"Dead on the Pin"

Writers mostly had mixed feelings about the passing of the pulps. Many felt that those days were best forgotten. They had outgrown the pulps, gone on to more mature work. The pulps seemed like a youthful indiscretion. Some writers could only remember the hard work, the endless days hunched over the Remington, pounding words onto paper until the clanging of the metal keys was ringing in the ears. But there had been good work, too, and the camaraderie, and the creative challenge. Mixed feelings. - - Lee Server, from Danger is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. (1993)

John D MacDonald was never at a loss for words when it came to reminiscing about his days writing for the pulps. He spoke often of the crushing workload, the the poor payscale and the sheer volume of product he needed to come up with in order for him to be able to support his family. He fondly recalled the opportunity to learn a craft he had decided to embark upon relatively late in life, and the generous and helpful guidance pulp magazine editors like Alden Norton, Babette Rosmond, Mike Tilden and Harry Widmer offered him. He even shared his recollections within the pages of fanzines such as Bronze Shadows, remembering the people, retelling amusing stories and conveying a general sense of nostalgia of an era gone forever.

But when it came to actually reading, remembering or bringing to light the short stories and novellas he wrote for these magazine, it was a different matter. The earliest clamor from his fanbase for an anthology of these tales was met with foot dragging on the author’s part. He agreed to a science fiction collection, because, hey, it was just science fiction, a bias he clearly revealed in his then-notorious afterword to Other Times, Other Worlds. But when it came to the mystery stories, it took a lot more convincing. When in 1978 Francis J Nevins, Jr wrote a paper on “MacDonald’s Early Pulp Stories,” extolling the quality of many of these forgotten works, MacDonald’s response was not enthusiastic.

As to a collection of pulp stories, I really do not know if they would work well enough at this late date. I have the feeling they are just a bit too glib and easy to be worth keeping. I would not gather them up myself for presentation with any feeling of pride and/or satisfaction. And I would hope that by the time they are posthumous, they will be far too passe for collecting.

But Nevins, along with über-anthologist Martin H Greenberg, persisted and offered to do the “gathering up for presentation” since MacDonald was clearly unwilling to do so. JDM’s bibliographer non pareil Walter Shine, along with his wife Jean, helped supply copies of the stories and chimed in on suggestions as to which stories should be included. The list was reduced to 30, they were typed up in manuscript form and submitted to McDonald for his ultimate decision. Instead of being repulsed, JDM wrote that he was “astonished” that only three of them “did not merit republication.” (Talk about a backhanded compliment!) He agreed to move forward with the project, which eventually encompassed two volumes, published two years apart, titled The Good Old Stuff (1982) and More Good Old Stuff (1984).

MacDonald’s reticence is clear in his introduction to the first volume, where he actually writes that he considered himself to be “taking [an] occupational risk in having the stories published.” How such an otherwise intelligent man could have so misjudged his appeal to his fans is a mystery that will never be solved. But MacDonald’s reluctance was one thing, something that was eventually dealt with, but he reacted in another, more damaging way, in that he felt the need to “update” the stories. All of the stories suffered this editorial meddling, some more than others. Several of the stories' time-frames were switched from the early postwar period to the early 1980’s. Many small references were changed, usually from then-famous personages to more contemporary ones. Prices were increased, as were income figures, and mediums of entertainment were switched, mainly from radio to television. But, he assured the reader, nothing had been done to the prose itself outside of these contemporizing adjustments.

I was horribly tempted to make other changes, to edit patches of florid prose, substitute the right words for the almost right words, but that would have been cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was.

The readers of The Good Old Stuff and More Good Old Stuff had to take MacDonald at his word on this assertion, as only a few readers had access to the original pulp magazines in which these stories appeared. I certainly didn’t own any of these hard-to-find and expensive-to-purchase periodicals, but I began looking and began collecting and it was years before I obtained even a small portion of the original material. Thinking that I didn’t need to re-read the stories where the updating hadn’t been obvious, it wasn’t until I actually did so when preparing to write a piece on “The Tin Suitcase” (titled “She Cannot Die” in the anthology) in 2016 that I realized that the author was way more than just a little misleading in his “hands off” claim. When I got to writing about “You Remember Jeanie” I discovered wholesale changes that completely altered the feel and atmosphere of the original story.

