"The Men Women Marry"

“The Men Women Marry” is a John D MacDonald short story that appeared in the June 8, 1956 issue of Collier’s magazine, the author’s eighth and final appearance in the weekly slick that began seven years earlier with “Looie Follows Me.” Between these two titles saw the publication of a five part serialized novel called “My Brother’s Widow” (which MacDonald later rewrote as the paperback original Area of Suspicion); a couple of excellent mysteries: “Who’s the Blonde?” and “Dead on Christmas Street”; a sports story about racing called “Elimination Race”; a three-part serialized novel that should have been redone for publication as a book called “Flight of the Tiger”; and a mainstream family piece called “The Unsuitable Girl.”

Mention Collier’s magazine to anyone under the age of 60 and you’ll probably draw a blank. It’s as obscure a title as other once-big newsstand denizens of a bygone era with names like Woman’s Home Companion, The American Magazine, Today’s Woman and McCall’s. But in its day -- from 1888 to 1957 -- Collier’s was a big deal, a weekly bedsheet-sized combination of “fiction, fact, sensation, wit, humor and news.” In the early years of the last century it published lots of groundbreaking pieces that would today be called “investigative journalism,” but was then known as “muckraking.” A few of the series published were of historical magnitude due to the legislative results of the articles. Upton Sinclair’s April 1905 article titled “Is Chicago Meat Clean?” -- published a full year before his famous expose The Jungle came out -- is credited with the passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The same year Sinclair’s article was printed, Samuel Hopkins Adams began an eleven-part series exposing the general fraud behind most then-popular patent medicines. Titled “The Great American Fraud,” it let to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act the following year.

But mismanagement and a general change in tastes led to a long period of decline during the 1910’s, and in 1919 the magazine was acquired by Joseph Palmer Knapp and his Crowell Publishing Company, who ran the periodical for the rest of its run. Things gradually improved and Collier’s eventually became one of the two major weeklies that contained both news and fiction, the other being, of course, The Saturday Evening Post. By the time the war ended in 1945 Collier’s was the 10th most popular newsstand periodical in terms of circulation, trailing behind other long-gone titles such as McCall’s, Woman’s Home Companion, Look, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1948 the magazine hired a new fiction editor, a 26 year old former editor from the Armed Forces weekly Yank, Knox Burger, a man who would go on to become a major player in the John D MacDonald story. It was Burger who purchased “Looie Follows Me,” and MacDonald never forgot him for it, or the experience of receiving his first big check.

I remember where I was when they bombed Pearl Harbor, and where I was when Kennedy was shot, and where I was when I got word of the first four figure sale. One thousand dollars. I was standing in the main post office in Cuernavaca in 1948 and I ripped open an envelope that told me that Knox Burger, then the fiction editor of Collier’s, had paid that amount for a short called “Looie Follows Me.”

In 1951 Burger left Collier’s to edit paperback originals for Dell, and in 1954 MacDonald began having his novels published by Burger’s firm after doing eight novels for Fawcett Gold Medal. When Burger jumped ship to Fawcett in 1960 MacDonald went with him, and from that point forward every JDM paperback was published by Fawcett, even though Burger left in 1970 to form his own literary agency. And it was Burger, of course, who finally got MacDonald to agree to create a series character, who eventually saw print as Travis McGee.

Collier’s was known for the brevity of its articles and fiction, to the point that even world class contributors like Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were ordered by editors to shorten their copy. Nowhere else was this mindset more evident than in the magazine’s weekly section called “Collier’s Short Short,” where an entire piece of fiction had to fit onto one or two pages, along with artwork and even advertising. Both “An Unsuitable Girl” and “The Men Women Marry” appeared as Short Shorts, with the latter clocking in at a mere 2.000 words.

