of what I had read so far.

Reading it again was pure joy and it's nice to report that the novel holds up well. MacDonald returns to his third-person, multi-perspective template after stumbling slightly with You Live Once, and here he writes a much tighter plot, with a focused narrative that moves along quickly. It's a bit of a preview of his 1958 novel The Executioners, in that he begins with a peaceful, unsuspecting and unprepared setting and introduces evil into it. He also presages that novel with one of the characters, a bad guy named Ronnie Crown, who is one of a long line of soulless MacDonald villains that would reach its apogee with Max Cady. But what makes April Evil really interesting is MacDonald's attempt to write a novel with no real hero in it. The author uses attorney Ben Piersall as a kind of narrative anchor, but Ben does nothing heroic and seems more of an observer in the plot. And out of all of the main characters featured in the book he probably gets the least amount of face time.

Ben is also at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to capturing the reader's interest, because April Evil is peopled with some of the most fascinating MacDonald characters to date. And once one gets over a somewhat fanciful premise -- millions of dollars locked away in an old house -- April Evil reads with a realism and attention to detail that had already become a MacDonald hallmark.

The setting for the novel is a barely-disguised Sarasota in the Florida of 1956, still a relatively small, insular and undeveloped town on the west coast of the state. He calls it Flamingo, a town of twelve thousand, and it is peopled with the kinds of characters one would expect in a JDM novel: attorneys, real estate agents, car dealers and retired doctors. If evil exists in Flamingo it is a venal evil, limited to cheating wives, unscrupulous businessmen and ham fisted attempts to get at an inheritance a bit early. Into this setting comes real evil, driving into town in a gray Buick with Illinois plates. Surely it was April Evil that Geoffrey O'Brien had in mind when discussing MacDonald in his great Hardboiled America, describing "...a hundred tiny dramas of loyalty and betrayal, small lusts, quiet madness, interior dramas of regeneration, all set spinning about each other, meeting and meshing..." That description could apply to any number of JDM's third-person narratives, but O'Brien's inclusion of "...an unfamiliar Cadillac gliding menacingly through the streets of a small town..." makes one immediately think of April Evil.

The novel appeared as a paperback original, a Dell First Edition, MacDonald's third novel for that publisher. Hitting the stands in December 1955, it's publication coincided with a condensed version of the book that appeared in the January 1956 issue of Cosmopolitan, featured as the magazine's monthly "Complete Mystery Novel." I count April Evil as MacDonald's seventeenth novel, although there has been some confusion about the exact dating of the book which I will deal with in more detail at the end of this piece.

The plot of the novel is relatively simple: Paul Tomlin is an elderly recluse, a retired doctor who, after years of practice in Flamingo, lives two miles inland in a large estate home he calls Rocklands. Distrustful of banks after losing money in the Depression, he had a large vault built in the house while it was under construction, and in it he stores all of his liquid assets. No one knows exactly how much Dr. Tomlin has there, but the best guess is somewhere between one and one-and-a-half million dollars. The only other person who lives with Tomlin is an elderly Negro driver and manservant named Arnold.

One would think that with all that money there for so long, someone by now (1955) would have gone after it. Apparently not, but now two separate plots are hatched to try and separate Tomlin from his money. Widowed and childless since the turn of the century, the only living blood relative he has is one Dil Parks, a Flamingo car dealer who is his grand nephew. But a distant relative he didn't even know about, a small-time punk named Joe Preston, lives out on the west coast and has heard rumors of Tomlin's hidden wealth. He tells a criminal acquaintance who, while in jail, tells a hardened criminal named Harry Mullin. Mullin escapes and, along with a dim-witted ex-showgirl named Sally Leon, heads for Flamingo. Through a crime syndicate he arranges for a couple of accomplices to aid him in the removal of Dr. Tomlin's cash, a safecracker named Ace and a cold-eyed killer named Ronnie Crown. Before Ace and Crown arrive Harry and Sal manage to rent a bayside home, a nice house on a large lot, with a dock and plenty privacy.

Meanwhile, Joe Preston and his young wife Laurie have moved east and are staying with Dr. Tomlin. They would likely have been shown the door the minute they arrived had Dr. Tomlin not taken an immediate interest in Laurie, in whom he sees reminders of his long-dead wife. Laurie becomes his constant companion, reading to the doctor every morning and helping Arnold around the house, while Joe spends most of his days in local Flamingo bars. It is this new relationship that launches the second plot to get Dr. Tomlin's money, when Dil Parks' wife Lenora begins to fret that she and her husband may now be frozen out of Dr. Tomlin's will. That is something they cannot afford.