“Dead on the Pin” is as nifty a piece of pulp writing as you’re likely to come across, a short, matter-of-fact tale that is wonderfully told and stylishly composed. It is a work of fiction that any mystery writer would have been proud to call their own in its original form. Yet MacDonald took his red pencil to it and made many, many changes. The overall effect is not as bad as it was with “The Tin Suitcase” or (especially) “You Remember Jeannie,” but the changes are nearly all unnecessary and are detrimental to the overall quality of the telling of the tale. The original appeared in the Summer 1950 issue of Mystery Book Magazine and runs an economic 2,500 words.

Joe Desmon is a veteran of the war (World War II, in the original) who has, since his return stateside, managed the Wonderland Bowling Alleys, “on the turnpike three miles out of town.” Because of a dearth of bowling alleys in town, he works long hours, hoping for the day he can own his own establishment and order someone else to do all of the things he does now.

So it seemed like almost too much to expect when one day about three months ago this little guy showed up and asked if I could hire him to do jobs around the place. He was edging close to fifty with the top of his head up to about my chin. He was the sort of little man you would push out of your way, but not if you looked close. There were hard, blunt bones in his face and a pair of pale blue expressionless eyes and a tight slit for a mouth. He had a thick look through the shoulders, and his arms hung almost down to his knees, with big square wrists.

His name was Johnson and he willingly accepts the pittance Joe is able to pay him for brushing the alleys, mopping the floor, emptying the ashtrays and cleaning the restrooms. His only request is that he be allowed to bowl a few games when there was no other work to do. Joe looks at Johnson’s thumb and recognizes the “swollen, bent-back look of a man who has done a lot of it.” It was late, and Joe suggests they play a quick one.

Initially he’s not impressed with Johnson’s game. By the third frame Joe has scored "a fat 69" to Johnson's 27. Joe begins to get bored. "He had a nice hook but it was coming in too quickly." On the fourth frame, however, Johnson finds the pocket "for one of the prettiest strikes I've ever seen." He does the same in for the next four frames. He handily beats Joe.

Johnson does his work quietly and gets along with the rest of the staff. He is eventually allowed to give lessons, earning a cut of the fees. "Having him around eased the pressure on me, but he wasn't a fellow you could chum up to." When Joe suggests that he join one of the leagues that play at Wonderland, he is quickly dissuaded. "Just say that I don't like to bowl with people. Maybe I blow up under pressure. Put it any way you want, but don't go talking up my game. Understand?"

In the story's most satisfying and best written scene, a trio of young punks come into the alley one night and start clowning around, rolling a ball down an lane Johnson is sweeping. He avoids the ball but has the mop swept out of his hands. "Did I scare you, pop?" asks one of the boys. Johnson walks up and throws the boy into the racks. The others respond but are handily taken care of. They leave the place, minus their swagger and a few teeth.

Then, early one morning, Joe wakes up in his room to find a stranger sitting beside his bed. "Good morning, Joe," he said…”

“Dead on the Pin” is a model of economy and one of the best examples of the real quality one could find in the pulp magazines of the post war period. There’s not a wasted word, and the prose is impeccable, with perfectly structured sentences that have a unique rhythm, ringing in the mind’s ear like a kind of Runyonesque poetry. This is MacDonald at his best, or at least his best at this period of his career, so it’s a real shame that he felt the need to alter the story when it was reprinted in The Good Old Stuff. As I’ve done in previous pieces on GOS reprints, I’ll present a section of the story, first as it was originally written and then as it was altered by MacDonald. It’s the passage describing the first game between Joe and Johnson.

With my double and spare in the first three frames and his two splits and a miss, I felt pretty patronizing. When I made a strike in the fourth to make my fill on the third frame a fat 69 to his 27, I began to get bored. He had a nice hook but it was coming in too quickly.

In the fourth frame he found the pocket for one of the prettiest strikes I’ve ever seen. He did it again in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth.

He paused then and said, “Mr. Desmon, do you fire people you can’t beat?”

“What do you think I am?” I demanded.

“Just asking, ki— Mr. Desmon.”

He then plunked across the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth strike in a row, snowing me under 237 to 202.

I said, “You’ve got eight in a row. Keep pitching.”

He grinned for the first time. The grin came and went so fast that I almost missed it. He got the ninth, then blew the tenth and left the ball on the rack.

I kept an eye on him. He did his work and got along with the rest of the help. He got along by staying out of everybody’s way. After the first month I began to throw lessons his way, giving him a cut. He had perfect style, setting the ball down so smoothly that it wouldn’t dent a custard, and he was quick to pick out flaws and point them out. Having him around eased the pressure on me, but he wasn’t fellow you could chum up to.

