"Eyewitness" (1964 and 1979)

Argosy holds the historical distinction of being the very first pulp magazine ever, the creator of the mold that everyone else followed. Begun as a children’s weekly called The Golden Argosy by Frank Munsey in 1882, it went on -- in a variety of formats -- for nearly 100 years before finally folding. It was Munsey’s idea to convert the weekly to an all-fiction magazine, his idea to print it on the cheapest paper available (pulpwood) and his idea to load it with as many stories as the binding could hold. Its nearly 200 pages -- no illustrations -- held stories of infinite variety, especially after he merged Argosy with another creation of his, All-Story, and gradually the stories took on the various elements of what we now call pulp fiction: strong, identifiable lead characters with an inner, personal morality, often working in exotic locales, in tales written in bright, clear prose, strong plots and, of course with a bit of violence and romance. Argosy plied this format until 1943, when it was converted to a slick and began printing non-fiction articles. As the 1940’s moved into the 1950’s non-fiction took a greater and greater portion of the magazine’s contents, and it eventually morphed into a “men’s magazine,” with articles about hunting and guns, and featuring “true” stories about dangerous safaris in Africa, sports, real police procedurals, and war stories. Fiction took a definite back seat to the articles.

John D MacDonald never wrote for Argosy the pulp magazine -- it converted to a slick three years before he began writing -- but he was well represented in its men’s magazine form, publishing ten original short stories there and one excerpt from a novel (The Last One Left in the July 1967 issue). His work for Argosy was uniformly excellent, with top-of-the-line entries like “A Young Man’s Game,” “Jail Bait,” “Cop Probe,” “Long Shot” (chosen for inclusion in the author’s 1966 anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories), and the unheralded gem of the pack, “Built for Speed,” published in the magazine’s June 1954 issue. His story “Eyewitness” appeared in the September 1964 issue and it is also a quality entry, revolving around an investigation of a hit and run accident. In fact, it was so good that MacDonald used it again 14 years later, in another format and with another protagonist.

Of course MacDonald had used hit and run accidents before, in two different but identically titled stories written nine years apart (“Hit and Run” in 1952 and “Hit and Run” in 1961), but both of those tales featured policemen as the seekers of the identities of the drivers. In “Eyewitness” MacDonald goes back to the Cliff Bartells model he used in his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, and uses an insurance claims adjuster as the protagonist. Carl Beldon is a man-with-a-past, although the author never explains exactly what has happened to him, hinting at it only at the beginning and the very ending of the story. He arrives in the beach town of Stoney Cove, somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean shore (probably Florida, but never explicitly identified), has a cup of coffee at a local diner, and is observed by the young, “burly and cheerful” waitress:

He had an ironic objectivity about what she was seeing, a young-old man, with a chronic tiredness around the eyes, with that look of having been savaged a few times by life and then released, free to assemble a new set of adjustments and compromises.

Beldon works for Guarantee Mutual Liability, an insurance company that holds the auto-fleet policy for a company called Swain Electronics, headquartered in Charles City, a much larger community located about 20 miles north of Stoney Cove. One of those cars was driven by Swain Electronics co-owner Mercer Swain, who was down in Stoney Cove having dinner with a Swain secretary named Joanne Treiber. After a long afternoon of drinking and dinner, Swain rents a room at the local Tahiti Motor Inn and suggests that he and Joanne shack up for the night. She is having none of that and takes the car to drive back to Charles City, leaving the inebriated Mercer to take a cab home the next morning. On the way home, while still in Stoney Cove, she takes a notorious curve way too fast and hits a young girl on her way home from a babysitting job. The car was traveling at full speed and the victim was killed instantly. The car made no effort to stop and Joanne drove on home to her apartment, where she fell asleep as if nothing had happened.

But Joanne claims she never hit anyone. An anonymous caller got in touch with the police stating that he witnessed the accident and described the driver right down to the color of Joanne's hair, her dress and her purse. He also gave the license plate number, which led to Mercer, which eventually led to Joanne, who was roused from sleep by the police the next morning. Joanne’s story is different and, after talking with the local police and inspecting the car, Beldon heads up to Charles City to interview the accused.

