The quotes from both books came from a piece Vonnegut wrote in 1973 for the July 15th edition of the Chicago Tribune’s Book World supplement. It appeared as part of a major celebration of JDM, including a long essay by MacDonald champion Clarence Petersen, a checklist of all of the author’s published books, and a review of the just-released The Scarlet Ruse.
Here is the complete Vonnegut article, titled, “He Comes to Us One by One and Asks Us Who We Are.”
John D. MacDonald and I have had the same literary agent for more than 20 years. He is Max Wilkinson, a cultivated man who has been described as a lovechild of Robert E. Lee and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I talked to Max one day about the deeper reasons for the popularity of John's books—as opposed to the surface of sex and gunpowder John puts on most of his tales. I will not try to reconstruct Max's elegant sentences, but two of his key nouns were encyclopedia and archaeology.
Max said in effect that John did more research for his books than any other fiction writer, was crazy about reliable information. Slam the Big Door, for instance, ends in a head-on collision between two automobiles, a disaster most writers would describe without leaving home. But John had a long look at the accident files of the Florida State Police, at the photographs especially, and he went to Cornell University, too. Cornell was doing research on wrecks. John then wrote the most harrowing wreck in all of literature, a sort of Beethoven's Fifth for coroners and safety engineers. John's wreck has been reprinted in its entirety, incidentally, in a booklet on good and bad driving habits put out by the Army Quartermaster Corps.
Another agent friend of John's and mine, Knox Burger, had to go to a hospital one time for minor first aid, and John came along for company. John passed the time chatting with hospital employees in the corridor, finding out what their workdays were like. He was especially fascinated by a floor-sweeper, Knox recalls. That sweeper will surely appear in a MacDonald novel sooner or later, and he will just as surely behave as real hospital floor-sweepers do. Some character may even die or be detected as a murderer because he doesn't know what John bothered to find out: what real hospital floor-sweepers, hour by hour, really do.
This is beautiful.
John's latest book, The Scarlet Ruse, tells us, among other things, what the stamp-collecting business is really like-how much money can be made by collectors; how negotiable stamps are; how common fakes are, and how the faking is done; how children are encouraged to become stamp collectors in the hopes they will become big-time speculators when they grow up. And so on. It justifies once again Max Wilkinson's feeling that John's collected works constitute a delightful, un-indexed encyclopedia, an encyclopedia jazzed up by fictional characters who care desperately about the information therein.
It also justifies the use by Max of the word archaeology. Max was speaking of diggers a thousand years from now. His guess was that those archaeologists would be like our own, hungry for the feel and smell and sound and taste and sight and muscle tone of human beings in the long ago. And the itches. And the tedious duties, and so on. A fairly lucky digger would find a Britannica. But the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.
Most of us lead narrow, queerly specialized lives. We play intricate games for a living, usually with rules which have never been recorded. John comes to us one-by-one with his keen and owlish curiosity, asks us what the rules are. Then he builds a crime and punishment story around those rules, and our livelihoods are immortalized.
I haven't said anything about how much John writes. Not only does he get his facts right, but he is probably the most prolific writer alive, now that Simenon has thrown in the towel. In his first four months of free-lancing, John says in his autobiographical House Guests, he wrote eight hundred thousand words-late in 1945. Some freedom! Some lance!
Volcanic productivity like that can be a symptom of many things, not all of them attractive. In John's case, however, it is an expression of enthusiasm for life, something else Max might have mentioned. John depicts us as attractive enthusiasts for our often fairly ridiculous games. He likes us. So guess what? We're only human, so fair is fair. So we like John.