Lenora Parks is a quintessential MacDonald character, a wanton, amoral, restless housewife who seems incapable of being faithful to her husband. Spoiled by a taste of the finer things in life, the couple has gotten deeply into debt and Dil's income from his car dealership is nowhere near enough to support their lifestyle. Lenora manages a "chance" golf course meeting with an old flame, local attorney Ben Piersall, who dumped her years ago and is now happily married and the father of two children. Lenora wants to have Tomlin declared incompetent and asks Ben to help her with the legal details. Ben, of course, refuses and warns Lenora that if she attempts it and is unsuccessful, Tomlin will write them out of his will forever. She realizes that she will need to come up with a different way to get the job done.

When Ben returns home that evening he tell his wife Joan about the meeting with Lenora, but is interrupted by his twelve-year-old son Toby. He wants to tell his dad about what happened to him when we tried to go fishing on the dock of the empty house next door. A man came out of the house and yelled at him to "get the hell off the property." Startled and frightened, Toby ran home. "He looked like some kind of gangster," he tells his father.

Of course, Harry and company have moved in next door to the Piersalls. The plot begins to move when Toby, who happens to be a reader of true crime magazines, thinks that the man who chased him off the dock looks like one of the gangsters he read about recently. He is determined to find out for sure and one evening sneaks up to the house to look in the window. He is caught and tied up, kept prisoner in the house until the gang leaves to carry out their attempted robbery of the Tomlin stash.

The plot of April Evil, as interesting and as wonderfully interconnected as it is, is not the main strength of this novel. What makes this a great read is the author's ability to flesh out character through the use of background and his amazing ability to digress while maintaining narrative focus. It's the short story master's ability to tell the "hundreds of tiny dramas" of his characters while at the same time spinning a single, riveting plot. He began this device with The Damned in 1952 and continued using it, on and off, up until his final published work, Barrier Island. By the end of April Evil the reader feels like they know the characters as well as they can know anyone. A few of them stand out:

Sally Leon, who could have been a peripheral character in this plot, is given six pages of background around midway through the book. We see her from the beginning, the fifth child of a Michigan factory worker, "moving dimly through life," focused on only one thing: The Dream.

"The Dream was the only important thing. It always had the same ending -- a black limousine pulling up to the marquee, police holding the crowd back, searchlight beams cutting across the dark blue velvet of the California sky. "Hey, it's Sally Leon!' they would yell and the police would strain to hold them back... Regal in sables, smiling brilliantly and nodding to her fans, walking between the packed throngs into the movie, sitting there with people who adored her, to watch the first showing of the film that would win the Oscar."

At fifteen she moved to Hollywood and registered with Central Casting, but the calls never came. She was fired from a couple of car hop jobs because she could not remember the orders. Later she got a job in a department store but was fired from there as well, for simply being too absent-minded. She managed to get a job as a waitress in a Los Angeles tavern, where she met an man who claimed to be an assistant producer with one of the movie studios. She moved in with him once he "made it quite clear that this is the way you get into the movies." When she learned that the man was, in fact, a studio electrician, she moved out and got her old job back. The next man in her life was actually a real agent, and he got her three days work as an extra in a college picture, playing one of several dozen cheering students sitting in the stands of a football stadium. When the agent tired of her he passed her along to a young screenwriter, who briefly paid for voice lessons before dumping her.
 She winds up working in a club, where she is "discovered" by another movie man, and he hires her to be in his next film. But these are not the kinds of films that Sally ever imagined she would star in.

 "There were no introductions. The cameraman looked at Sally carefully. "This is better stuff that those last pigs. You sure you want to do this, kid?" Then she was told what she would have to do. She did not want to do it. But they all acted so matter-of-fact about it. And... the man who brought her told her the makeup would be pretty heavy, and she could fix her hair a little different. She was still reluctant and [the man] said he would make it a hundred and a half instead of a hundred. She had never done anything like it before. She was scared and awkward. Finally they felt they had enough, and the sun was out when [the man] drove her home."

 Sally went on to make seven of these pictures before she actually sat down and watched one.

