Tag Archives: John D. MacDonald

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Only Girl in the Game,’ by John D. MacDonald

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It seemed to Hugh as he sat there that this was a very bad place on the face of the earth, that it was unwise to bring to this place any decent impulse or emotion, because there was a curiously corrosive agent adrift in this bright desert air…. It would not be a good thing to stay in such a place too long, because you might lose the ability to react to any other human being save on the level of estimating how best to use them, or how they were trying to use you. The impossibility of any more savory relationship was perfectly symbolized by the pink-and-white-and-blue neon crosses shining above the quaint gabled roofs of the twenty-four-hour-a-day marriage chapels.

As I’ve been reacquainting myself with John D. MacDonald’s non-McGee novels, happily republished by The Murder Room in Kindle format, I’ve had one nagging worry. I remembered that one of these books in particular was a heartbreaker, a really tragic story. Now I don’t have to worry about it anymore, because I just read The Only Girl in the Game, and it turns out that’s the one. It knocked me down, made me cry, and took my lunch money. Excellent book.

Hugh Darren manages the Cameroon Hotel in Las Vegas. It’s interesting work and it pays well, which will help him with his dream of eventually opening his own resort in the Bahamas. He knows that the mob owns the place, but they’re on the casino side. Hugh just deals with food suppliers, employees, and customer complaints, that sort of thing. Oh, from time to time his genial, party animal boss asks him for a little favor, and he gets an off-the-books gift when he does it, but they’ve never asked him to do anything illegal.

He particularly delights in Betty Dawson, his new girlfriend. She’s a singer with a regular show in one of the small lounges. She’s tall and beautiful, smart and funny. Hugh is head over heels in love with her, but she’s made it clear she wants only a casual relationship.

What he doesn’t know is that their boss owns Betty. He has leverage on her, and that enables him to require her – not often, only once or twice a year – to do something that makes her hate herself, that makes her feel dirty. Nothing personal, it’s just business.

One day they’ll ask Betty to do something she knows she can’t do. And that day she’ll break free. Then everything will go very bad, very quickly.

The Only Girl in the Game was originally written for the cheap paperback originals market. It includes the obligatory scenes of sex and violence (though fairly mild by 21st Century standards). But it’s also a remarkably well-written and morally centered book. It’s all about the effects of gambling, on individuals and on communities. We’ve come to accept those effects since casinos have been legalized most everywhere, but we’ve paid a price. If you want to understand that price, this is a good book to start with. If you’re thinking of going to a casino for fun, this is a good book to read.

Highly recommended, with cautions as specified above.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Man of Affairs,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I had the uncomfortable feeling that you could be marooned on an island with this fellow for seven years and never get a clue as to what he was thinking. He would be inevitably and interminably polite and charming, and were he forced to kill you and eat you, he would be deft and slightly apologetic and quite noble about it. And he would know exactly which leaves and berries to boil with you to give you the right flavor.

John D. MacDonald wrote paperback novels for Fawcett Gold Medal, whose stock in trade was cowboys, private eyes and soldiers of fortune. It’s a tribute to his skill that he could write a saleable (and engaging) story for that market about business. (He had a business degree from Harvard.) A Man of Affairs isn’t one of his top novels, I think, but it’s a pretty good read.

Sam Glidden is a top manager for a small manufacturing  company, the Harrison Corporation, in a fictional town. He rose from the work floor partly with the assistance of the company’s late owner, who was energetic but improvident. Since his death, Sam and the other managers have been trying to rebuild an out-of-date operation, which has prevented them from paying dividends to stockholders. This results in discontent, particularly with the late owner’s two adult children, one of whom, Louise, Sam has carried a torch for since high school.

Then Harrison Corporation comes into the sights of Mike Dean, a famous investor who’d be described as a “corporate raider” today. Dean talks a good talk about rebuilding the company, but Sam knows how this guy operates. He’ll pump the stock up, unload it, and leave the other shareholders in possession of the smoking ruins of a gutted operation. When Dean invites Louise and her brother and their spouses to his compound in the Bahamas, Sam manages to get himself invited too, in hopes he can counter Mike Dean’s persuasions.

