"Fatal Accident"

John D MacDonald wrote 14 short stories for the pulp magazine The Shadow, beginning in 1946 and ending in 1948. The Shadow was the first “hero pulp,” a fiction magazine built around a single character who was the star of a 60,000 to 70,000-word novel that led off each installment of the pulp. The balance of the issue was given over to unrelated shorter stories by pulp authors of the day, and it was here where MacDonald’s stories appeared. (Every Shadow novel was the work of author Walter Gibson, who wrote under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant.) During the postwar period the magazine was one of two Street and Smith publications edited by Babette Rosmond -- the other being Doc Savage -- whose interest in and mentoring of MacDonald during his early days as a writer was instrumental in getting his career off the ground. Between both Rosmond-edited magazines MacDonald’s work appeared 34 times.

Begun in 1931 in response to the popularity of a character on a Street and Smith radio show -- this “character” simply read stories straight out of one of Street and Smith’s pulps -- The Shadow began as a quarterly, switched to a monthly, then to a bi-weekly, then back to monthly, then bi-monthly and finally back to quarterly. The magazine’s name also underwent periodic changes, with titles including The Shadow, The Shadow Detective Monthly, The Shadow Magazine and Shadow Mystery. The magazine also changed sizes, starting out as a standard pulp, then switching to a digest in 1943, then back to a pulp for its final four issues.

MacDonald’s output for the magazine consists mainly of short stories, but he supplied at least two novellas: the 40,000-word “Never Marry Murder” and “You’ve Got to Be Cold,” which the author thought good enough to include in his second pulp anthology, More Good Old Stuff, appearing under his original title “The Night is Over.” Five of those 14 entries were published under a pseudonym, either Peter Reed or Robert Henry, both house names Street and Smith used frequently (and not only for MacDonald.)

“Fatal Accident” was MacDonald’s last story for The Shadow, and it appeared in the Fall 1948 issue, one of those final four pulp-sized entries. It’s a nifty little 3,700-word howdunit that is brought up a level by the author’s development of the protagonist, a Philadelphia police detective suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome after investigating the aftermath of a multiple murder. And although that really has nothing to do with the plot itself -- how a guy murdered his wife by crashing their car while he was driving -- it gives the story an extra layer of substance that makes the rather creaky dénouement easier to swallow.

Told in the first person by the detective referred to only as “Tom,” we open with him on the road, a few miles north of Williamsport, following a Buick in a dense Pennsylvania fog. Tom is heading to a remote cabin in the woods, owned by a fellow officer, for a two-week vacation forced on him by his boss. His plan to "sleep twenty hours a day and eat like a horse" is really a means of recovery, of getting away from ten years of police work that has hardened him, although “you never manage to get tough enough to keep things from getting to you, from getting down through your thickened hide and stinging the few soft parts you had left.” The most recent case was the cause of the forced sabbatical.

I thought of the Miller kid and of the hammer murders in the shanty down by the river, and the gray, bloated look of the bodies that came out of the river. Violence. Diseases of the mind. Shifty eyes. A thousand lineups. You walk into small, dingy sitting rooms and you can smell the blood in the air and hear a woman moaning. It's a dirty business. Thankless.

The Buick in front of him slows, then runs off the shoulder and smashes into a mammoth tree, making a sound “like a million bricks falling into a greenhouse.” Tom quickly pulls over and runs to the overturned car, finding a man on the driver’s side and a woman in the front passenger seat. He quickly sees that the woman’s head is smashed in and that she is beyond help, but the man is alive and moaning, his mouth full of blood. He pulls them both out and hails a passing car, instructing the driver to phone for the police. When they arrive the man and woman are taken away in an ambulance and Tom is asked to come down to the barracks to make a formal statement. Once the patrolmen discover that he is a fellow cop, they have a drink and trade stories, and Tom, too tired to continue on, spends the night on a cot in the barracks.