John D MacDonald fans will surely smile at the introduction of Joanne Treiber. From the author’s description we know instantly that she is not only not guilty, but that romantic sparks are soon to fly. She’s “tall,” “blonde,” “slender,” and “red-bronze from recent exposure to the sun.” She is, understandably, in bad shape, facing felony manslaughter charges, but she is adamant that she did not hit anyone. When Beldon reminds her that she was drinking the whole afternoon, she responds by making one of the “drinks” for him: a wine spritzer -- only an ounce of Rhine wine mixed with soda. She relates her own side of the story: after refusing Mercer Swain’s advances, she took the keys to the company car and headed home. Before she made it out of the area she pulled over onto a deserted stretch of beach and walked about a mile down the shore to clear her mind. She got back in the car afterword and drove home, “very carefully,” as she was unused to the size and weight of the car. She didn’t realize anything was amiss until the next morning when she was awakened by the police.

Beldon reminds her that that was the car that hit the babysitter -- spectrometer analysis of the paint proves it. Joanne acknowledges that she is in “a horrible mess” but sticks to her story. Then time stops:

Looking at her, he knew the rare thing had happened. He could conduct fifty investigations and aside from a feeling of pity or distaste, feel no involvement with the people concerned. They were factors in a violent human equation. He could imitate empathy when it seemed the only way to open someone up, but he always felt shabby about doing it. In the fifty-first case, he would find someone who suddenly involved him in a personal way, tapping a hidden well of genuine concern. He did not want it to happen, ever. Because these things often came out very badly. And there were enough old scars to live with. Here it was again, where he had least expected it, and least wanted it -- with this doomed girl.

As Beldon compares Joanne’s timeline with that of the police, and once he decides to believe her protestations of innocence, he comes to the only conclusion he can: someone else took the car when Joanne was walking on the beach, hit the babysitter and returned the vehicle to where they found it. Thus it was probably the person who made the anonymous call to the police with the detailed description of the driver. Now it’s a case of trying to smoke the person out, and Beldon has an idea…

“Eyewitness” is an engaging, entertaining story, even with some of its obvious plot points and inevitable romance, and it is certainly worthy company to his other Argosy stories. So it’s no surprise to learn that when MacDonald wrote three serialized stories about an insurance claims adjuster in the late 1970’s, he borrowed “Eyewitness” for the third and final entry in that series. Indeed, this story seems to have been the template for the idea. Duke Rhoades, the protagonist of all three stories, began life in May 1977 with the five-part “Finding Anne Farley,” published by the Chicago Sun-Times’ Field Newspaper Syndicate in scores of newspapers around the country, both large and small. There was a gimmick involved with these stories, one that would hopefully inspire readers to study the plots and characters more closely: the final installment of each tale was withheld for a week so that readers could write their own endings, pick their own perpetrators from the cast of suspects, submit that ending to the local paper and possibly win a prize for best submission. Their ending would be printed alongside MacDonald’s own.

The second story, “Friend of the Family,” was published the following year, although fewer papers picked it up, and by the time MacDonald submitted the third and final story, the whole idea seems to have run out of gas. The contest idea was thrown out the window and the story presented as a simple four-part serialization. MacDonald himself didn’t even bother writing an original story: he rewrote “Eyewitness,” with the new protagonist and hewed to the original plot as closely as he possibly could. In fact, a comparison of the two stories reveals that he did almost no rewriting at all. Most of the characters names are the same and every detail from the original story is included, save the paragraph about the protagonist being “savaged by life.” Duke Rhoades is a much less complicated character. The final paragraph of the original story (which I won’t reveal here) is a wonderful ending, beautifully and concisely written, but it is ruined in the rewrite, replaced by a few banal sentences. One tends to think of writers getting better as they age, learning their craft as they go along, and MacDonald certainly thought that of himself, but when he tried to re-do his older material he almost always ended up destroying the pace, grace and sense of magic in the prose. Think The Good Old Stuff. In fact, if you ever want a perfect example of what I am talking about, read my piece on his Crack Detective Stories tale “You Remember Jeanie” and its rewrite in More Good Old Stuff.

