Would You Like Something to Read?

One of the oddest entries in the canon of John D MacDonald’s writing has to be his single piece written for the “Adult Humor” magazine National Lampoon. Published in the November 1985 issue titled “The Mad as Hell Issue,” the issue featured scores of brief rants by noted writers and celebrities on things that particularly irritated them. MacDonald’s piece was titled "Exploitation of Grief" and I transcribed it back in 2010 for the blog. It reads like an aside in a Travis McGee novel.

Four years earlier JDM was the subject of Nat Lamp’s particular brand of humor in its July 1981 issue they called “Endless, Mindless Summer Sex”. (I suppose nearly all of their issues could have been labeled thusly.) A piece written by Sean Kelly and Ted Mann titled “Would You Like Something to Read?” was a satire of a regular book column and featured “reviews” of new novels by John D MacDonald, along with a handful of made-up writers like Angelica Sitwell, E. Claude Boll and Hugo Lestoil.

Here is a transcription of the Crime section, featuring the review of JDM’s new Travis McGee book. Like most of National Lampoon’s humor, it is adult and politically incorrect.

CRIME

Monthly, John D. MacDonald issues a new paperback private-eye thriller from his costly Florida bunker chronicling the adventures of that "slightly tarnished knight in tanned and lanky armor” Travis McGee. But fans of the series have detected a certain drop-off in quality recently. The Awful Yellow Chinaman was just a reworking of last year's The East Is Terribly Red; and The Horrible Key Lime Pie was not so much a murder mystery as a Miami restaurant review. The Terrific Pink Gin and its successor, The Scary Purple Elephant, suggested that John D. was losing his battle with the bottle, and one feared that an appropriate title for the next McGee caper might be A Black Eye for Detective Fiction.

But we are pleased to be able to praise without reservation Mr. MacDonald's new book, another in the Travis saga but in every way a superior departure from the norm. Set in the demimonde of the homosexual writing community in Key West, it sheds new light on the relationship between Travis and his swarthy longtime boat buddy, Meyer. Most exciting scene? The bitchy brunch chez Tennessee Williams, after which Meyer salves Travis's many psychic bruises and seduces him gently with a twelve-page monologue explaining supply-side economics. We can heartily recommend this new and different Travis adventure, The Winking Brown Eye.

Angelica Sitwell, heiress apparent to Agatha Christie's title as queen of English detective fiction, has another elegant whodunit in the bookshops this summer. It features the intelligent and charming amateur detective, herself a successful writer of detective fiction, Angela Standgood, to whom we were first introduced in Ms. Sitwell's previous Murder Most British. This one is titled, in England, Murder at the Women Writers of Detective Fiction Club, but it has been released in America as Scribble Scribble Die Die! The plot? In a series of gruesomely fitting murders, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James, Amanda Cross, Catherine Aird, and Mary Stewart are all bumped off, leaving the indefatigable and delightful Ms. Standgood as the only member, and thus president, of the club. The identity of the killer is a real surprise!

Aficionados of offbeat European detective fiction -- and aren't we all? -- will be sure to enjoy A Specter Is Haunting, the latest case for Eurocommunist vegetarian Interpol inspector Marco Venzetti to solve. Marco, a "big, hairy, lovable, mystical bear of a proletarian intellectual of a man,” this time investigates a series of Swiss industrial accidents, and proves, with the aid of his underground pal, Carlos the Jackal, that reactionary capitalists are the real culprits! Marco's many American devotees, will eat this one up like mung beans!

JDM on the Exploitation of Grief

As a confirmed news junkie, watching local news and, whenever possible, at least two of the networks, I am increasingly furious at the trend in local and national news for more and more invasions of the privacy of grief, and the jackass questions the young Airedales use to prime the tear ducts.
 

'Mrs. Brown, what did you think when the hurricane smashed your home?'

'Mr. Collins, what was your reaction to the death of your newborn quintuplets?'

'Miss Green, what was your thinking when they arrested your brother for the murder of his wife?'

All these people in crisis conditions have watched a lot of television. Now the lights and lenses are on them. In their genuine shock and grief they have no one to emulate but those gilded, glossy, improbable, two-dimensional actors in the soap operas, empty people who make a living giving dramatic and inaccurate imitations of reality.

And so the lens comes in tight and close to capture thirty-two seconds of an imitation of an imitation of pathos.
 

-- from "Exploitation of Grief"

JDM's entry in the November 1985 "Mad as Hell Issue" of National Lampoon.