“The Men Women Marry” is one of MacDonald’s “family problem” stories, devoid of any crime, mystery or even bad intention, where parents wring their hands over the actions of their children or the relationships their children have fostered. In this respect it is nearly identical to “An Unsuitable Girl” (with a different gender child) and very similar to a This Week story from 1955 titled “Too Young to Marry.” The fact that all three of these stories appeared around the same time (“The Men Women Marry” was published in Collier’s June 8, 1956 issue) may have been connected to the fact that MacDonald’s own child Johnny (now Maynard) was sixteen years old.

Walter Tyler is concerned about his daughter Kath, but wife doesn’t understand his concern. Kath has fallen for a boy by the name of Carl, and things seem to be getting serious enough to start thinking about marriage. Kath’s previous boyfriend was a musician, and while both parents are relieved that that particular relationship has ended, Walter is still worried, but for different reasons this time.

"[Carl is] just -- too darn' plausible. Too perfect. He hangs on my every word. He calls me 'sir.' He keeps hopping up to do this and that. He's got salesman manners... He's selling us, and maybe he sold Kath the same way... I just don't know the guy, and I can't seem to get to know him. I can't seem to get beyond that attentive politeness of his."

This complaint comes over breakfast one morning, and Mrs. Tyler reminds Walter that they are having guests over that evening: Kath and Carl, and Walter’s sister Helen and her bore of a husband, Ralph. (MacDonald’s unfortunate title for this short story was “The Triple-Plated Bore,” mercifully changed by a Collier’s editor.) Walter’s consternation over this recalled duty is only assuaged by the possibility that Carl will become so bored with Ralph that he will head for the hills. Ralph is a classic JDM “type,” an all-too-familiar comic gasbag who is succinctly described in a single paragraph.

Ralph... was a big, meaty man with a big, meaty voice... He had a vast assortment of opinions and stated them in a way that was at once so positive, so heedless of the possibility of disagreement, that the listener felt a compulsion to disbelieve. When Ralph turned his heavy face and his boiled eyes toward you and said, with utmost dogmatism, "The sun will rise tomorrow" -- said it harshly, imperiously -- you found yourself wishing it wouldn't. Ralph had perfected a defense against contradictions. He simply refused to notice them.

Dinner that evening is everything Walter feared it would be: “deadly.” Ralph is his usual obnoxious self and Carl treats him with the same perfect, almost robotic respect that he shows toward Walter, even agreeing and laughing with Ralph. After dinner the men retire to the living room and Ralph continues bloviating his many opinions. At one point Walter eases himself out of the room and heads upstairs to give his ears a rest, leaving Carl alone with Ralph. A few moments later he hears the creak of floorboards and, unobserved, sees Carl heading up the stairs and into the bedroom. Standing in front of a dressing-table mirror, Carl seems an entirely different person, to the point that Walter wonders if his future son-in-law is actually insane…

There’s not much to see here, really, outside of MacDonald’s ability to paint entire worlds within a few well-crafted sentences. The story is negligible and the ending entirely predictable, as glib as any in the JDM cannon. Still, it’s one of ten JDM short stories that have recently become available as eBooks (eShortStories?) from Peril Press. “The Men Women Marry” is the only one bundled with another story, MacDonald’s other Collier’s Short Short, “The Unsuitable Girl.” For only 99-cents you can own both, available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The cheesy cover the publishers provide for this set is completely misleading; it’s an illustration of a pulp-cover dame shooting an automatic pistol. It’s kind of hard to blame them, really, as there’s really no action in either tale, and the story art for both of them -- provided with the text of the stories -- wouldn’t sell a book if they were ice water in hell.

"The Unsuitable Girl"

"The Unsuitable Girl" is a John D MacDonald short story that appeared in the February 3, 1956 issue of Collier's. Listed in the table of contents as "The Short Short Story" (evidentially a running feature in the magazine), it comes in at a brief 1,450 words and takes up all of a single page, plus illustration. It's another in a series of MacDonald homily pieces about the struggles of parenthood, particularly when faced with a willful teenager discovering the opposite sex. These were the kinds of brief set pieces that JDM usually sold to This Week and include "Too Young to Marry," "Who Stopped the Clock," and "The Night Jamie Grew Up." In "Too Young to Marry" the problem is a teenage child who wants to marry. In "The Unsuitable Girl," it's "an older woman."