Here’s the rewrite:

With my double and spare in the first three frames and his two splits and a miss, I felt pretty arrogant. When I got my strike in the fourth, it made my fill on the third frame a fat 69 to his 27. I started to get bored, but in his fourth frame, his ball ducked into the pocket for one of the prettiest cleanest strikes I have ever seen. His ball had been curving in too fast before that, giving him those thin Brooklyn hits.

And so while I got spare, strike, spare, he got three more of those boomers, where all the pins jumped into the pit in unison.

He looked at me and said, “Mr. Desmon, do you fire people you can’t beat?”

“What do you think I am? No. And I’m not beat yet.”

“Just asking, ki—Mr. Desmon.”

So he kept chucking them in there, and in the end he had put eight strikes in a row altogether, and he wiped me out, 235 to 202.

So I said, “Okay. And I think you could keep right on wiping me out. You’re not fired.”
He grinned for the first time. It came and went so quickly I almost missed it. He wanted to know if he could practice a little when his work was done. I told him to be my guest.

I kept an eye on him. He did his work and got along well enough with the rest of my people. He got along by staying out of the way. After the first month I began to throw some lessons his way, giving him a cut. He had perfect style, laying the ball down so smoothly it wouldn’t have dented the top of a custard pie. He could pick up the flaws and point them out and demonstrate how to cure them. He eased the pressure on me, but I never did really get to know the man.

With these changes one gets the impression that MacDonald is talking down to an idiot kid, someone incapable of understanding the nuances of the language or picking up on the obvious slang of the day. Why bother changing the sentence “Having him around eased the pressure on me, but he wasn’t fellow you could chum up to.” to “He eased the pressure on me, but I never did really get to know the man.”? What does it add to the understanding of the character or to what is happening? It certainly robs the original of its rough meter. Or how about “In the fourth frame he found the pocket for one of the prettiest strikes I’ve ever seen. He did it again in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth.” replaced with “in his fourth frame, his ball ducked into the pocket for one of the prettiest cleanest strikes I have ever seen. His ball had been curving in too fast before that, giving him those thin Brooklyn hits.And so while I got spare, strike, spare, he got three more of those boomers, where all the pins jumped into the pit in unison.” This isn’t “updating,” it’s explaining.

And did he really need to add “pie” after the word “custard”?

A few weeks ago I posted a transcription of an essay MacDonald wrote for Writers’ Digest titled “The Editor Over My Shoulder.” In discussing the role of editor the author asks the reader to imagine the writer as a tailor, designing and sewing suits of clothing in the middle of a carnival. The editor is a passerby, offering numerous bits of unsolicited advice, all analogous to what passes between a real writer and a real editor. With MacDonald acting the role of real editor with the Good Old Stuff anthologies, here are some of the pointless suggestions that apply to his own meddling:

“The pattern of that material looks awfully loud to me."

“Nobody wears that style any more.”

“It’s going to end up looking like any other cheap, readymade suit.”

“They’ll never let you into the best clubs wearing that, will they?"

“All the lapels are wider this year.”

And so on…

I would like to extend a special thank you to Trap of Solid Gold reader Keith Hann, who, after reading my pieces on “The Tin Suitcase” and “You Remember Jeanie,” decided to quantify the changes MacDonald made to the text of all of the Good Old Stuff stories. He transcribed both the originals (where available… he doesn’t have them all) and the Good Old Stuff re-do’s into separate Word documents, then used the software’s Compare function to produce a document highlighting in red all of the changes made to the original. When he sent me the comparison of “Dead on the Pin” my eyes bugged out at the amount of crimson on the page. MacDonald made over 75 changes -- some minor, many not-so-minor -- to the original text. Seventy-five changes to a 2,500-word short story. He really must have feared that the publication of The Good Old Stuff was an “occupational risk.”

"Murder in Mind"

John D MacDonald once claimed that he had never written about a place that he had not once lived in or visited. Science fiction stories notwithstanding, this would -- if true -- cover a lot of ground. The careful student of the author’s work and biography can see through a lot of the fictional towns, cities and rural locals as matching places where he grew up, lived, fought and vacationed. There are the rust belt cities of the northeast that are featured in many of his early novels, all stand-ins for Utica, Rochester, Fayetteville, Albany or Syracuse, New York. There’s Mexico, of The Damned, The Empty Trap and “Border Town Girl.” And of course there’s Florida, with several thinly disguised versions of Sarasota (April Evil) and Clearwater (The Brass Cupcake).