Before morning one of the troopers returns from the hospital to write his report. The driver claimed that he fell asleep at the wheel, and when he was told about his wife's death "he cried like a baby." The couple were from Upper Darby, on their way to visit a relative in Elmira. Oh, and in his injured state the driver insisted that his car not be touched.

Tom says his farewells and resumes his trip to the cabin, where he spends two weeks eating, resting, chopping firewood and getting a tan. On his way home he stops by the barracks to ask about the accident. He learns that the driver stayed in the hospital for two days and then headed back home with his wife's body. The car was a total loss and was sold for scrap. "The thing was open and shut. A simple, tragic accident."

And yet, somehow, it bothered me. Curiosity is an occupational disease with a cop, I suppose. I still couldn't figure out why [he] had slowed down before hitting the tree, why the jar of going off the pavement hadn't awakened him, and why he was so insistent on the car not being touched.

And so begins the investigation, on his own time, into the background of of the driver. It’s a situation very familiar readers of MacDonald’s short fiction (we few, we happy few…), recalling similar JDM policemen in stories such as “Hit and Run,” “The Rabbit Gets a Gun,” and “I Always Get the Cuties.”

“Fatal Accident” has never been anthologized but it was reprinted, once, in the April 1966 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In the American edition of the magazine the story was retitled “Never Quite Tough Enough,” but in their British and Australian editions they retained the original title. I can’t quite fathom why this was done -- “Fatal Accident” was MacDonald’s original title, so it wasn’t as if he dictated the change -- but it certainly leads to confusion. It’s cases like these that probably led to the oft-repeated claim that JDM published over 500 short stories during his career, when the actual number is closer to 400.

I don’t own a copy of the original issue of The Shadow -- one can purchase it on eBay for a mere $149 -- but I do have the EQMM reprint. I can only assume that it was a straight reprint and not a doctored “improvement” like those perpetrated on the Good Old Stuff stories.

"I Always Get the Cuties" in EQMM

Back in February of last year when I wrote a piece on John D MacDonald's 1954 short story "I Always Get the Cuties," I based my posting on a version of the story that had been included in a 1998 mystery anthology edited by Billie Sue Mosiman and Martin H. Greenberg titled The Fifth Grave. I recently dug out my copy of the November issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine where the story was originally published and was delighted to find a couple of things I had completely forgotten about.

First, this was one of EQMM's "prize" issues, an annual event where the editors (read: Frederic Dannay) awarded three stories special honors, usually first, second and third place, along with some sort of monetary award. Back in 1950 MacDonald's supremely excellent "The Homesick Buick" won EQMM's third prize and the author received $300. In this 1954 issue there is no mention of any money passing hands, and the prize levels are somewhat confusing. The issue leads off with Harry Miner's "Due Process," and this story is headlined "Winner of a Third Prize." It is followed three stories later by Peter Godfrey's "Hail and Farwell," announced as a "Prize-Winning Story." Second place, first place, fourth? It is not clear. Finally, the eleventh story in the issue is "I Always Get the Cuties" and in addition to being designated the issue's only entry in the digest's "Black Mask Department," it is also given the headline "Prize-Winning Story." One would assume that MacDonald's tale came in first, based on its placement in the issue, or perhaps it tied with "Hale and Farewell." Who knows and, really, who cares? Like MacDonald's other three EQMM originals ("Buick,' "Funny the Way Things Work Out" and "He Was Always Such a Nice Boy") it represent JDM at his crime-writing best, each story expertly structured, using an economy of words and each containing a terrific surprise at the end.

But the best thing about unearthing the original magazine was discovering two paragraphs of introduction to the story, presumably written by Dannay, essaying a brief background of the tale.