“Eyewitness” was the end of the line for Duke Rhoades. So unenthusiastic were the members of the Field Newspaper Syndicate over the story that few picked it up, with only one major metropolitan daily (the San Diego Union-Tribune) doing so. I managed to find my copy of it in the September 30, October 7, 14 and 21st editions of Florida Today, a Gannett publication. A rather ignominious ending for a character who is part of a special and unique group of fictional protagonists, including Benton Walters, Shane Brent, Park Falkner and Travis McGee.

"Friend of the Family"

Serious students of the works of John D MacDonald, along with readers of his short fiction and followers of this blog, are no doubt aware of the fact that Travis McGee was not the author’s first attempt at creating a series character. That particular effort began all the way back at the beginning of his writing career when Doc Savage editor and early mentor Babette Rosemond implored him to give it a try for that pulp magazine. MacDonald created one Benton Walters, a war vet who quits his dull bank job and takes on an improbable career as a cold war spy. He debuted in the December 1946 issue with a story titled “Private War,” and again the following month in “Eight Dozen Agents,” before MacDonald tired of him and put him to rest, famously writing Rosemond, "Honest to God -- I'm never going to start another series. They are limiting and I hate them."

But he did just that four years later for Detective Tales magazine when he created Parker Falkner, a fabulously wealthy playboy and resident of his own island off the coast of west Florida. MacDonald’s formula for this particular series was to have Falkner relieving his constant boredom by digging into the pasts of people he believes have done some great wrong and have gotten away with it, then devises a clever and complicated ruse to smoke them out. Yet again, it took only two stories (“Breathe No More, My Lovely” and “The Lady is a Corpse,” both reprinted in JDM’s 1982 pulp anthology The Good Old Stuff under the author’s original titles) before MacDonald put Falkner to rest.

And in between those two early efforts was the almost-series character of Shane Brent, the protagonist of the 1948 science fiction short story “Dance of a New World” which appeared in the September issue of Astounding Science Fiction. He showed up again in “School for the Stars,” also in Astounding, before disappearing altogether. As I wrote in my piece on “School for the Stars,” this particular character seems to have been intended for a closed-end series of stories rather than one that would have been ongoing.

Fast forward to 1964 and the birth of Travis McGee. So, no, he wasn’t MacDonald’s first attempt at a series character. But here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know: he wasn’t the last.

I didn’t know this either, until I recently expanded my JDM story collection to include two works I’d heretofore been unable to locate. Back in July of 2015 I wrote a piece on “Finding Anne Farley,” also known as “Ring My Love With Diamonds” a unique 1977 newspaper serialization MacDonald did for the Field Newspaper Syndicate, owned by the Chicago Sun-Times and which included scores of smaller and regional newspapers. The lengthy story was serialized over five weekly installments (more in some of the smaller papers), with the final installment delayed a week so that readers could write and submit their own versions of the ending, revealing who done it. A winning entry would be selected, printed along with JDM’s actual ending, and the submitter awarded a prize of $100. For a protagonist, MacDonald went back to the beginning of his paperback career and created a subject remarkably similar to Cliff Bartells, the hero of JDM’s first book, The Brass Cupcake. Oliver “Duke” Rhoades is an insurance investigator, especially adept at recovering stolen goods. Rhoades’ nickname is derived from his facial similarity to John Wayne, but he is not especially tall, and any other similarities to MacDonald’s other famous protagonist end there.

MacDonald went on to produce two other serialized stories for the Field Syndicate, one published the following year (“Friend of the Family”) and the final effort in 1979, a reworking of a 1964 story with the same name, “Eyewitness.” I speculated in my piece on “Finding Anne Farley” that Rhoades may have been the star of these two other stories, and now that I own copies of them I can report that this is indeed the case. Duke Rhoades is series-character number five in the John D MacDonald canon.