"She paid no attention to what she was doing in the short sound [film]. She was only interested in how she looked, how her voice sounded, how she walked and held herself. She knew at once that she was looking at a stranger, not at the creature in The Dream. She looked at a girl with a ripe, heavy body and a blank face and a thin squeaky voice and dull eyes. The Dream died there."

From there Sally descends into strip clubs, where she meets up with the gangsters who eventually pass her off, one last time, to a recently escaped convict, Harry Mullin.

Dil Parks is another character who could have been hastily sketched, as his part in the plot is secondary, yet MacDonald gives him a chapter that is wonderfully detailed, revealing a man who has wasted all of the opportunities given to him in life and who, at the point where the reader gets to know him, is sinking into an almost Cainsian despair. Described by Ben Piersall as "ninety-five percent slob," Dil is the kind of man MacDonald truly dislikes, devoid of morality and any kind of work ethic. He has let his once-athletic body go to seed, and in a single paragraph early in the novel we learn -- again, through the eyes of Ben -- all we need to know about what kind of man he is.

"Dil had turned into a big-bellied, hard-drinking loudmouth. It was not a role that suited him with precision. There was something plaintive and uneasy in his eyes, even as he told his bawdiest stories. He owned and operated a marginal automobile agency. He was difficult to work for. People did not stay with him long. Dil and [Lenora] were childless."

There's also an early throwaway that clearly paints the amorality of both Dil and Lenora, as Ben recalls rumors of Lenora's infidelity.

"There had never been any actual proof of her inconsistency. The closest thing to proof was the garbled stories which came back from New Orleans the time three couples had gone over to Mardi Gras. But some of that could be blamed on inadequate reservations, three couples going when there were only reservations for two. Other comment was mostly locker room talk."

By the time Dil gets his own chapter, we have already learned that the rumors about his wife are more than true, but they are the least of Dil's problems. In a desperate attempt to get some quick cash in order to pay several late bills, Dill (two weeks before the novel opens) had arranged to play in a high stakes poker game. Of course he lost big time and covered his bets with checks that would most certainly bounce when presented. The winner of the hand was an elderly local businessman named Jim Staunch, who agreed to let Dil post-date the checks. But time was now running out and Dil was no closer to being able to cover the checks than he was when he wrote them. MacDonald's depiction of the poker game itself is beautifully pulled off, complete with the moments where the room "grows still" each time Dil makes some awkward attempt to ask for forbearance. Dil asks for several extensions, which Staunch readily agrees to, but Dil knows he is putting off the inevitable and begins thinking of things he never though about before.

"Maybe it was time to go away. Just get in the car and go. He sat at his desk and he could hear his heart thump. Too much weight. Too much drinking. Things weren't supposed to end this way. Not a fat man of almost forty sitting at a desk and listening to his own heart. He wished he could stop thinking that it was some kind of end, some sort of finish."

When Staunch finally stops agreeing to extensions, he gets Dil to admit that he has no way of covering the checks and presents him with an alternative: sell his gulf front house. Dil is horrified at the suggestion, especially since he has never told Lenora about the debt, and finally gets Staunch to agree to two more weeks, at the end of which he will either honor the check or sell his home. After Staunch leaves the meeting, Dil sits and ruminates about his wasted life, and in a couple of expertly-written paragraphs MacDonald reveals the hopelessness of the character in a way that recalls the writing of James M. Cain or even Jim Thompson.

"Two weeks. What could he do in two weeks? He thought of the old man and the money the old man kept in the big safe. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all. What good was that money to the old man? But there wasn't any way to get the money.

"There had been a chance, once. Long ago. That time Uncle Paul had sent him up to New York with cash and with a long list of things to buy. He had met the woman on the train. She had just acquired a Florida divorce. She was going to New York to look for work, she said.

"Four days later he had awakened at noon in a third rate hotel room, with a monstrous clattering crashing hangover, soiled, wrinkled clothing, no luggage, and sixty-five cents in his pocket. The fourteen hundred dollars was gone, and the woman was gone, and there was an inch of bourbon left in a bottle. Uncle Paul had wired the money to come home on. But that was the end of it. The end of meager trust.

"He remembered the black despair of that hotel room. But he had bounced back. He had forgotten it. The golden years were coming... but somehow things had not worked out. Too many years had gone by... He was heavy, and his head ached, and his heart pounded, and the lunch eaten hours before was an indigestible heaviness in his stomach. For the first time in his life he wondered what it would be like to die by your own hand."