Here is a story that John D. MacDonald (remember his earlier prizewinner, the wonderful tale of "The Homesick Buick"?) really wanted to write. He knew that at best it had a limited market -- he told us that if EQMM did not happen to like it, he would not even know where else to send it. (This is a fine compliment to EQMM's constant search for the unusual, but it is also an underestimation of the story's appeal.) In any event, Mr. MacDonald felt he simply had to write this story -- and any time an author feels that way, we want to see that story! The tales that lie dormant in writers' minds for years and years, that never die or even fade away, that keep nagging for recognition and birth -- those are the stories that so often have power, impact, and an unforgettable quality.

When Mr. MacDonald submitted "I Always Get the Cuties" to last year's contest, he wrote: "I suspect that it is probably as unpleasant a little yarn as you will receive for this particular sweepstakes." No, we have had much more unpleasant entries. True, we don't buy stories that carry unpleasantness too far -- there are limits to what can reasonably be called entertainment and escape; and there is never any excuse for sensationalism, sex, and sadism merely for their own sake. As we have so often said, the only taboo is that of bad taste. But while Mr. MacDonald's story concerns a particularly gruesome murder plan -- and the author reminds us that "murder is something that should not be prettified" -- it is interestingly written, original in its conception, and from a technical standpoint, most artfully done. And perhaps we should warn you: it packs a wallop...

You can read my original posting on "I Always Get the Cuties" here.

"Heritage of Hate" ("Secret Stain")

Black Mask magazine was undoubtedly the most influential and most highly regarded mystery pulp ever published. The list of authors that appeared within its pages is a literal 'who's who" of detective fiction, including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and the creator of the hard boiled detective, Carroll John Daily. Its initial focus, articulated by editor Joseph T. "Cap" Shaw, was "...simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility and belief...[and] action [that] involve[d] recognizable human character in three dimensional form." It's place in American fiction cannot be overstated.

Many of the finest works by the great mystery writers were published in Black Mask. Hammett's Sam Spade originally appeared in the serialized debut of The Maltese Falcon, and the prototype for Chandler's Phillip Marlowe was born in a number of Black Mask stories, later "cannibalized" by the author for his early novels. And while John D MacDonald published stories in the magazine long after the greats had either stopped or moved on to novels, his entries there were uniformly excellent. I've already written about two of them -- "Killing All Men" and "Jukebox Jungle" -- both terrific examples of "revenge" writing with much psychological subtext. "Heritage of Hate" fits nicely into that category as a story of retribution and redemption, filled with mystery, violence, an interesting and instructive background and an ending that doesn't quite resolve itself.

The story takes place in the world of the "numbers racket," a setting that must seem quaint to today's readers, what with state-run lotteries and ubiquitous Powerball promises of instant riches. Before it became "OK" to gamble, lotteries were illegal and the purview of organized crime, meticulously stratified organizations that thrived in poor urban neighborhoods. For the gambler the cost was low, the chance of winning real, and the ease of involvement ridiculously convenient. It was a lucrative business that naturally invited competition, and in the world of criminals, any inroads made against their flow of money was met with violence and gunplay.

The protagonist in "Heritage of Hate" is the mysterious Lawrence Hask, a right-hand-man to a syndicate lieutenant named Gus Lench. Hask came to be employed by Lench after he showed up one day attempting to run his own numbers game inside Lench's territory. He was dragged into Lench's office by a couple of strong-arms and immediately began explaining why he was muscling in on Lench: his operation was "soft."

"You've got no penetration in your area. Stinking little candy stores and horse rooms and newsboys. Hell, you've got half a hundred big plants in your area. One out of every three foremen and sweepers and setup men ought to be peddling for you."

Lench -- a man whose "weakest point was his inability to think of any motive beyond profit" -- hires Hask and makes him his "promotion manager." For one full year Hask has been working, improving the operation, all the while "gently prodding Lench ... telling him how smart he really was, of how unappreciated he was by the higher-ups." That higher-up is a man by the name of Carter, a big, dignified, well-dressed boss known for his ruthlessness. The story opens at Lench's luxurious Westchester home, where a party is underway, including drinks, dinner and swimming in the heated indoor pool. Carter is there and Hask senses that this is the evening Lench is going to make his move against his boss. With the help of his ex-swimmer wife Gail -- who is secretly having an affair with Hask -- he has arranged a pre-dinner swim for all the guests. Once everyone is in the pool the lights suddenly go out and Hask immediately heads to where he last saw Carter. Sure enough, Carter is underwater and unconscious, and after quickly getting the lights back on, Hask pulls Carter out of the pool and revives him with artificial respiration. The look on Lench's face shows he is not pleased.