Tommy Winslow is seventeen. He's begun dating a twenty-year old girl named Pamela. She's the type who drives up to the house and blows the horn rather than come in and talk to the parents like a respectable girl would. You know the kind. This grates especially on Tommy's mother Marian, who constantly harangues her husband Thomas to "do something."

"... she isn't even the proper sort of girl... [Tommy] isn't himself. He positively slinks about the house. He's almost surly. He's just a high-school boy. That woman could ruin his life!"
 

Thomas feels there's nothing to get excited about. Tommy would grow out of it. "Once a child had been raised in a sound emotional climate, all you could do was wait and hope and pray he would make an equivalently good emotional relationship." Also, Thomas recalls his own teenage infatuation, one he thankfully grew out of:

"The girl had been a clerk at a perfume counter. The day's labor had always clung to her with its myriad musks and fragrances. It had taken many weeks for him to become disconcertedly aware of the little things about her -- the slightly grubby knuckles, the hearty chomp on the cud of gum, the run-over heels. Yet, before the magic had faded..."
 

Well, if her husband wasn't going to do anything, Marian certainly would. She hatches a plan to invite Pamela to dinner with the family at their club, knowing full well that "she'll be too sly to come. I know that type." The following day Tommy reveals that Pamela has declined the invitation, and this leads to five "glum" days in the Winslow house. On the evening of the sixth day Thomas returns home to a triumphant Marian, who announces that Tommy and Pamela have broken up and that he's going out with "that nice little Rogers girl tomorrow night." She gloats:

"You didn't want to do anything. But that girl cut her own throat by turning down the invitation."
 

Thomas isn't so sure and knocks on Tommy's bedroom door. With Dave Brubeck playing in the background Thomas learns that the real story is completely different, and he leaves feeling "desperately old..."

"The Unsuitable Girl" follows the the same pattern and framework as the other JDM tales of this ilk: Properly-raised teenager does something out of the ordinary, parents react with consternation, one of them (usually the father) has the sense to let things work out for themselves, eventually kid comes to his/her senses. The story is sufficiently interesting, the writing professional, the economy of words admirable. It all comes down to something you'd be happy to read while waiting in a dentist's office. MacDonald's own child Johnny was seventeen when this particular story was published, and one naturally wonders how much of its "plot" was borrowed from real life. At least MacDonald was consistent in his belief -- evidenced in countless stories -- that child-rearing was a gamble that usually paid off if you stacked the odds by raising them responsibly.

Incidentally, MacDonald may have felt some special pride with the publication of "The Unsuitable Girl" in an issue of Collier's during the 1950's. One of his literary idols -- and an author he was occasionally compared to -- had a running column in the magazine and they appeared together in the February 3 edition. John O'Hara's Appointment with O'Hara was printed at the beginning of each bi-monthly issue and featured the author's rambling thoughts on just about everything, full of all of his trademark wit, vindictiveness, and bellicosity. In a typical display of his self-importance, this particular issue features a few paragraphs on Orson Welles, who O'Hara bemoans as a great talent who was reviled and kept out of work because of his making Citizen Kane. He immediately devolves into a rant on how O'Hara himself suffered the same shameful treatment because he praised the film! Ah, John... you were a one-of-a-kind. Elsewhere in the column he manages to drop a mention that he attended Columbia University (a life-long sore point with the author), slams War and Peace, reveals that he was once a neighbor of both Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and complains of would-be authors sending him unsolicited material for publication and advice. "I don't read the stuff," he snarls. "If I seem a little ungracious -- I am."

Why is it that I detect a little bit of another John in the sound of that last remark? Read some of MacDonald's later interviews and you can hear the same tone of belligerence when he is crossed. MacDonald once responded to an interviewer's question with the reply: "Here again, we have a typical asinine amateur question..." Like O'Hara, JDM's literary reputation depends on who you are talking to.

