John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

For millions of readers John D. MacDonald is the consummate storyteller of our time, a writer who, with his energetic prose, his vivid sense of character, his all but miraculous skill at describing every sort of person and setting and event with economy, elegance, and total credibility, makes us turn and turn his pages with our minds in awe and our hearts hovering around our Adams apple. The thirteen stories in this collection demonstrate how fantastically good his best work was at the start of his career.

MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on July 24, 1916. His father was a strong-willed workaholic who rose Horatio Alger-like from humble origins to become a top executive at a firearms company in Utica, New York. A near-fatal attack of mastoiditis and scarlet fever at age twelve confined young MacDonald to bed for a year, and lack of anything else to do in those days before radio and TV virtually forced him to read or have his mother read to him, huge quantities of books. As soon as he was back on his feet, he began haunting the public library, compulsively devouring every book on the shelves.

After graduating from the Utica Free Academy in 1933, MacDonald took some courses at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Finance, then transferred to Syracuse University where, in 1938, he received a B.S. in Business Administration. He married fellow Syracuse graduate Dorothy Prentiss the same year, and was awarded an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in June 1939. After an assortment of jobs that he hated, he accepted a lieutenants commission in the Army in June 1940, and was assigned to procurement work in Rochester, N. Y. until June 1943, when he was sent overseas to Staff Headquarters, New Delhi, India. A year later he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and served in Columbo, Ceylon as a branch commander of an Intelligence detachment, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

During the idle times, instead of writing his wife letters that he knew would be heavily censored, MacDonald began writing and sending her short stories. One of these, Interlude in India, Dorothy sold for $25 to Whit and Hallie Burnetts prestigious Story Magazine, in whose July-August 1946 issue it appeared. I cant describe what it was like, MacDonald said recently, when I found out that my words had actually sold... I felt as if I were a fraud... as if I were trying to be something that I wasnt. Then I thought, my goodness, maybe I could actually be one.

At the end of the war MacDonald was entitled to four months of stateside terminal leave with pay before his official discharge. He spent the time behind the typewriter, working harder than ever before in his life, putting in 80 hours a week, cranking out 800,000 words worth of short stories, keeping 30 to 35 yarns in the mail at all times and selling not a word. Finally, early in 1946, a few of the less-than-first-class pulp mystery magazines like Detective Tales and Mammoth Mystery began to buy from him, and by the end of the year he had earned about $6,000, enough to support himself and Dorothy and their seven-year-old son in modest style. For the next half-dozen years most of MacDonalds income was from magazines, primarily the great pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Mystery Book, whose gaudy and lurid covers could still be seen on every newsstand in those immediate postwar years. Once in a while a MacDonald story would sell to a slick periodical like Esquire, Liberty, or Cosmopolitan that paid top dollar, but the vast majority of his tales of the late forties and early fifties went to the pulps, and his name became a fixture on those garish covers several times a month. He made so many pulp sales so quickly that some magazines would run two, three, or even four of his stories in a single issue, one under his own byline, and the rest under house names.

MacDonald was the last great American mystery writer who honed his storytelling skills in the action-detective pulps as Hammett and Chandler and Gardner and Woolrich had done before him. During the half-dozen years after the war he produced more than two hundred pulp tales whose variety in length and content is astonishing. There were 2 Westerns,

Gingerly turning the now brown-edged pages of those old pulps and tracing MacDonalds apprenticeship as a tale-spinner, we can watch him growing stronger in countless ways in record time. He was writing everything from straight detective stories like The Simplest Poison and biter-bit yarns like Death Writes the Answer to psychological suspense tales like Miranda or thrillers like Trap for a Tigress. He was writing about disturbed war veterans, professional criminals and gamblers, city cops, country cops, and all sorts of private adventurers, including one or two recognizable prototypes of that perpetually disappointed boat bum and contemporary knight, Travis McGee. He was experimenting with mini-minis of under two thousand words and short novels the length of a Simenon and everything in between. The best of his stories are masterful and the worst marginal, but in grinding them out at breakneck speed he was evolving the uncanny instincts that shape his sixty-plus novels, from The Brass Cupcake (1950) to Cinnamon Skin (1982).

Several of MacDonalds earliest pulp crime stories were set in the China-Burma-India locales in which hed spent the war. But magazine editor Babette Rosmond persuaded him to take off the pith helmet and start writing about the United States, and from then on the majority of his stories dealt with the postwar American scene. Indeed MacDonald portrayed more vividly and knowledgeably than any other crime writer the readjustment of American society in general and American business in particular from a war footing to a consumer-oriented peacetime economy, and the redemption and return to the real world of all sorts of warhaunted people on the verge of self-ruination by drink and detachment. Several stories of this sort, such as They Let Me Live and She Cannot Die, are collected here, and even though MacDonald has eliminated or updated some of the topical references that he feels would be lost on todays reader, perhaps enough remains of the ambience of the late forties and early fifties to demonstrate how the best crime fiction of any period bears witness to later generations about the way we lived then.

In 1950 MacDonald had his first novel published, not in hardcover but as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, and throughout that decade and most of the sixties he continued to write paperbacks so prolifically and well that he forced critics and intelligent readers to take notice of a new book-publishing medium that they might otherwise have dismissed as junk. With the debut of his series character Travis McGee in 1964, MacDonalds royalties and readership soared even higher, and in due course the author and his hero migrated to hardcover publication and to the best-seller lists.

Whats the secret of his success? The values he admires most in others fiction and embodies in his own have been best summarized by MacDonald himself. First, there has to be a strong sense of story. I want to be intrigued by wondering what is going to happen next. I want the people that I read about to be in difficulties emotional, moral, spiritual, whatever, and I want to live with them while theyre finding their way out of these difficulties. Second, I want the writer to make me suspend my disbelief... I want to be in some other place and scene of the writers devising. Next, I want him to have a bit of magic in his prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry. I want to have words and phrases really sing. And I like an attitude of wryness, realism, the sense of inevitability. I think that writing good writing should be like listening to music, where you identify the themes, you see what the composer is doing with those themes, and then, just when you think you have him properly identified, and his methods identified, then he will put in a little quirk, a little twist, that will be so unexpected that you read it with a sense of glee, a sense of joy, because of its aptness, even though it may be a very dire and bloody part of the book. So I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.