Once Carter is conscious he asks who saved him, and when he is told it was Hask, he tells him that the two of them are leaving and that Lench's days are numbered. Although he didn't see his assailant he knew it was a woman's arm that grasped his throat from behind, and he also recognized Gail's perfume. Lench sputters his claims of innocence as Carter is walking out the door, but Carter will hear none of it.

"You, my greedy friend, may live another twelve hours, or even as much as thirty-six hours if you stay and fight it out. If you run like a rabbit, it may take my people a year to find you. If you want another year -- run."

As Hask leaves with Carter he gives the frightened and enraged Lench a wink, as if to tell him that this is all part of some grand plan. Carter brings Hask on as his assistant and immediately begins pumping him for information on Lench's operation, seeking the best way to rub him out. Hask tells him that Lench is too well fortified to go down in a direct assault and suggests a double cross: Hask will go to Lench and propose a burglary of Carter's safe, while Carter will hide out in his office and gun down Lench during his attempt. A time and alibi is established, but when he makes the proposal to Lench he gives him a different time, one that will take both of the crooks by surprise. Just who's side is Hask really on?

The story ends violently with plenty of bloodshed, and includes a scene that may or may not be a surprise to the reader. Running 6,300 words, "Heritage of Hate" zips along at a rapid pace and is ultimately satisfying, if morally ambiguous. It would prove to be MacDonald's penultimate entry in Black Mask.

Black Mask ceased publication in in 1951, ending with its July issue. In May of 1953 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine "merged" with the defunct Black Mask, announcing on the cover of that month's issue, "Black Mask Magazine -- originator of the hard-boiled mystery -- is now part of EQMM." This simply amounted to reprinting one or two old Black Mask stories in each issue, under a separate heading in the table of contents. In the very next issue (June 1953) EQMM reprinted MacDonald's first Black Mask story, 1947's "Manhattan Horse Opera," re-titled "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose." A year later in their April 1954 issue they republished "Heritage of Hate," again under a new title, "Triple Cross."

To make matters even more confusing to bibliographers, MacDonald restored his original title -- "Secret Stain" -- when he included the story in his second anthology of pulp tales, More Good Old Stuff. Happily, because of the unique setting of the numbers racket he had employed, MacDonald was unable to "update" the story into a modern setting, an unfortunate practice that marred so many of the stories reprinted there.

"I Always Get the Cuties"

Any fan of hard-boiled mystery writing has to sit up and take notice at a title like "I Always Get the Cuties." The wonderful wise guy sound of it rings in the ear and jumps off of the page. I remember how disappointed I was back in 1981 when I learned that it was not John D MacDonald's original title for this 1954 short story. He wanted to call it "Confront," and since I hadn't read it at the time I assumed this was another case of an editor screwing with the author's intent. When I did finally find a copy and read it, I was pleased to see that the phrase was MacDonald's and that he used it repeatedly throughout the story. And, it was a good choice, better than the author's, since nearly the entire text consists of a cop regaling a listener with the story of how he caught a murderer. The story originally appeared in the November 1954 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and comes in at tight 5,000 words.

MacDonald uses an interesting narrative method here. It is told in the first person, but by the protagonist's listener, so even though we are given his point of view, nearly every paragraph consists of another character's words. At the end, the reader understands why...

Our first person is someone addressed as "Doc," and we assume he is a medical doctor, although it soon becomes unimportant. The setting is Omaha and the first sentence reads beautifully and sets the stage:

"Keegan came into my apartment, frosted with winter, topcoat open, hat jammed on the back of his hard skull, bringing a noisy smell of the dark city night."