Chapter Six is reserved for Ronnie Crown, the real evil in April Evil. He's a paid assassin who the syndicate has selected to send down to assist Harry Mullin, a curious choice for someone who is supposed to simply serve as a hired gun for a robbery, but there is an ulterior motive in sending him. It seems that Ace, the safecracker, has been secretly giving information to a local DA, and the powers that be have decided that he needs to be silenced. Ronnie, who has already killed twelve men and two woman, will be paid handsomely to knock off the Ace, either before, after or during the heist, it doesn't matter. But whether or not Ronnie gets paid is really immaterial, for as we learn more about this character we discover that he really likes his job. Too much.

As mentioned above, Ronnie is one of MacDonald's soulless villains, a pure evil masquerading as a man, an embodiment of "darkness for its own sake." In his novels, MacDonald first experimented with this character type in Dead Low Tide with the person of Roy Kenny, and he appears in different embodiments throughout the author's career, most notably in the aforementioned Max Cady, as well as Travis McGee-enemies Boo Waxwell and Junior Allen. Ronnie bears a closer resemblance to Kenny than he does with Waxwell. He a tall, slim fastidiously-dressed man in his late twenties who wears a friendly expression and an open gaze. He goes about his job just as any businessman would theirs, and for him Flamingo is just another in a long list of cities he has traveled to and Ace is simply another soon-to-be victim. But it's when MacDonald begins describing him from within that things get interesting.

"[Payment for his services] was always in cash, in used bills. Sometimes when the amount seemed too small, he was annoyed. Other times it would be larger, more satisfying. But only Ronnie knew that he would have performed the assigned tasks with no pay at all. Once, between assignments, he had gone to a strange city. He had selected a name at random, taking it from a phone book. It had been very simple because, in this case, the man had had no presentiment of danger. But Ronnie had made the stalk as carefully as with the others.

"But he resolved he would not do that again. It had been pleasurable, but it had meant a step across a thin line. He was aware that he was not as other men. He had read enough to know that other men, if they could see inside him, would call him psychopathic. So long as he kept his wish to kill within the channel of those cases assigned to him, he could pose as a man of business and the difference would not show on the outside. But he was superstitiously afraid that were he to continue to kill without cause, he would become marked, and other men would begin to read the difference when they looked in his face."

Virtually every character in April Evil has an interesting background story that MacDonald explores at length, everyone but the ostensible protagonist of the novel Ben Piersall. He serves primarily as the moral anchor of the tale and takes very few actions that drive the plot. Again, harking to the later novel The Executioners, we get to see how an average everyman reacts to crisis, although with Ben there is little he can do but watch and wait as the authorities search for his missing son. But he is not really a character that needs much fleshing out, especially with such a rich cast of broken human beings. In addition to the three discussed above, we are treated to characters like Mooney, the itinerant car salesman who, while employed by Dil, becomes Lenora lover and accomplice in a strange and far-fetched attempt to have Dr. Tomlin committed. There's Joe Preston, Tomlin's far-distant relative who has lived a wasted life on the periphery of the criminal world, and his blank-slate wife Laurie, a quiet, submissive woman who is, in fact, a highly sensitive creature and who blossoms under the tutelage of Dr. Preston. And then there's Lenora Parks, the venal, grasping tramp-wife of Dil, a thirty-four year old woman in an eighteen year old body, a body she freely uses to her advantage, whether it be for monetary gain or simply for pleasure. She, too, is a MacDonald "type," a character we've seen before and will see again many times. She has a moment toward the end of the book that is as frightening as it is brilliantly written, as she sits in front of a mirror in her bedroom. To say any more would be revealing too much of the plot.

There were two printings of the first edition of April Evil, one in December 1955 and a second in May 1956. Both runs, however, were printed with a 1956 date on the copyright page and there is no way to distinguish between the two. As such, both are considered official First Editions for collecting purposes. Dell reprinted the novel in 1960, but the total number of copies printed in their three runs was significantly lower (326,000) than the previous two Dell MacDonalds. The terrific cover illustration for the First Edition was done by Robert Maguire -- his only JDM cover -- and features a bare-shouldered Lenora Parks standing in front of a close-up of Harry Mullin and Ronnie Crown. The artwork for the second Dell edition is a characteristically wonderful Robert McGinnis illustration of Lenora striking a wanton pose in the front seat of a car.