What he finds is a house party with a creepy but seductive vibe. Millionaires, publicity people, entertainment people, hangers-on. Greedy, bored, kinky. Sam finds that Mike Dean’s charm and psychological strategy have him on the point of selling out. Then people start dying…

It’s a tribute to MacDonald’s narrative skill that he could transform a story about business into a life-and-death thriller and make it work. There’s sex in A Man of Affairs – fairly shocking by the standards of the time though tame nowadays (it’s all straight sex). The violence is a little far-fetched, but that goes with the territory.

The heart of the story, however, is a pretty solid examination of personal and business integrity. I think it holds up well on that level.

Recommended for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Low Tide,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She nodded. It was the first time I’d ever had a good chance to look at her face. Big bright black eyes, and just a shade too much in the tooth department, so she had a very faint look of coming out of one of Disney’s woodland dells.

Early (1953) John D. MacDonald. That promises a great story, set back when men were men and women were women. Dead Low Tide does not disappoint in any way.

Andy McClintock lives in a small, cheap Florida cabin in a court originally built for tourists. It’s all he can afford on his current salary. His boss, land developer “Big” John Long, lured him to the state on promises of promotion and good money, but neither has appeared. (Rapacious land development was a continuing theme in MacDonald’s books, and it’s interesting to note his criticisms even at this early date.)

Then John’s wife, the small, intense Mary Eleanor, asks Andy for help. John has been acting strangely, she says, and she’s concerned what’s troubling him. Andy agrees to talk to him. He goes to see John on a building site, and concludes that the man is hiding a problem – likely a health scare. Andy also confronts John about his job, asking for more responsibility and money. To his surprise, John hands him a contract the next day, and the deal involves a partnership.

Then John is found dead, apparently having committed suicide with a speargun that belonged to Andy. He does not identify it for the police. Mary Eleanor asks Andy for another favor – there’s an envelope in John’s desk, she says, that belongs to her. Don’t open it. Just bring it to me. Andy doesn’t agree, but he does search the desk.

The next thing he knows, he’s been arrested for John’s murder. The cops know the speargun was his, and the new contract is motive. But that’s only the beginning of his troubles. Something far, far more valuable than his freedom is about to be taken from him…

Outstanding prose. A tight, gripping plot. Vivid characters who surprise you. A shocking twist toward the end. Dead Low Tide had everything. I highly recommend it.

Minor cautions for mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bright Orange for the Shroud,’ by John D. MacDonald

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After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue.

Whenever I see a deal on one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books in e-book form, I grab it. So it was with Bright Orange for the Shroud, a fairly early – but memorable – entry in the series. If I remember correctly, now and then in later books, when he’s recalling his personal nightmares, McGee mentions Boo Waxwell.

Travis McGee isn’t a private eye. He calls himself a salvage specialist. When people are robbed of large amounts of money or valuable possessions, he goes and gets them back, then keeps half the value. This enables him to live his chosen lifestyle – “taking his retirement in installments.”

He plans to make this particular summer one of his lazy ones. He’ll do some maintenance on his big houseboat, the Busted Flush, cruise a bit, do some fishing. He’s earned a rest.

Until Arthur Wilkinson shows up on the dock, incoherent and emaciated. Arthur was part of their beachside community for a while, a low-key, diffident man who’d made money in the family business. Then he met tiny, gorgeous Wilma Ferrer, married her, and moved away.

But it turned out Wilma was a con woman. With her little group of confidence friends, she picked Arthur clean. Money wasn’t enough for her, though. Together with the muscle of the group, big Boo Maxwell, she made sure Arthur had been destroyed as a man.