Keegan is a police detective and "Doc" is an acquaintance. Keegan has solved a case, a tough one, and he wants to brag. With a house full of teenage daughters at home, Doc has become Keegan's "sounding board" whenever he wants to talk about a case. So Doc breaks out the brandy and they sit together by the fire as Keegan begins talking:

"Ever try to haggle with a car dealer, Doc? ... I tried once. Know what he told me? He said, 'Lieutenant, you try to make a car deal maybe once every two years. I make ten a day. So what chance have you got?' ... It's the same with the cuties, Doc -- the amateurs who think they can bring off one nice clean safe murder. Give me a cutie every time. I eat 'em alive. The pros are trouble. The cuties leave holes you can drive diesels through."

He asks if Doc recalls a recent murder, one that happened months ago out at a lake house. Doc vaguely remembers it. A woman was found strangled, discovered by her husband who had been away on a lengthy business trip in California. She had been dead for weeks, and the house was secluded, so there were no witnesses. The marriage was a bit unusual, in that the wife was several years older than the husband, she had money and he was a medical school dropout. Also, there were reports from the neighbors near their house in town that they had been fighting recently. None of this is enough to cause suspicion of the husband, until he is brought in for questioning. Since he was in California he has an alibi. Then he puts his foot in it, although he doesn't know it. Keegan relates:

"I tell him he is a nice suspect. He already knows that. He says he didn't kill her. Then he adds one thing too many. He says he couldn't have killed her. That's all he will say. Playing it cute. You understand. I eat cuties alive."

Keegan investigates, travels to California to check out the husband's alibi, finds another woman there and a few interesting holes in the story. Once he has an idea of how the crime was committed he works backward, checking for evidence and eventually tripping up the husband. Case closed.

Yeah, but...

When I first started re-reading "I Always Get the Cuties" I thought I had found an early version of MacDonald's 1957 short story "The Bullets Lied." There we have a similar setup, with a police detective and a professorial friend discussing and working on a case, with the friend providing direction to the detective's case. That turns out not to be the case here, as Doc does nothing but sit back, listen attentively and refill the brandy glasses. There is a twist at the end, one I never see coming, but there are a few very well-hidden clues given in the early text that won't exactly make you slap your head at your own stupidity, but will cause you to admire the author's skill.

The setting is unusual for MacDonald, although Omaha has nothing to do with the story and it could have taken place anywhere. The lake house is a familiar one, used many, many times by the author and obviously modeled after his summer home on Lake Piseco in upstate New York.

But the setting did provide an excuse for later editors to include it in a 1998 mystery anthology titled The Fifth Grave and Other Terrifying Tales of Homicide in the Heartland. Edited by Billie Sue Mosiman and Martin H. Greenberg, it is a nice collection of stories that all take place in the American Midwest, and includes authors such as Ed Gorman, Jack Ritchie and Edward D, Hoch. Before that it was part of a 1989 collection edited by David Willis McCullough called City Sleuths and Tough Guys: Crime Stories from Poe to the Present, and before that it was included in Joe Gores and Bill Pronzini's Tricks and Treats: An Anthology of Mystery Stories by the Mystery Writers of America, published in 1976. There are also three earlier anthologies where the tale appeared, but that should give the curious reader plenty of opportunity to find and read this fine short story.

"He Was Always a Nice Boy"

By 1971 John D MacDonald was a master of his craft, a writer of hundreds of published short stories, scores of novels and the creator of a soon-to-be iconic series character. His publisher at the time, Fawcett, called him the "best selling author in America." And although he had long since abandoned the short form in favor of novels, he still wrote a few every year, usually when a magazine's fiction editor begged for one. In 1967 he had only one story published, in 1968 two, and the following year not a single piece of JDM short fiction was published in any magazine in the country. In 1971 he released S*E*V*E*N, a collection of short pieces that was a combination of tales sold to Playboy alongside three new ones. The only other story published that year was the ruefully-titled "He Was Always a Nice Boy," which appeared in the March 1971 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Told in first person and in the form of an interview, "He Was Always a Nice Boy" pretty much gives up its ending in the title. Anyone who has ever read a news account of a seemingly "nice" kid going postal, or anyone who actually knew someone like this (like I did) can guess how this story turns out. MacDonald knows that, and his effort here is not to spring a surprise ending, but to create character in the form of background and back-story. That it reads like any newspaper interview is the author's intention.