Like the story written before it, “Friend of the Family” is a short work built around an elaborate crime, a rare whodunit for JDM, who usually avoided such stories. But that was the whole point of the contest, to have readers not only guess who did it but to explain how they did it. The author introduces various unusual characters, plants clues along the way (both real and red herrings), then springs the trap at the end. The tales are short on characterization and background, yet as with everything MacDonald, the writer’s singular skills at creating whole worlds from a few well-chosen words help to fill out all the background the reader needs.

Unlike Cliff Bartells in The Brass Cupcake, insurance investigator Rhoades does not actually work for an insurance company but instead is employed as a consultant. He’s the guy brought in when the company’s own man fails to find anything suspicious with an unusual or expensive claim. As such, when he arrives on the scene all the important people have already been grilled, investigated and exonerated, and the claimant is usually impatiently awaiting the insurance money. Rhoades is so good that once he gives the claimant a pass the insurance company complies without further investigation.

“Friend of the Family” sends Rhoades to MacDonald country, specifically Sarasota, where a couple of years earlier two Fortune 500 retirees had grown restless fishing and playing golf all day and decide to start a small business together, making white camera cases designed to keep film unspoiled in the hot Florida sun. The idea sounded better than it really was and the enterprise never took off, leading the company to go slowly downhill until the pair eventually decide to liquidate its holdings, laying off the workforce and selling its inventory. In the process of doing so, one of the partners, Tyde Dunning, decided to go into work one late evening to do some paperwork and never returned home. He was discovered the next morning by the one remaining employee who comes to the building, located on the grounds of the Sarasota Airport, to finish up some work. She finds Tyde in a most unusual state:

[He] sat in a wooden armchair ... slumped to the right, his head tilted forward and to the right. He wore a short-sleeved sport shirt, pale shorts and leather sandals. His legs were tanned and hairy. He had a pot belly. His arms were bound from wrist to elbow to the arms of the chair. There were some wide strands of the same white tape around his chest and around the back of the chair, holding him upright. His head was totally wrapped in the white tape, around and around, covered from the crown of his head to his adam's apple. He was a contemporary mummy, semi-processed.

Tyde was a nice guy and everyone who knew him liked him, so there are no obvious suspects. The widow was playing in a bridge tournament in Miami at the time, and all of the ex-employees have been cleared. But there was a $700,000 key-man life insurance policy for the business with a $300,000 accidental death rider. The beneficiary, now that the business is shuttered, is Tyde’s partner Ralph Sharn. But Ralph has terminal cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy, which has made him frail and in need of continual care from his second wife, Betty. His adult daughter, Laura, has even come down from her home up north to help with her dad.

Or course all of this has been investigated before by the insurance company's own investigator, so it is Duke’s job to go over everything again, interview all of the people who were involved with the victim and try to either find a killer or authorize the payment of the insurance to Ralph. Here we get to see MacDonald firing on all cylinders as Duke meets with them, and the author gets to show off his amazing ability of drawing characters with a minimum of words, a line here, a movement there, a description that says all the reader needs to know to understand who that particular character is. We meet the local agent who sold the pair the insurance policy, we meet the deputy who investigated the case, we meet the widow, the partner and his wife and daughter, the lawyer who handled the business’s affairs, and even Ralph Sharn’s doctor. MacDonald’s painting of Duke’s first meeting with Ralph is a perfect example of his ability with character:

Ralph Sharn was tall, very tanned and quite thin. His posture was bad. He walked as though he were on the parapet of the tallest building in town, braced against unexpected gusts of wind, trying not to look down. He had frail, scattered remnants of gray hair, pale-blue eyes framed in flesh so dark it looked bruised, and a smile of welcome so exceptionally warm and sweet that I became an instant friend.