"The Unsuitable Girl" was published just once and has never been anthologized.

"Elimination Race"

I mentioned in an earlier post that John D MacDonald was a prolific producer of sports fiction, that he wrote at least 29 such stories in the early days of his writing career, and that most of these stories were written for now-forgotten pulps with names like Sports Fiction and Super Sports. Those old pulp magazines are some of the rarest and hard to find collectables around, and old issues rarely show up for sale on eBay. It seems like these were the most dispensable of fiction magazines and were not collected with anything near the fanaticism of science fiction or, to a lesser extent, the mystery pulps. I own one story from the sports pulps -- "Blue Water Fury" -- and that's only because MacDonald included it in his first short story collection End of the Tiger and Other Stories under the title "The Big Blue." The two previous sports tales I've written about came from a men's magazine and a Sunday newspaper supplement, and "Elimination Race" will be no exception: It was printed in the most mainstream of mainstream slicks, Collier's.

Appearing in the magazine's September 13, 1952 issue, "Elimination Race" is all about auto racing. Wade Ralson is a middle-aged race car driver with a wife and kids. His day job is running a small garage, but he's an experienced racer with twelve appearances in the Indianapolis 500. He trying to arrange a car to enter in his thirteenth appearance but is having trouble. His problem is he's never won. He came in third once, then fourth another time, and those were his best results. Last year he crashed and burned. He feels he's simply the victim of bad luck and believes he still has a big win in him. But sponsors won't talk to him, and when he tells his wife Sally that he is looking for one, she reacts like a lot of racers' wives must:

"She dropped a dish in the sink and he heard it smash. She turned slowly and said, 'It isn't for you to decide. I saw you roll and burn, Wade. I saw it happen and I knew you were dead, because nobody could live through that, and I was sure you were dead. And I sat by your bed all those weeks while they were doing the grafts and giving you the plasma. So you can't say I ever backed out before. All the stinking wrecks and the clunker heaps you drove, and that smash at Cleveland and over the rail in Miami...I won't stop you. I know that. But I won't be there. I won't even let myself think about it. And if you come back, maybe we can make some kind of life, but it won't ever be the same again. Ever, ever, ever.'"

Whoa......

All Sally manages to do is leave Wade with a sense of "righteous anger" and a determination to race. "One more time. One more chance to show them all." He continues looking and Sally doesn't bring up the subject again. Eventually there is no one else to ask. No one but that man Oliver Banderson down in Florida, who tells Wade over the phone, "I can't promise anything, but come on down if you can, and we'll talk it over."

"It was a bad thing dealing with Banderson, because there was something strange about him. He's put the money into the big cars, and money into the drivers, and it never seemed to mean much to him except the power-sense, the indirect way of killing a man. He got good drivers and they would work with him once and never again."

Wade goes down to Florida anyway and meets Banderson at his lavish Gulf-front beach house. He's a familiar MacDonald "type":

"He was a crisp little elderly man with a mocking smile and a faint and disconcerting slant of his eye, so that it was difficult to look directly at him and make any guess at what he might be thinking."

Wade makes his pitch but Banderson isn't biting. He tells Wade that he is entering one car in the Indy 500 and that he's using Johnny Harvester as driver. He offers Wade $200 to cover his expenses in coming down, and tells him to enjoy his drink and to stay around for a party he is throwing. Wade tears up the money and throws it into the pool, but he does hang around for the bash.

Johnny Harvester arrives, along with a crowd of "kids," teenagers who love cars and love to race. Wade drinks too much and ends up with one of the girls on his arm, a "lean young girl with taffy hair and bold, undisciplined eyes." After dinner everyone piles into cars and heads for Banderson's local track, where he races stock cars. A couple of the party boys were supposed to be driving two of Banderson's cars that night, but they are too smashed to get behind the wheels. Banderson then makes an offer, one it seems the whole evening was leading up to: Wade and Harvester will substitute for the two drunk boys, and whoever wins will drive Banderson's car in the 500.

There is a long, exciting race that ends with a predictable result, and Wade finally realizes something about himself he didn't know before.