But if one remembers that the MacDonald family owned lakeside property in a very remote section of the Adirondacks along the shores of Piseco Lake, another vast set of locales is added to the mix. Purchased in 1944 by Dorothy MacDonald, using funds husband John won in a poker game while stationed in Ceylon during the war, an actual residence wasn’t built on the property until 1951. From that year on the MacDonald family spent nearly every summer in their Piseco Lake “camp,” and every winter in Florida.

So its no surprise that remote lake house locales figure heavily in the JDM grabbag of settings. I’ve written about this before. They are featured importantly in novels such as Cancel All Our Vows, All These Condemned, You Live Once and Judge Me Not. Lake houses are a place of intrigue in “Betrayed,” murder scenes in “I Always Get the Cuties,” and redemption in “Forever Yours.” From a literary point of view lakes can be idyllically peaceful and reaffirming or menacingly isolated from civilization. In 1948 MacDonald wrote a beautifully conceived set piece that took place entirely in a lakefront setting, one nearly identical to the MacDonald Piesco camp. It was called “Murder in Mind” and it was published in the Winter issue of Mystery Book magazine, a pulp with a somewhat interesting history.

“Murder in Mind” can be classified as one of MacDonald’s “howdunits,” although it also works as a rare JDM whodunit. Howdunits  typically involve a crime committed in a way that either defies explanation or seems cut-and-dried, but is in fact an elaborately designed masterplan created to make discovery impossible. Impossible, that is, until one of MacDonald’s typically bright and driven protagonists comes along and solves the puzzle.

The relatively brief short story is told in first person by a police detective the reader knows only as Joe. Joe is a county cop and works out of the village of Hoffwalker (a stand-in for Speculator, the county seat of Hamilton County, which contains Piseco Lake.) His senior partner is detective Burt Stanleyson, who has just been called by a man vacationing at a camp on Lake Odega, telling him that his wife has just been killed by a stray shot from a hunter coming from the opposite shore of the lake.

It is late autumn and trees around the lake are “stripped naked.” The camps that dot the shore of Lake Odega are mostly vacant now and the only activity that brings people up here at this time of the year is hunting. That is what brought Ralph Bennison and his now-dead wife Alice to the lake, to rent the Tyler camp for a week and to try out Ralph’s new Remington. When the cops and Ralph arrive they find Alice lying where she fell, dead on her back in the middle of a trail.

There were streaks of drying mud on the right sleeve of her pale yellow sweater. There was more mud on her freckled right arm. Death had flattened her body to the ground. Her tweed skirt was pushed up halfway between knee and hip. Her heels rested in the mud and her brown sandals toed in… The chill wind off the lake hurried the dry brown leaves across the trail. A leaf had stuck to her hair over the right temple, where the hair was sticky with new blood.

As Ralph Bennison sits on a log with his face in his hands, Burt Stanleyson stands over the body while Joe observes the two men. He notices their similarities -- both are big men -- but contrasts Burt’s wrinkled gray suit and manner of confidence in a wooded setting to Ralph’s department store wool hunting shirt and his matching breeches and high shoes. “He had the city label on him, all the way from his big shiny fingernails to the bright new leather of his knife sheath.”

When Ralph asks bitterly why the two cops aren't on the other side of the lake looking for the hunter who fired the shot, Burt says nothing and leans down to look closely at the bullet wound. He also lowers the skirt to cover Alice's knees. Ralph continues, explaining in detail how everything happened.

"Look here," he said. "Alice and I were walking down the trail with the lake at our right. She was ahead of me. The trail is muddy and uneven, and I was watching my feet, like I told you. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her fall on her face. I jumped toward her, thinking that she had tripped. As I jumped, I heard a distant noise like a shot. I rolled her over and held her head in my arms. I saw she was dead, and realized that she had been killed by a stray shot. Then I came after you. Why aren't you after those people across the lake?"

Burt patiently explains that it is late in the day and that trying to round up two dozen hunters at that hour would be nearly impossible. Besides, nobody would admit to firing across the lake. Then there’s the time and expense of doing ballistics testing on all of their rifles. Burt thinks that the best thing to do is to play up the publicity and hope that “some man’s conscience will punish him.”

He asks Ralph about the reason for their trip to Lake Odega and asks, since they were up here to hunt, if they brought two guns. No, answers Ralph, only the one. Why then, wonders Burt, does Alice have a bruise under her eye, as if a gun stock had hit her there on recoil. Ralph tells Burt that she did some target practice behind the cabin and pulls back her sweater to show the cops a purple bruise on her right shoulder. By this time Joe is completely confused as to Burt’s demeanor and line of questioning. If the senior cop was inferring that Ralph may have shot his own wife, that would seem impossible, as the wound indicated that the shot came from a great distance. Burt then asks some personal questions.