“Friend of the Family” hearkens back to many of the stories MacDonald did for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Manhunt and Justice back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, before Travis McGee took over his writing life. There is an emphasis on procedure and the characterization of the protagonist is necessarily thin, certainly nothing even close to that of McGee or any other main character in one of his novels. But it’s an enjoyable story that will keep the reader guessing -- up to a certain point, when it becomes pretty obvious (at least it was for me, but I’ve read too much JDM to be surprised very often.)


So longtime readers won’t be surprised when Duke meets Ralph’s daughter Laura and she is described as “ash blond almost as tall as I am,” it leads to a relationship. (Apparently Duke’s girlfriend from “Finding Anne Farley” has gone by the wayside.) And readers of MacDonald’s own biography will certainly recognize the neighborhood where the Dunnings and the Sharns live two houses apart. It’s on a spit of land that juts out into Sarasota Bay from Siesta Key, just off of Midnight Pass on a road called Blind Cove Road. As Duke approaches, “I drove between old, live oaks, catching glimpses of expensive-looking houses beyond tropical shrubbery. The Dunning house was off the turnaround at the end of Blind Cove Lane, the wide blue bay glinting beyond it.”

This is, of course, the neighborhood where the MacDonalds lived from 1952 to 1969 on Point Crisp Road and the house described is that of his next door neighbors.

The Field Newspaper Syndicate offered the series to its member newspapers along with supporting story art and author background, but it seems that fewer papers picked up the option than before with “Finding Anne Farley.” Of course Field’s main newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times carried it, as did the Miami Herald and the Sarasota Journal, but it does not appear that as many of the smaller presses ran it. One that did was the Daily Record of Morristown, New Jersey, which is where I located my copy. Unlike “Finding Anne Farley,” the story was never anthologized in book form. The winning entry for the ending was submitted by one Lorraine Biear, a resident of Rockaway Township and an unpublished mystery writer herself. She got the bad guy right but her ending is, of course, much different.

It would be another year before Duke Rhoades’ final appearance in print took place. I’ll write about that next time.

"Finding Anne Farley" ("Ring My Love With Diamonds")

In 1977 John D MacDonald went from being a fairly well known writer of crime and suspense novels to a Big Deal. In March of that year his massive novel Condominium was published in hardcover by Lippincott to fairly universal acclaim and major sales. Only the year before the author’s sixteenth volume in the very successful Travis McGee series had been published and accounted for JDM’s first ever appearance on the New York Times Best Seller List, peaking at Number 3. With Condominium he again made it to that then-sacrosanct listing, where it sat for a full 27 weeks, peaking (again) at number 3.

Although the author had pretty much given up on writing short stories at this point in his career, this particular year saw the publication of three such works, all of them unusual to some extent. In the spring his “Wedding Present” appeared in the literary journal Antaeus, his first and only work for that title. It’s an ingenious and fairly typical JDM crime story centered around a particular method for committing that crime. It reads, however, like a much older work, and I’m betting that it was something the author had done years before and perhaps had it rejected by his first choice of publishers. In October New York magazine published the first Travis McGee “short story,” a monograph really, titled “Terminal Cases.” It’s basically McGee and Meyer conversing about a particular societal problem and is a precursor to the posthumously published Reading for Survival, a work we typically classify as a book rather than a short story.

But in May of ‘77, a month after the publication of Condominium, one of MacDonald’s more unusual efforts appeared, not just in one periodical but in many dozen across the country. The Field Newspaper Syndicate, an organization owned by the Chicago Sun-Times, contracted with MacDonald to publish a JDM novella he called “Finding Anne Farley,” to be serialized in five parts, with installments published weekly. The serial would appear in the syndicate’s flagship publication (in the paper’s Sunday magazine supplement) and be offered to the scores of regional papers that were members of the syndicate. To make things interesting, the editors at Field came up with the idea of delaying the story’s final installment so that readers could write and submit their own conclusion to the tale. A winner would be chosen by each member newspaper and a prize of $100 awarded. In addition, the Field editors offered its members the option of publishing the story under an alternate title, “Ring My Love With Diamonds,” and nearly all of the papers that picked up the serial did so using the second title.