The narrator is never named. He a middle-aged parent living in suburbia, with a wife Martha and several children. The opening sentences set the tone nicely:

"I just cannot understand how such a thing could happen. It is a nightmare and I guess we have to live with it. Or try to forget it, or something... Why, Martha and I have known that boy ever since he was a little bit of a tyke..."
 

Jimmy Bell was three when his family moved into the neighborhood, the only child of Joe and Connie Bell. Joe worked at "the heater company" then and Connie stayed home. "They seemed like nice enough people," we are told, "but they never did get what you call real friendly with anybody on the block." A lot of people who knew them from before were friends, though, a fact made obvious by the "whooping and hollering" parties they threw. "You'd wonder how the kid got any sleep, but I suppose he was used to it."

In the early years Connie entertained herself by having bridge parties during the day, where the stakes were "pretty good." Jimmy was kept in a harness outside in the yard, able to run up and down but not out.

"Now don't get the idea from that that Jimmy was abused. There wasn't anything they wouldn't do for that kid. They kept him dressed up fine, and they fed him well, and he was a healthy kid. You could see that..."
 

A few years later Joe Bell got a better job at an aircraft factory, and he managed to get Connie a job there as well. That's when they "really began to haul in the money." Jimmy was sent to a "day-nursery," and Connie -- "a good-looking woman right from the start" -- bought her own car and dressed in the best of clothes. "And they got Jimmy a mess of expensive toys."

Jimmy played with the narrator's children, and accompanied them frequently on family picnics, usually on Sundays when his parents were sleeping it off. He was self-reliant and got along well with his peers, with "no scraps or fusses." He didn't do too well in school, though, where he was "dreamy." He worked on building model planes but never finished one, and spent ten weeks each summer away at the best of summer camps, one where "the price would curl your hair."

Connie eventually got laid off and spent her afternoons "out a lot... and not getting back until pretty late." Then "the trouble" that nearly broke up their marriage, when she was caught with some guy she used to work with. She and Joe "settled their differences and things were all right between them again."

And so it goes...

In the end we are never specifically told what happened with Jimmy, but it is implied that it is terrible. Reporters hanging around the house and the parents refusing to answer the door. The narrator tries to explain things to his interviewer the best way he can:

"What Martha and I said, we said it seems as if there is kind of... of an evil thing loose in the world these days. something terrible and full of hate. Like maybe it lands here from those UFO's. And then it takes over somebody, some ordinary person like Jimmy Bell."
 

MacDonald has obviously done his research here, and he puts the story into the mouth of a narrator who hasn't. It's one of the author's characteristic techniques for employing something taught to him in his earliest days as a writer: describe by showing. He spoke about it back in 1978 at the John D MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detective Fiction when responding to a Francis M. Nevins, Jr. paper on his earliest writings:

"What Mike Tilden [an early pulp magazine editor] always insisted upon was that I shouldn't step into the story and describe the internal machinery of somebody. I shouldn't say 'She was a clumsy girl.' I should have her stumble coming into the room and drop something. So the reader says, 'Oh gee, here's a clumsy girl.' If you try to point it out -- I know this sounds like baby talk, but I get annoyed with many of my peer group in large, highly lauded novels, who commit the sin of telling us what the character is instead of showing us what the guy is or the lady is..."
 

"He Was Always a Nice Boy" is the quintessential textbook example of that lesson.