Burt: “What’s your business?”

Ralph: “Well… nothing at the moment. I used to be in the investment business.”

Burt: “Married a gal with money, hey?”

Ralph: “Look here, Stanleyson, I resent this questioning. What’s that got to do with finding out which one of the hunters across the lake shot her?”

Burt: “Then she did have money?”

Ralph: “Suppose she did? We both had money.”

Burt sighs and looks up at a tree, then walks down to the shore of the lake and stares “moodily at the water.”

OK, this is not really much of a whodunit. With the fact that there are only three living characters in the story, and two of them are policemen, the title alone (remarkably it’s MacDonald’s original) should give things away. And beware of a MacDonald character who is unemployed and living off his wife’s money! I suppose the question was never intended to be about guilt but about the way things were planned. The story ends with two full pages of Burt and Joe chatting over a couple of glasses of bourbon, with Joe asking questions and Burt explaining things. Everything makes perfect sense when coming out of the mouth of the older cop, and when one goes back to reread the story, obvious clues are found in abundance.

MacDonald wrote lots of stories just like “Murder in Mind,” tales of involved crimes and their unwinding. They include “The Bullets Lied,” “I Always Get the Cuties,” “There Hangs Death!,” “Black Cat in the Snow,” and best of all, “The Homesick Buick.” “Black Cat in the Snow” even uses a nearly identical setting as “Murder in Mind.” Many of the solutions involve ballistics, not surprising coming from the son of an executive of an arms manufacturer. And many others use the framing device of the junior, observing narrator and the wiser senior partner who acts in a placid, confusing manner, only to be proven the wise man in the end. Not uniquely MacDonald, to be sure, but one he loved to use and reuse. “Murder in Mind” is one of the earliest example of all of these literary “types.”

The story was anthologized in MacDonald’s first mystery pulp collection, The Good Old Stuff, which is available used nearly anywhere one looks for used books, and is now for sale as an eBook. Thankfully there was nothing to “update” in this particular story, so one can read it and picture an upstate wilderness in 1948, not 1982.

"Bedside Murder"

For an author who published as many short stories as John D MacDonald did, there is surprisingly little critical assessment of this body of work. Part of the blame can be attributed to the nature of much of these stories -- mystery and crime tales, published in the lowly pulps -- yet MacDonald, more than any of his crime-writing contemporaries, made numerous forays into the world of mainstream fiction, appearing in such big-circulation periodicals as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and The Saturday Evening Post. He won a fairly prestigious prize for one of his mainstream tales (1955's "The Bear Trap") and when it came time to anthologize some of his short stories later in his career, he chose mainstream fiction to fill the pages of End of the Tiger and Other Stories and S*E*V*E*N. He was eventually goaded into publishing collections of his older pulp tales, but even then he couldn't leave well enough alone and "updated" them, fearing the modern reader couldn't handle contemporaneous references and settings from the late 1940's.

The JDM Bibliophile, that journal dedicated to the study and appreciation of MacDonald's work, contained very little analysis of the author's short work. By the time Ed Hirshberg took over the editorial duties in 1978 the journal had become little more than an organ for the Travis McGee Fan Club, and nearly every issue skewed heavily toward all things McGee. But this wasn't always the case. In the early days of the JDMB, there were articles discussing the short stories, most of them penned by author and bibliographer Francis M. Nevins. The focus was purely on the pulp writings rather than the mainstream, and Nevins' descriptions and brief analyses of each story he wrote about created (for me, at least) a mystical aura surrounding these lost and forgotten tales.

If I recall correctly (since I no longer own copies of the early JDMBs), one of Nevins's motives in writing about these stories was the hope that some day they would be collected and republished. That hope came to partial fruition with the publication of the Good Old Stuff volumes in 1982 and 1984, and Nevins himself was one of the editors of those collections. Even with MacDonald's wrongheaded insistence on "updating" most of the stories, reading them for the first time confirmed what many JDMB readers had been led to believe: these were indeed excellent examples of early crime fiction.

Yet far from being an uncritical cheerleader for these lost stories, Nevins didn't flinch from pointing out their shortcomings and appraising them in the light of what they really were: pulp fiction, not the lost writings of Fitzgerald. In his paper on MacDonald's early writings -- "The Making of a Tale-Spinner: John D. MacDonald's Early Pulp Mystery Stories," presented as part of the 1978 John D. MacDonald Conference on Mystery and Detective Fiction -- Nevins singled out a particular JDM pulp story as being below-average and containing "one of MacDonald's least plausible characters." That story was "Bedside Murder." It originally appeared in the Summer 1949 issue of Mystery Book Magazine, and the editors thought it good enough at the time to give the story a mention on the cover (but not the art).