For a protagonist, MacDonald went back to the beginning of his paperback career in creating a subject remarkably similar to Cliff Bartells, the hero of JDM’s first book, The Brass Cupcake. Oliver “Duke” Rhoades is an insurance investigator, especially adept at recovering stolen goods. Rhoades’ nickname is derived from his facial similarity to John Wayne, but he is not especially tall, and any other similarities to MacDonald’s other famous protagonist ends there. Rhodes, once employed by Equity Protection Insurance, is now a private “consultant” and hires out to whoever is paying. In “Finding Anne Farley” Equity is grudgingly using him as an independent for the first time.

The company has paid a huge settlement after a large amount of diamonds were stolen from an Atlanta jewelry story. Thirty-two items worth $600,000 was taken over a weekend from Westcott and Sons and replaced with professionally made but worthless copies. The initial investigation resulted in the conclusion that a long-time, trusted employee named Anne Farley was the thief. Using the opportunity of a weekend when the store’s manager was out of town at an auction, Farley apparently made her way into the store’s vault on a Friday and took the items, all of them worth in excess of $300, and replaced them with the phonies. After a pre-arranged weekend vacation, Monday rolled around and Farley didn’t come in to work. She hasn’t been seen since.

Duke’s first stop in his investigation is to a diamond broker in New York City named Wally Marks. Looking over the store’s reference photographs of the stolen items, Marks concludes that the pieces in question were selected not only for their value but for their anonymity: diamonds that could be sold with little effort and funneled back onto the market.

“Somebody had a channel to feed this stuff right back into the industry. Somebody had a lot of time in the vault to select these items and leave the fancy cuts behind. There’s no junk here. All these stones are salable, and probably already sold.”

The conclusion is that Anne Farley sneaked the photos of the items out over time and used them to have the phonies made, then waited until the Friday the manager was away to switch them and take off.

Duke then makes his way to Atlanta and Wescott and Sons. He interviews the store’s manager, one J. Trevor Laneer, who he finds is less than interested in reviving the case.

“Five different people -- two of them from Equity Protection -- questioned me at great length over a period of many weeks, you know. They extracted every scrap of information from me. Surely all that material is on record, and if you have a legitimate purpose in all this, surely it will be available to you. Frankly, I am sick unto death of it. I was deceived by a person I trusted. It took far too long to get the insurance settlement. I feel I was treated badly.”

But Duke hangs around the store afterward and meets one of the saleswomen, Libby Franklin, the only member of the sales staff who doesn’t appear “demure and bloodless.” Libby agrees to meet at a local bar after work to answer Duke’s questions. They eventually end up back at Libby’s apartment and order Chinese carryout. Duke learns that Anne Farley was a dedicated and severe assistant to a severe and authoritarian Laneer. The two of them were the only members of the staff with access to the vault. Farley, referred to by Libby as the “head vestal virgin” of the all-female staff, had no real personal life, had lived with her mother until she passed away, and had resided in a residential hotel until a week before the theft, when she moved to a motel near the Atlanta airport.

A romantic relationship eventually develops between Duke and Libby, but it is never directly referenced and doesn’t becomes part of the main plot.

Duke manages to track down a travel agency where Anne paid for a trip to Cancún, presumably to disappear. It is a plot development that bears remarkable resemblance to MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel The Empty Copper Sea, which he was presumably in the process of writing when “Finding Anne Farley” was published. But unlike McGee in Copper, Duke actually makes the trip to Cancún and to the hotel where Farley had reservations. Eventually he deduces that although Anne had a reservation and had paid for her room, she never actually arrived there.

Things get more complicated when Duke learns some additional facts about Laneer. The store manager’s older wife comes from big Atlanta money and the store is owned by a trust set up by her father. She suffered a paralyzing stroke several years ago and is completely incapacitated, able only to sit in a chair and look out the window onto an expansive rock garden that Laneer has lovingly built for her with his own hands.