The story has been anthologized only once, in a 1976 collection titled Ellery Queen's Giants of Mystery, out of print but easily obtainable used.

"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.

"Funny the Way Things Work Out"

"Funny the Way Things Work Out" was published in the April 1963 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Of all the purely fiction-based magazines where John D MacDonald's stories were published, EQMM is one of only three still extant (the other two are The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction & Fact). Begun all the way back in 1941, the mystery digest is the longest running such periodical in existence.

Ellery Queen is, of course, the pseudonym of two writers, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who began writing mystery fiction together in 1929. Dannay served as editor of the magazine, which was created to publish mystery fiction of a more traditional nature, as opposed to the hardboiled variety so popular in the pulps of the day . It was also differentiated by its smaller digest size and far more sedate cover art (when they used cover art). MacDonald published only four original stories in the digest, but permitted reprints of seven older tales, culled from magazines as varied as Black Mask, Collier's and This Week. EQMM also published several foreign language editions and, as such, provided JDM a readership in countries such as France, Germany and Great Britain.

"Funny the Way Things Work Out" was one of only three short stories JDM had published in 1963. It's an expertly told and entirely unpredictable tale of an old man who reaches his tipping point and gives up on years of subterfuge, with unexpected results. Will Garlan is "a big mild man in his middle sixties, his body thickened and slow, his face deeply tanned." He lives in what is probably Florida (it's never made clear), having moved down there from up north after his first wife died twenty-four years ago. Retired (at age 40) he built a house and married 20-year old Sue Purdley, a hot young thing who had already seen her share of trouble. Now Sue is anything but hot. Will is out trimming the hedges when he hears Sue's shrill voice, a sound that can only mean bad news.

Sue, as described by the author, sounds like a mess:

"He watch[ed] his wife striding toward him, her thin face dull-red with anger, her features pinched into an ugliness of hate. She was a lean woman... [and] wore frayed yellow shorts, too large for her, and a grimy white halter. She had fierce gray eyes and a sallowness the sun never touched. Her black hair looked lifeless in the morning sunlight."

Will has committed the unpardonable sin of leaving his pipe in the bedroom. As he tries to apologize, Sue "drew her wiry arm back and hurled the pipe at him with startling force," hitting him under the eye before storming back toward the house. It is then that "the thing that he had to do came back into his mind."

But this is not the typical perfect-murder-by-henpecked-husband story. Will gets in the car and nearly runs Sue over as he heads into town and into the Palm County Court House. There he hunts down Sheriff Wade Illigan and asks if he can bend his ear for an hour or so. He confesses to thinking about killing Sue, which Illigan assures him is not a crime, and then begins to tell the sheriff about his very interesting past, and about things he did before moving down to Palm County. He also mentions some very valuable items hidden in his house, things Sue would love to get her hands on.

I can almost guarantee you you'll never guess how the story ends.

"Funny the Way Things Work Out" contains some characteristically beautiful writing, none more so than the paragraph that follows the pipe-throwing incident:

"Suddenly he imagined himself grasping the handles of the wooden clippers, hurling it at her, saw it turn once, slowly, glinting in the sun, and chunk into her naked sallow back, points first, exactly between the bony ridges of her shoulder blades... He felt sweaty and cold in the sunlight. The screen door slammed."

By 1963 MacDonald was putting together words such as these in his sleep. This was the year he was struggling to come up with a workable series character who eventually became Travis McGee, writing three versions of The Deep Blue Good-By before arriving at a hero he was satisfied with. It was also the year he wrote the sublime short story "End of the Tiger."

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine was similar to the mystery fiction pulps in one respect: they didn't like MacDonald's titles. He originally called this story "No Heart For the Law." EQMM even changed the titles of the previously published stories they reprinted. Thus we have a story MacDonald called "Secret Stain" changed in 1949 by Black Mask to "Heritage of Hate," reprinted by EQMM in 1954 as "Triple Cross." No wonder no one can say with any precision exactly how many short stories John D MacDonald wrote!