MacDonald published a total of four pieces in Mystery Book, from 1948 to 1950, and three of these stories were good enough to pass JDM-muster and were included in the Good Old Stuff volumes. Only "Bedside Murder" was omitted. It's a long, fairly ambitious novella where MacDonald attempts several somewhat daringly unique (for him) approaches, but in the end the story falls apart. One senses that the author's attempts at trying something out of the ordinary gave way to the hokey, obvious plot he saddled it with. As a result, neither succeeded.

What's so different about "Bedside Murder"? It features the first-person narrative of a female. Except for several chapters of MacDonald's 1959 novel The Beach Girls, it is the only story I am aware of with a woman speaking directly to the reader. (Granted, there are a lot of JDM short stories I don't own.) For the regular reader of the author's work -- indeed, for regular readers of most pulp stories of the time -- this creates a challenge when reading the story, to constantly remind oneself of exactly who it is that is speaking. MacDonald makes this task even more difficult by adding a male lead, one who in most instances would have been the story's protagonist. He then takes the further muddying step of giving the female a man's first name (Hank), and the man a woman's name -- Kim. Just exactly what the author was trying to do here is debatable and beyond my own limited abilities at literary analysis. Whatever it was, I think it's safe to say that he didn't pull it off.

The plot is familiar and the ending -- a surprise -- could have come out of any pulp tale from the pre-war, pre-hardboiled era of detective fiction. Henrietta "Hank" Ryan is a successful nightclub singer who goes by the stage name Laura Lynn. Someone is trying to kill Hank. A shot was fired into her Greenwich Village apartment, the bullet grazing her ribcage. A few days before that some unknown person tripped her in front of a speeding cab. And before that someone pulled the old "rock-in-a-box-over-the-transom" trick, nearly crushing her skull. She doesn't want to go to the police because she doesn't want an obvious bodyguard, and she suspects her would-be killer is too clever for that. She decides to seek out the services of an attorney, not to do any legal work but to pretend to be her new boyfriend, a constant companion who won't appear to be a paid protector and alert the person who is trying to kill her. After a few unsuccessful attempts she enters the office of Kimberly Hale -- "Kim" -- a struggling attorney who can't even afford a secretary.

The physical descriptions of the two characters are straight out of the John D MacDonald stylebook. Kim is tall, strong, "with that nice flat, rangy build" that happens to be favorite of Hank's. Hank herself is tall, "a big, big girl," who has no modesty about her good looks.

"In my business I'm forced to be spectacular. Nature helped by giving me soft silver hair and smoke-gray eyes -- and a figure that I have inadvertently overheard described in words no lady would repeat. I further the illusion with the right clothes and a sunlamp that gives me a tan the color of warm honey."

Hank's deep, husky voice -- which is what makes her such a successful chanteuse -- is explained away in this odd exchange:

Hank: "[My voice] isn't natural. When I was thirteen I was playing football with the kids on the block and got kicked in the throat."

Kim: "All women ought to be kicked in the throat," he said warmly, then caught himself.

At first Kim refuses to take the case, but when Hank breaks into tears from the cumulative pressure of it all, he listens to her story and eventually relents.

The pair concoct a cover story whereby Hank met Kim at a club in California five years earlier and recently became reacquainted. Kim is supposedly an old friend of Hank's now-dead boyfriend. From this point on the reader is introduced to a variety of secondary characters, all friends or business acquaintances of Hank's and all possible suspects. There's Sonny Rice, Hank's bandleader, and Johnny France, the male singer for the band. Sam Lescott owns the club where Hank performs and Carl Hopper is Hank's agent. There's Donald Frees, a rich would-be playboy who is smitten with Hank and who attends all of her performances, and Betty Lafferty, Hank's friend and roommate who also serves as her paid secretary. Betty's description provides an immediate announcement that she will not serve as a romantic distraction for Kim.

"Betty is the size of a pint of cream. Rusty red hair, a pert little face and smiling blue eyes. She's just a wee shade too plump and she laughs a lot."

The "couple" make their debut together at Hank's club, several hours before she's about to go on. When Hank spies famous gossip columnist Wallace Wint in the place, she orders Kim to kiss her, hoping that Wint will see and write it up in his column. With Wint's "beady little eyes" on them, Kim takes his cue from Hank and obliges.