“Finding Anne Farley” is a straightforward tale of investigation, clues and the solving of a meticulously planned crime. It has little characterization outside of MacDonald’s trademark economic descriptions and does not contain a single wasted word. The author didn’t write a lot of what could be classified as whodunits, but this story definitely fits that bill. It seems to have been fairly successful, with a number of papers around the country picking up the option to run it, from big city dailies such as The San Francisco Examiner and the Miami Herald to smaller publications like the Van Nuys Valley News and the Oil City (Pennsylvania) Derrick. It was successful enough for the Field syndicate to do it again the following year, with a serial titled “Friend of the Family.” The year after they published a third and final serial called “Eyewitness.”

I’m unsure if Duke Rhoades repeated his role as protagonist in the subsequent serials, as I don’t own copies and have never read them. If that was the case, and it seems likely, then we can add Rhoades to the list of JDM series characters that began with Benton Walters back in 1946. I can say that the third series, “Eyewitness,” was an adaption and expansion of an early JDM short story of the same name that was published in the September 1964 issue of Argosy. Although the protagonist of that earlier tale isn’t named Duke Rhoades, he is an insurance investigator, so it seems likely to me that these three serials all feature that particular character. “Eyewitness” (the serial version) appeared in very few newspapers -- in fact, according to Walter Shine, it didn’t even make it to the Sun Times -- so it has been hard for me to find out exactly who is in the new tale.

“Finding Anne Farley” was reprinted once, in the Best Detective Stories of the Year anthology for 1978, edited by Edward D Hoch. There one can read it as a unified piece without the installment interruptions. Used copies of this book occasionally turn up online. If you have access to a newspaper database, either at home or at your local library, you may be able to find it in its five parts, including perhaps the winning entries in the reader contest for the ending. If you can get into the archives of the San Antonio Express-News, you will find not only MacDonald’s own ending, but the winning reader’s ending and a handful of runner-up entries. One of them, written by Phillip D. Tritchler, has got to be one of the funniest and most outrageous bits of reader participation ever. Believe me, I’m giving nothing away from MacDonald’s own ending by printing Tritchler’s wacko conclusion below.

After his return to Atlanta from Mexico, Duke Rhoades talks again with each of the key figures in the case, looking for some unusual occurrence in the jewelry store's routine over the past year or in Anne Farley's woefully sterile life.

One of Anne's fellow sales clerks mentions the name of Travis McGee as the only man she's known Anne to show an interest in.

Duke finds that McGee was a highly successful salvage operator of sorts, recovering lost, stolen or swindled valuables for friends, usually for a fee of half the sum recovered.

It was on just such a case, involving precious gems, that McGee visited Atlanta and met Anne Farley.

What serves to whet Rhodes' curiosity even more is that McGee, in his last "salvage" operation, departed from his usual pattern and, weighing friendship and honesty in balance with greed, kept the entire bundle for himself.

Could he have done it again?

Following this trail, Rhodes goes to Florida to talk with McGee. But McGee's houseboat, "The Busted Flush," departed its usual moorings one day after Laneer's diamonds disappeared in Atlanta.

There was also, McGee's neighbors reveal, an attractive blonde on the houseboat. Anne Farley?

After weeks of searching the Caribbean, Rhoades finds the “Flush” anchored in an isolated bay near Bimini in the Bahamas and confronts both McGee and Farley.

After a brief but violent confrontation, McGee collapses with a fatal coronary. Turning to Anne, Rhoades notices that all those months of leisure in the sun have had their effect on her as well.

The mousy, shy clerk has blossomed into a woman worth second and third glances. Farley confesses the plot including the false Mexico leads was McGee's idea [sic] and produces the diamonds.

The catch in the caper, she said, came when her love for McGee turned to hate during the months of isolation.

Rhodes, staring at the beautiful blue-white diamonds and glancing at Anne, thinks of the return to Atlanta and comes to a decision.

With a smile and a gesture toward the houseboat controls, he asks her, "Can this thing get us to Brazil?"

It’s been a long time since I’ve wiped tears of laughter from my eyes after reading something.