MacDonald writes about racing the way he writes about everything: with the knowledge and confidence of an expert. As far as I know he was never a fan of auto racing and did not harbor a lot of love for the automobile in particular. In 1971 he wrote, "I really do not care that much about cars. If they go from here to there without drawing undue attention to themselves because of failure to perform properly, that is all I ask." Still, in "Elimination Race" he manages to convey the world of racing and the particular psyche of the driver with the same insight he did everything else.

The story was anthologized once, in a 1963 collection titled High Gear, edited by Evan Jones. It is tough to locate and the collector would probably have an easier time finding a copy of the original Collier's.

"Who's the Blonde?"

"Who's the Blonde?" was originally published in the August 9, 1952 issue of Collier's. Running 5,000 words, it's a typical John D MacDonald "howdunit," although this time we also have a rare MacDonald whodunit. And like every good whodunit, there are clues scattered in the early text that reveal the bad guy for anyone with a careful eye. It's a fun, interesting story, one where the "how" is more of a surprise than the "who," and one where MacDonald's typically-impeccable research shows up in lots of nice little details.

The story takes place in a bank. Teller Tom Weldon's drawer has come up short, to the tune of $4,000, which was real money back in 1952. After much research and going over tapes, chief teller Vic Reisher concludes that this is not an error, and that the money must have walked out the door. He calls the police and the local bank examiners, who arrive and grill Tom for hours. When they finally allow him to call his wife to explain why he hasn't come home yet, he learns that there are two detectives rummaging through his house. The cops obviously think that Tom took the money. Their suspicions center around a strange customer who came to Tom's window that afternoon, a blonde bombshell, one who waited in Tom's line even though there were other tellers available. She leaned over, addressed Tom by his first name and whispered something to him. Tom counted out some bills and gave them to her, whereupon she quickly walked out of the bank as someone wolf-whistled behind her. The police clearly believe that Tom and the blonde were in on something together.

"A dish like that, people notice her. A real blondie. One of those tight-skirt, go-to-hell blondies... What does she have on you, boy?"

Tom explains that all she wanted was change for a $50 bill, that she did address him as "Tom" because his nameplate is in front of his teller cage, and that he had to lean forward because she spoke in a voice so low he couldn't hear her. But the cops clearly are not buying it:

"The starting place is for you to come clean, boy... A lot of nice guys get taken over the jumps by a blondie. Come on, boy. What's she got on you?"

The fact that Tom has recently been fighting with his wife and was seen in a local bar talking with two women he can't identify doesn't help matters, but the cops eventually let him return home. Once there his wife Helen listens sympathetically, demanding to hear all of the details. If Tom didn't give the money to the blonde, it had to have gone somewhere, she reasons. When all the other possibilities have been eliminated, it leaves only one improbable conclusion. Tom calls the police and asks to reenact the scene, the thief is caught and Helen gets her husband back...

"Who's the Blonde?" is an enjoyable tale, one the those stories where even though you can see the gears turning -- JDM obviously came up with a method then wrote the story around it -- it still entertains. All the minute details of the inner-workings of a bank are carefully explained, and Tom's teller cage is described in meticulous fashion, right down to the size of the holes in the wire mesh. I have to say, however, that a lot of this story was over-the-top for me. As someone who spent 30 years as a banker, and who started out as a teller, the thought of calling the police and a bank examiner for a teller shortage made me laugh out loud when I re-read it. A police detective at the bank, two detectives at Tom's house, and later on the FBI threatening to get involved seems completely unrealistic to me. If my head teller had called the police every time I had a shortage in my drawer, I'd either be in jail today or an emotional wreck! Or both! Still, in order to make the plot work, MacDonald had to bring in the police.

"Who's the Blonde?" was one of the few MacDonald stories that eventually made its way to television, as an episode of Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. It was broadcast on April 26, 1955 and starred Don Taylor as Tom Weldon, Maxine Cooper as Helen, and Joi Lansing as "the blonde." The story was reprinted in the May 1957 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and most recently was included in the mystery anthology Ellery Queen's Bad Scenes: Stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, edited by Eleanor Sullivan in 1989. That collection is easily obtainable as a used book.