"He leaned across the small table. He was very adequate.He was even deft. It took me a good four seconds after it was over to remember why it had happened. I loosened up on the fingernails that were about to punch holes in his hand."

So... the reader can easily see where this "relationship" is going (as if there was any doubt), even if the first-person narrator can not.

This initial visit to the club provides MacDonald the opportunity to introduce all of the characters/suspects, with some so blatantly hateful that you know they can't be the guilty. The story proceeds like an old Philo Vance or Charlie Chan tale, with some exciting action scenes where Hank is nearly knocked off, suspects acting like suspects and everyone involved providing at least a slight reason for wanting the protagonist dead. In the end it is, of course, one of the least likely characters who is guilty, and that character's reason for wanting Hank dead is every bit as preposterous as the plot itself.

Still, "Bedside Murder" doesn't really seem any less believable than a lot of other early JDM yarns, with titles like "You've Got to Be Cold" or "Killing All Men!" springing to mind. But despite MacDonald's somewhat artless attempt at writing a story from a first-person female perspective, there is an obvious plotting point inserted in the tale that, while eventually providing a rationale for the attacker's motive, immediately renders the motivations of Hank herself unbelievable. The author clearly recognized this lame necessity by attempting to have Hank explain it away, unconvincingly. Sorry, but to go into it any further would give away too much of the story.

One gets the feeling that MacDonald, when apologizing and attempting to explain away his early pulp stories, had "Bedside Murder" in mind, with its hokey, unwieldy plot, its obvious romantic angle, some unbelievably motivated characters and, ultimately, its "glib ending." But JDM wrote many far better pulp tales than "Bedside Murder," and it does stand as proof that MacDonald's storytelling skills could fail him every once in a while.

The 15,000-word novella has yet to be reprinted or anthologized.

"A Corpse in His Dreams"

Mystery Book Magazine was another one of those ubiquitous pulps from the late 1940's and early '50's, but it didn't start out that way. From its first issue in July 1945 up through May 1947 it was a well-received mystery digest, similar to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and it published the works of many "A-List" authors such as Dorothy B. Hughes, Brett Halliday, Lawrence Treat and Cornell Woolrich. Like Ellery Queen, the covers were sedate and featured a minimum of artwork, certainly nothing as lurid as your average mystery pulp. But sales were not good, so beginning in the Fall of 1947 the magazine became a larger-sized pulp and reduced its publication schedule to quarterly. The covers started looking like a mystery pulp should -- indeed, the artwork on the front of Mystery Book Magazine was superior -- but sales continued to lag. In the Fall of 1950 the magazine's title was changed to Giant Detective, published two issues under that name, then disappeared forever.

Like a lot of other publications of the time, it featured a novel or novella in each issue, then filled the remaining pages with short stories. Editor Leo Margulies, better known for his stewardship of the science fiction pulp Thrilling Wonder Stories, helmed Mystery Book Magazine for its entire run, and was responsible for publishing four John D MacDonald pieces within its pages, two novellas and two shorts. MacDonald thought well enough of these works and agreed to have three of them included in his Good Old Stuff anthologies. "A Corpse in His Dreams" was his second entry, published in the Spring 1949 issue, and is one of the novellas.

Running 24,000 words, "A Corpse in His Dreams" begins oddly and at times reads like the work of a different author. The first couple of pages contain all sorts of interesting and strangely lyrical passages, and the writing seems stylistically different than what the early JDM reader is accustomed to. There are flashbacks-within-flashbacks that are inserted parenthetically, a device I don't recall ever seeing before or since in MacDonald's stories, although there are a lot of his stories I've never read. But once the plot gets moving we land in familiar MacDonald country and things race along to an exciting and suspenseful conclusion. MacDonald packs a lot of material in this tale: a brooding, haunted protagonist, the ghostly memory of his deceased fiancé, a focused, somewhat psychotic villain, and a couple of rich sisters who own a failing factory.

We first meet hero Matt Otis on a train, returning to his hometown of Cranesbay after an absence of nine years. Now a famous war correspondent, Matt has been covering the civil war in China where he has been "imbedded" with the troops of the Nationalists. Matt is a haunted man. He is haunted by his dreams, and the memory of Alicia Crane, his long-dead fiancé who died in an automobile accident with Matt behind the wheel. She returns to him over and over again at night, calling to him in a thin, clear, sweet voice, "Matthew! Matthew, darling. Matthew Otis! I'm dead! Dead, dead, dead..." He has been afraid to return home, but realizes that he must "if he [is] ever [to be] able to live in the present and in the future." His guilt has crippled him and "made all his days of danger tasteless, his vain seeking of delight insipid."