When Fawcett acquired the JDM catalog in the mid-sixties, they republished nearly all of the author's works, and they all came with new covers. To members of my generation who discovered MacDonald in the early seventies, the first Fawcett edition of April Evil is graced with its most recognizable cover, created by Bill Johnson, featuring four trench coat-wearing men (cops? crooks?) standing around an obviously uncomfortable woman tied up to a chair. This illustration was used in one form or another for the next four printings, through September 1974. What is interesting about this artwork is that it depicts a scene that can be found nowhere in the novel. It's not even clear who these people are supposed to be.

Fawcett's November 1976 printing (their sixth) featured another McGinnis creation, a montage depicting Dr. Tomlin and a sunbathing Lenora, all overshadowed by a plaintive Laurie collecting flowers. The final Fawcett edition to see print was illustrated by William Schmidt and features the arresting sight of a gorilla mask in an open suitcase full of money. In case you're wondering, gorilla masks do appear in the novel.

The novel was well received by the book critics who reviewed it, with the reliably-supportive Anthony Boucher of the New York Times using his review to write one of the most oft-quoted praises of MacDonald ever published:

"When John D. MacDonald is at his best, his economy, his ear for speech, and his characterization of all levels of a community and their interplay suggest that he might be termed the John O'Hara of the crime-suspense story. He's at that not infrequent best in April Evil..."

Boucher was joined in his praise by syndicated columnist Paul Little ("... one of the best suspense-mystery novels we have read in a long time..."), James Sandoe in the New York Herald Tribune, Avis DeVoto in the Boston Globe ("Tops in realism... original and first-rate... Vivid characterizations, outstanding construction [with] simultaneous story lines and some pointed social observations.") and two unaccredited writers in both the London Morning Telegraph and the Toronto Globe and Mail. Edgar Hirshberg analyzed it briefly in his 1985 biography of MacDonald, and it was mentioned in passing both Geherin's and Moore's studies of JDM.

The condensed version of the novel as published in Cosmopolitan is -- not surprisingly -- inferior to its complete version. It is little more than the basic plot, eliminating much of the character background that makes the novel really come to life. Many passages are rewritten and changed, resulting in a version that loses much of its unique quality. A good example is the background of Sally, which I transcribed in detail above. That entire story, one that took up several pages in the book, is reduced to two very small paragraphs. The story is, however, accompanied by some nice, typically Fifties artwork by MacDonald's Sarasota neighbor Al Buell.

As I mentioned above, the early publishing history of April Evil is a bit clouded. When Walter and Jean Shine wrote their second bibliography of MacDonald's novels and anthologies in 1988 (A MacDonald Potpourri), they listed You Live Once before April Evil in the order of publication. It wasn't until the printing of their subsequent book containing JDM criticism in 1993 (Rave or Rage) that they switched the order of the two books. April Evil came out in December of 1955, while You Live Once hit the bookstands in March of the following year. Yet despite this correction I still consider You Live Once as the earlier work, for reasons I discussed in detail in my piece on that novel. It was a work that was begun as far back as early 1955 and had a troubled publishing history. The condensed magazine version of You Live Once -- published as "Deadly Victim" in Cosmopolitan -- did, in fact, predate both the book and magazine versions of April Evil. Besides, April Evil reads like a later novel: its writing is assured and far more accomplished than that of the other novel. A quibble fit for bibliophiles only, to be sure, but one that needs explaining.

April Evil is out of print and has been so since the mid 1990's. Used copies, however, are plentiful and easy to find at reasonable prices.

"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.

Estate Sale

John D MacDonald died on December 28, 1986, and his wife Dorothy survived him by a little over two years, passing away on March 30, 1989. The couple's only son Maynard, who had moved to New Zealand with his family years before, was with both of his parents when they died and, after his mother's death, he remained stateside to take care of all of the details of closing out the estate: probating wills, closing accounts and selling his parents' Siesta Key house. He gathered their belongings, took what he wanted, sent off a few remaining items to the University of Florida, and arranged for an estate sale to get rid of what was left. That sale took place over two days, on June 30 and July 1, 1989, and was advertised in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

MacDonald's bibliographers Walter and Jean Shine attended the sale and wrote about it in their column in the JDM Bibliophile. As was typical of Walter whenever he wrote about something that irritated him, he was direct and not shy about letting his feelings be known. The following appeared under the headline "Sad Day":

"There are few sights more forlorn than the treasured lifetime possessions of people of taste and distinction being pawed over at an estate sale...