McGee can help people recover stuff, but recovering a lost soul is outside his skill set. So he goes to Chookie McCall, a professional dancer who dated Arthur for a while, before hooking up with a wrong guy, now in prison. Though she’s reluctant at first, one look at Arthur arouses all Chookie’s maternal instincts.

McGee comes up with a plan to con the cons and get some of Arthur’s money back. It’s a good plan. His mistake is underestimating Boo Waxwell as an opponent. Though he comes off as an ignorant, overgrown cracker, Boo is no fool at all. Someone suggests that Boo is McGee’s alter ego, what he might have been if something had been missing in his make-up. (In many ways, Boo anticipates Max Cady, the brutal villain of MacDonald’s novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice under the title, Cape Fear.)

There’s not a wasted line in this book. It’s tough and hard-boiled and tender and sympathetic. There’s a lot of sexual content. Some of it reads really great from my traditional, sexist point of view, and some of it reflects the mores of the sexual revolution and hasn’t aged well.

The plot includes, in my opinion, one too many lucky breaks for the good guys. But all in all, Bright Orange for the Shroud works splendidly. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Judge Me Not,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“You stay in town long enough, and I’ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you’ll eat grass. I know. You’re telling yourself you’re a big strong guy and you’d die before you’d take orders like that. That’s fairy story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren’t like that. You can break people. You can break anybody in the world, if you know how to go about it. If you want to be smart, just join my team. Dennison doesn’t have to know. Keep the five grand. You like this little girl? Take her home with you. She’ll do anything you tell her to do.”

I said of the last old, republished John D. MacDonald novel I reviewed that it felt like a “programmer,” a quick project slapped together to meet a deadline. MacDonald did, after all, work on contract for the pulp paperback trade.

Judge Me Not, the latest one I read, is a very different specimen. Though written for the paperback market, and at a very early point in his career, and though it follows the conventions of the pulp genre, it transcends all that and (in my opinion) achieves the level of serious literature. It belongs up there with Hemingway – or at least with Dashiell Hammet.

Teed Morrow is a sort of professional reformer. He served in the occupation forces in Germany after the war, and then teamed up with his former commander to work for civic reform. They’ve gotten themselves hired as city manager and assistant in the town of Deron, New York. They’re on schedule with their plan to expose and oust the current mayor and the gang that supports him.

But Teed isn’t quite the straight arrow his boss, a widowed father of two daughters, is. Teed’s a bit of a swinger. And right now he’s sleeping with the mayor’s wife. Who could it hurt?

What he and his boss don’t realize is how seriously corrupt and vicious the gang running the town is.

That becomes very clear when Teed wakes up one day to find the mayor’s wife murdered in his lake cabin. He manages to dump the body before the cops show up (heroes disposing of women’s bodies seems to have been one of MacDonald’s go-to tropes at the start of his career; it’s featured in the last three of his novels I’ve read), but that doesn’t prevent his being arrested and beaten within an inch of his life by the cops.

And that’s just the beginning. It will get much, much worse before Teed manages to take the fight back to the enemy.

Judge Me Not’s plot genuinely surprised me. It was troubling and a little shocking. Very bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it, but there’s a moving redemptive element too.

I was highly impressed with Judge Me Not. Cautions for sexual situations (1950s vintage, so they’re not very explicit). Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘You Live Once,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Another oldie from John D. MacDonald to review. You Live Once is not, in my opinion, his best work. But I may be prejudiced. (Ya think?)

Back in the mid-50s, when You Live Once was published, there was a particular kind of corporate culture common to several major American corporations (I had an uncle who was involved in this). The company would move young executives around, relocating them every couple years, putting them to work in various divisions on various jobs. The idea was to make them generalists, able to step in and take over wherever they were needed.

Clint Sewell is part of this culture, though unusual in being a bachelor. That suits his boss, Dodd Raymond, very well. Dodd is carrying on an affair with Mary Olan, a wealthy local girl, notoriously promiscuous. Dodd brings Clint along on double dates with his wife and Mary, allowing him to spend time with Mary while Clint amuses his wife. Clint has tried his own luck with Mary, but she put him off.