"Funny the Way Things Work Out" was anthologized at least twice, originally in Ellery Queen's Double Dozen (1964) and again in Joan Kahn's Hanging By a Thread in 1969.

"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.

"The Homesick Buick"

"The Homesick Buick" was originally published in the September 1950 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and won Third Prize in the magazine's Best Mystery Story of the Year contest. A 5,000 word short story about a bank robbery in a remote Texas town, "Buick" has become one of the most anthologized of all John D MacDonald's works, appearing in at least ten different collections. It was adapted for television in 1958 as an episode of an anthology series called Heinz Studio 57 under the title "Getaway Car," and featured Mike Connors and Wallace Ford in the cast.

Leeman, Texas is located about 30 miles south of Beaumont and is a typical, remote Texan town. It consists of little more than a main drag, "six gas stations, two theaters, Willows' Hardware Store, the Leeman National Bank... a supermarket and four drug stores." On a day in early October 1949, a man named Stanley Woods arrives by bus, radiating "quiet confidence and the smell of money." Representing the Grotson Precision Tool Company of Atlanta, he's in town "nosing around to find a good location for a small plant. Decentralization, you know." His first act is to deposit a $1,200 check into a new account at the Leeman Bank. He spends two weeks looking around, then leaves "under unusual circumstances."

On October 17, several out-of-town cars pull into town, including an old Buick sedan. The cars parked on the main street and did some funny jockeying as two men entered the bank. They held up the place, shot and killed the head teller and left with the monetary contents of nearly the entire bank, the alarm finally sounding as they exited the building. Across the street, Henry Willows, a man close to seventy, was in the hardware store and he ran when he heard the commotion. Grabbing his .22 rifle, he shot the driver of the Buick in the temple, killing him instantly. The other two cars sped off in a hail of gunfire, and in one of them sat Stanley Woods. Attempts to call the Texas Rangers were unsuccessful, because someone had cut all of the phone lines going out of town. Efforts to try and raise outside help on the radio were fruitless, because "some sharpshooter with a high-powered rifle had gone to work on the towers of station WLEE and had put the station out of business." And the attempts to catch the robbers by car were thwarted by the liberal sprinkling of sharp metal jacks across the road. "No matter how a tire hit one, it was sure to be punctured." The jacks cause the deaths of two deputized twins, their car rolling over an estimated ten times, "killing them outright."

The FBI is brought in, but the two agents assigned to the case are frustrated in their attempts to learn anything from the citizens of Leeman. Their descriptions of Stanley Woods (not his real name -- surprise!) are vague and conflicting, and the robbery happened too fast for anyone to remember any useful detail. All they have to go on is the Buick and its dead driver. Methodically going over each clue, they are able to determine that the driver's suit was purchased in Chicago and that the car had been stolen from a town in North Carolina. There are no other clues that lead anywhere and the FBI is at a dead end.

Then Pink Dee has an idea. A fourteen-year-old town misfit ("...milk-blue skin, dead-white hair, little reddish weak eyes, pipe-cleaner bones, narrow forehead, no chin, beaver teeth, a voice like an unoiled hinge..."), he sneaks into the garage, gathers a bit of information and goes to work. To reveal the ending would be cruel, but suffice it to say that he shows up the Feds.

"The Homesick Buick" races along at breakneck speed. The story is told methodically and dispassionately, without really delving into the heads of any of the characters, almost like a police report or a newspaper article. The descriptions of the methods used to try and track down the killers are fascinating and prove that police work wasn't completely primitive before the era of CSIs. The means with which Dee discovers the killers' whereabouts is so ingenious it will make you stop and think every time you get in your car.

Some of the anthologies that include this story are Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Stay Awake By (1971), Masterpieces of Mystery and Detection (1965), Best Detective Stories 2 (1964), The Delights of Detection (1961) and World-Famous Great Mystery Stories (1960). The most recent anthology I've been able to find containing it is The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000).