"The MacDonalds were people of dignity, culture, and talent. So much of that culture and talent was given to their choice of keepsakes, but in seconds, perfect strangers, grubbing through them, rejected some as uninteresting or unworthy, or gobbled them up to grab a bargain. Little of the meaning of those chattels to their owners could ever be known or taken into account. True, many of the MacDonalds' favorites were sent off to their son's New Zealand home prior to the sale, but there was still vast evidence of their passion for beauty in many forms: paintings, sculptures, Mexican artifacts, rock crystals, vases, phonograph records and tapes, and books enough to elicit an overheard comment: 'Why there are more here than in our city's library!' The books covered a vast range of subjects, apart from fiction, including photography, chess, rock cutting, painting, sculpture, philosophy, psychology, semantics and travel, to name only those we can remember.

"We were at the sale early and found many things which have a direct relationship to the books: hats worn by John D. for the back-of-the-book photos, records and tapes of music and books specifically mentioned in John's books, etc. All of them will find their way into the John D. MacDonald Collection at the University of Florida in Gainesville."

It's no surprise that many of those books once owned by the MacDonalds and sold to "perfect strangers" eventually found their way into the rare book market. Almost immediately, antiquarian booksellers began advertising the sale of books once part of the "John D MacDonald Library" and featuring the author's distinctive personal bookplate, for prices far beyond the reach of ordinary readers. Apparently many of those customers who were "grubbing" and "gobbling up" bargains knew what they were doing.

Some of these volumes have found their way to one particular antiquarian bookseller in Baltimore, Maryland. Royal Books, a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, has several of these volumes for sale to anyone with the financial ability and desire to pay for something once owned by MacDonald. The prices ain't cheap.

For a mere $25.00 one can purchase MacDonald's copy of John Keasler's Dear George, given to MacDonald as a gift by the author and featuring the following inscription: "Dear Anxious John: If you would stop worrying so Goddamn much about who done it, those dizzy spells would go away." For only ten dollars more you can own MacDonald's copy of the 1941 mystery anthology The Murderer's Companion, edited by William Roughead (a First Edition!) And lest you think that JDM was all-knowing, the same price gets you his copy of A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms, proving that the author probably needed an occasional literary crutch.

Do you have more money to burn? For only $75 you can own JDM's copy of Ancient Lake Cahuilla's Fish Trappers by Ann and John Balch, another gift book given to MacDonald by the authors and inscribed thusly: "To John D. MacDonald, in partial payment for the hours of pleasure that we have experienced from reading your books. May you live at least "one year" longer than we do so that we can be sure of a continual supply." It's a big jump to the next item, a 1934 First Edition of Peter Fleming's One's Company -- sans dust jacket -- for $275. Then we get into serious money with the next-highest-priced volume, Biography of the Bulls: An Anthology of Spanish Bullfighting by Rex Smith, a 1957 First Edition. Price: $425. Top dollar, however, is reserved for an obscure volume titled Doctor Golf, a 1963 First Edition written by William Price Fox. It will cost you $475. Perhaps its lofty purchase price is due to the illustrator of that work: the great Charles Rodrigues.

If you still have some money left in your wallet or purse after all that, you might want to peruse the books for sale that John D MacDonald actually wrote. You can find a few relatively inexpensive First Edition paperbacks of readily available titles such as Barrier Island or Cape Fear (the movie tie-in version of The Executioners) for as little as five dollars. But since we're here to spend some money (aren't we?) lets get to the top of the price chart. A signed First Edition of the ultra-rare Weep For Me, inscribed by MacDonald with the amusing plea, "Eddie, Please burn this bad book!" can be had for only $950. But if you want to own the rarest, most expensive MacDonald volume in the store, you will have to choose between two volumes: the first American hardcover edition of Bright Orange for the Shroud, or a British hardcover edition of his 1958 novel Soft Touch. Either can be purchased for a cool $2,500.

If you can't decide you can always purchase both.

As I said, the "grubbers" knew what they were doing.