Finally, John D MacDonald fan Jimmy Buffett co-wrote and recorded a song titled "Who's the Blonde Stranger?" in 1984, but it has no relation to this story.

"Dead on Christmas Street"

As near as I can tell, John D MacDonald wrote only two Christmas-themed stories, and only one of them was a mystery. It appeared in the December 20, 1952 issue of Collier's and was titled "Dead on Christmas Street." You can pretty much tell from the title that we aren't going to be reading about goodwill toward men.

JDM was a self-declared agnostic, and I can only guess that Christmas wasn't a big deal in the MacDonald house. "Dead on Christmas Street" is a fine mystery story, but it really has little to do with the holiday. It's a straightforward tale of crime solving that happens to take place during the Christmas season, and I'm tempted to surmise that the setting was dictated by an editor, who may have wanted a Christmas theme for his December 20th issue. The story does not depend on the season and it would have worked just as well at any other time of the year.

The primary witness in an upcoming trial has been pushed out of a high rise office window a few days before Christmas, and without her the district attorney has no case. Dan Fowler is the Assistant DA assigned to the trial, and he knows that the three teenagers accused of the robbery she witnessed couldn't have been responsible, since they are currently sitting in jail. One of them, however, is the younger brother of local crime boss Vince Servius, and Dan immediately suspects he may have been involved. When Servius provides an alibi and convinces him that he doesn't much care for his younger brother, Dan and his fiancé Jane (who also works in the DA's office) begin checking into the background of the dead witness. They uncover a not very likeable woman with a lifestyle far beyond the means of an ordinary secretary.

"Dead on Christmas Street" seems an odd inclusion for the Christmas issue of a mainstream periodical, but MacDonald had already published several stories there, including the serialized "My Brother's Widow," which later became the novel Area of Suspicion. Nearly 20 years later "Dead on Christmas Street" was reprinted in the Christmas issue of a more appropriate monthly, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It has been anthologized at least twice, originally in 1990's Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories: From Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and again in 2002 in the collection titled Murder Most Merry. Used copies of both books are very easy to locate.

It's a well-crafted, enjoyable mystery story, but not necessarily one that's going to put you in the Christmas spirit.

"Looie Follows Me"

When John D MacDonald decided, relatively late in life, to write fiction for a living, he took the approach that it was a real job, requiring discipline and hard work. Writing short stories exclusively, he worked "14 hours a day, seven days a week, lost 20 pounds, and collected almost 1,000 rejection slips."(Shine) Over 800,000 unsellable words. MacDonald once characterized this output sarcastically as "wonderful stuff about dying blind musicians," and as soon as he began selling stories to the pulps, he took these unsold manuscripts out into the back yard and burned them all. That MacDonald began his writing career attempting to produce "serious" mainstream fiction is not surprising. After all, his first piece that sold was not a mystery or science fiction tale, but a work that was purchased by Story Magazine ("Interlude In India"). When he began making sales to the Pulps he wrote almost exclusively for those types of magazines.

Almost.

His earliest stories were published in a cheap literary magazine (The American Courier) and, scattered among the numerous sales to magazines like Doc Savage, The Shadow and Dime Detective, he made sales to mainstream "slicks" like Liberty, Esquire and Cosmopolitan. So it's not surprising to see a story like "Looie Follows Me," a tale completely devoid of mystery, murder or private detectives, appear in a mainstream magazine like Collier's in August 1947. It's a wonderfully evocative tale of childhood, and of a particular summer when a young guest came to stay.