"Guilt is a hand across the eyes, a knife in the heart. There can be no peace, no joy, no ecstasy, no pride in accomplishment. With guilt all there can be is a pseudo-life where one goes through the motions expected of an adult, and carries in his mind the horrors imagined by a child."
 

Cranesbay, founded by Alicia's grandfather, is a New England costal town, "carelessly arranged on the shelf of land between the hills and the sea." As the train pulls into the station:

"He felt the rising tide of excitement... but it was the excitement of a man who, alone in a factory at night, has caught his fingers in slow-moving gears and knows that the gears will inevitably pull in his arm, elbow, shoulder, killing him at last."
 

We flash back nine years earlier, to a seaside Cranesbay restaurant, where Matt and Alicia are enjoying dinner.They are interrupted by Roy Bedford, Alicia's former beau, who joins them at their table, leaving his own date alone at hers. Roy is reveled to be a driven, competitive former schoolmate of Matt's, one who "had seemed to depend on winning as much as on breathing." He has come from modest beginnings, the son of the town drunk, had never attended college and clearly resents his peers who did. But he seems tipsy this night and leaves as suddenly as he arrived. Then, on the way home, the crash, leaving Matt with a broken leg and Alicia dead.

The early pages of this tale seem uncharacteristically clumsy for MacDonald, with the aforementioned parenthetical flashbacks, the sometimes florid prose, and most unnerving, a third-person omniscient narration that jolts suddenly from one character to the other, leaving the reader nearly dizzy. When Roy joins Matt and Alicia, we suddenly get his background in the form of a flashback, then we quickly materialize inside the head of Rose Carney, Roy's date, where we are treated to her back-story. This all takes place in Matt's flashback! Happily, once these flashbacks are over with and the motivations established, the story becomes a typically engrossing MacDonald yarn.

Matt discovers Roy is still in town, where he has become a wealthy entrepreneur, buying up business after business. Rose is still his "girl," and he has set her up in a nice oceanside house outside of town, where she lives alone and does Roy's bidding. Roy has managed to accomplish most of the things he has set out to do, save one. The town's primary employer, its one major industry is the Furnival Pneumatic Tool Company, founded years ago by the grandfather of it's current owner Patience Furnival. Actually, Patience is only the majority owner, for the company is publicly traded and another large block of stock is owned by her frivolous younger sister Susan. The remaining shares are owned by Roy, and he wants control. He makes a few offers to Patience, then threatens her with ruin when she refuses. Business has been bad since the war. Her father died and Patience, along with her factory manager Evan Cleveland, has tried to keep it going, but all sorts of outside pressures keep it teetering. Things like needed steel supplies that suddenly get underbid by another business, and a sudden lawsuit for patent violation launched by a rival factory. But Patience is stubborn and hates Roy, so she sends him packing.

Evan secretly pines for Patience, but Patience has always longed for a relationship with Matt. Roy, meanwhile, sets his sights on aimless Susan and her block of stock. He proposes marriage which, when consummated, will give him controlling interest in the factory. When Matt foils his plan, things start to happen, things that seem mysteriously familiar to the events of nine years ago...

Wow.

It's all very exciting, very pulpy and very predictable. Still, there are a lot of familiar MacDonald themes going on here. We have a haunted hero, although Matt is not the typical post-war vet trying to fit back into society, and we have a business-industrial setting, the kind of world where MacDonald's writing excels, impeccably realized with a minutiae of detail. The two female love interests -- living and dead -- are typical JDM types, one blonde, gray-eyed and beautiful, the other dark, regal, tall and, yes, beautiful. The good guys --Matt and Evan -- are accomplished professionals in their respective trades, and Roy is revealed to be a soulless sociopath who seems almost superhuman at times. And if the story begins like an out-of-control roller coaster, it eventually settles into an exciting, satisfying work of early JDM suspense.

Thankfully, MacDonald didn't update the setting for "A Corpse in His Dreams" as he did so many of the other Good Old Stuff entries. The tale of war correspondents, industrial intrigue, and a kept woman in a beach house would have become impossibly convoluted had he attempted to move things up to the 1980's. As I've written before, I believe it was a mistake to have "updated" any of the old stories he re-published, but doing so with this one would have been nearly impossible.

"A Corpse in His Dreams" is included in the second of those two pulp anthologies, More Good Old Stuff.