Jimmy Baker is about to turn 11 and lives with his parents and five-year old sister Looie in a large house in the country, about twelve miles from town. After being told that he won't be going to camp this summer, and resigning himself to a season of having Looie follow him around everywhere he goes, his parents tell him they have a surprise for him. That surprise shows up in the form of 12-year old Johnny Wotnack, a tough, inner-city kid who has come to the country as part of the Fresh Air Kids program, and who is scheduled to be a guest in the house for a couple of weeks. MacDonald's description of him could have come from one of his crime stories:

"[T]here was an air of cold disdain about him, a superior condescension. He was almost thin, and his face had a seamed grayish look, like that of a midget I saw once at the sideshow. His hands were huge, with big blocky knuckles... There were two deep scars on the back of his right hand, and one finger was crooked. To me he was a perfect example of urbanity and sophistication."

The language MacDonald puts in Johnny's mouth seems, at first , to be almost comically tough. When Mrs. Baker looks behind one of Johnny's ears for dirt after he first arrives, he flinches and barks, "What's the gag?" When asked why he won't drink his milk, he responds, "Never could get used to the taste of the stuff." And when little Looie first addresses him by his preferred name -- Stoney -- he replies "That's right, doll." On his first day as guest he immediately goes out behind the big barn and lights up a cigarette, asking "What's to do around this dump, Jim?" The first time I read "Looie Follows Me" it immediately called to mind an old Little Rascals short titled Free Eats, where the gang helps capture a couple of midget gangsters who spout off such classic Thirties tough-guy lines like "Beat it, sister!", "Aw, go chase yourself!" and "Say, flatfoot! Call your shots!"

After asking to read a crime-oriented comic book and being told that Jimmy's parents only allow cowboy stories, Stoney reacts disdainfully, "Them big fairies in the pink shirts give me the itch."

Stoney is supremely bored in the country, until he goes into the barn and rigs up a makeshift punching bag. He tells Jimmy "Little workout's a good thing... Another couple years and I try the geegees... Golden Gloves, kid. That's the life... better than lugging a shine box around in front a the Forty-Second Street Library." He spends a couple hours every day punching the bag, then morosely slips back into his silent shell, walking around the place with Looie following him.

There are a couple of bully neighbor boys who live in the place next door on the other side of an orchard. The first time they come bounding over the hill to the Baker place, neighing loudly like horses, Stoney looks up from his chores and said "one short word under his breath. I saw that word once, chalked on a fence. I had wondered how to say it"

The rest of the story is, well, predictable, yet well written, touching and deeply satisfying. It's one of MacDonald's best.

When "Looie Follows Me" was sold to Collier's in 1947, the MacDonalds had moved to Mexico to live, as their precarious finances required an affordable locale. In his forward to End of the Tiger and Other Stories, MacDonald recalls that the payment for "Looie" was the largest he had received up to that time. "It was the first check I had received with four figures to the left of the decimal point. It seemed incredible to be paid so well for something I so enjoyed doing, and which gave me so much satisfaction when the words went especially well together. I still have that feeling, but on that day it was wonderfully enhanced."

I've often wondered how much of "Looie Follows Me" is autobiographical. MacDonald grew up in a "cocoon of middle-class respectability," according to his biographer Hugh Merrill, and the family unit was identical to the Bakers: Father, Mother, and younger sister. The locale of the story could be the MacDonalds' house in Sharon, Pennsylvania, their summer home in Orangeville, Ohio, or their home in Utica, New York, where the family moved to when John was nine. Like Jimmy Baker, John was the victim of bullies, including, most memorably, "Ralph," who once forced a nine-year old MacDonald to assist him in the killing of a cat. Whether autobiographical or not, the story rings with nostalgia for the simple days of youth.

It is odd, therefore, that Merrill, while citing the story specifically in his The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D MacDonald, makes it clear that he didn't bother to read it. He calls it "a story about big-city gangsters," and even misspells the title as "Louie Follows Me." He then goes on to quote MacDonald's tale of the four-figure check. The book is otherwise well researched (although apparently no primary research of any kind was done) and worth seeking out... I can only chalk it up to an editorial oversight.

Outside of its original appearance in Collier's, "Looie Follows Me" has only been anthologized once (as far as I can determine), in MacDonald's End of the Tiger.