It’s a great arrangement for Dodd, until everything goes foul. Clint wakes up in his apartment one morning with a bad headache, and finds Mary dead in his closet – strangled with his own belt. Panicking, Clint drives the body to the woods and dumps it (feeling guilty). But that doesn’t put the police off long. Soon he’s a fugitive, looking for someone to turn to for help.

I thought You Live Once was more of a programmer than most of MacDonald’s books, more of a potboiler cranked out for a buck. But my judgment is clouded because the story employs a trope I dislike. That trope may have been quite fresh in 1956, but it’s pretty predictable today. And it’s one that annoys me.

So I don’t give You Live Once my highest rating. Your may like it better.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Bullet for Cinderella,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But Ruth wore her own face for the world—wore an expression of strength and humility and goodness. Should you become accustomed to her loveliness, there would still be all that left. This was a for-keeps girl. She couldn’t be any other way because all the usual poses and artifices were left out of her. This was a girl you could hurt, a girl who would demand and deserve utter loyalty.

I’ve read all John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, and a good number of his non-McGee works. I’m not sure if I ever read A Bullet for Cinderella before, though. I find it hard to imagine I could have read it and forgotten it. This is early MacDonald (1955), but it’s a gem.

Tal Howard is a returned prisoner of war from Korea. Nowadays we’d say he has PTSD. He came home to a job and a faithful, waiting fiancée, but walked away from both of them, because he wasn’t the same man anymore. He wasn’t sure what to do with his life, so he thought he’d go look for the money Timmy Warden, as he lay dying in the camp, told him about. The money he’d embezzled from his and his brother’s business and buried in a secret place. “Cindy will know where it is,” he said.

Tal arrives in Timmy’s home town, Hillston (no state named). He finds Timmy’s brother broken and bankrupt, a bitter alcoholic. He meets Ruth, Timmy’s old girlfriend, who never guessed his secrets. He starts searching for a girl named Cindy, but there doesn’t seem to have been any such girl in the small town in Timmy’s time.

But he’s also reunited with an old acquaintance – Fitzmartin, another camp survivor. He’s no friend, though. A loner, a sneak, a spy, all the prisoners had hated Fitz. He overheard Timmy’s confession to Tal, and he has preceded him to Hillston. But so far he can’t find any Cindy either, and none of the many places he’s dug up have yielded treasure. Fitz has no doubt he can solve the puzzle – or, even better, if Tal solves it, he’ll just kill him and take the dough.

You may recognize in this synopsis a fairly standard Noir set-up. And that’s what it is – a morally compromised hero going for the easy score and finding himself in over his head. What raises it to the level of art is John D. MacDonald’s sheer mastery of his medium, the lucid prose, the complex characters, the essential humanity of the project. This book was written fairly early in the author’s career, but it’s a complete, polished achievement. Superior in its time and superior today.

A great introduction by Dean Koontz is included.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald

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I rarely buy the e-book versions of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. I just can’t justify paying the prices they ask for books I’ve already got in paperback. But now and then one shows up at a bargain price, and I always snap it up. So it was with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, one of the most memorable in the series – in a dark way. I got it during a brief sale.

Travis McGee, Florida beach bum, calls himself a “salvage specialist.” That means he recovers things that people have been robbed of, returns them to them, and keeps half the value. But he makes exceptions for friends, and the Pearsons are friends. Years ago he helped them with a boat deal, and then after the husband’s premature death he comforted the widow – in a carnal manner. They’ve kept in touch and he’s very fond of her and her two daughters.

At the start of this book, he comes back from a job to find a letter from the mother, Helena, telling him she’s dying of cancer. She’ll probably be gone by the time he reads this. She asks if he’d see if he can help her older daughter, Maureen, a beautiful woman married to a prosperous land developer. Maureen is suffering from a mysterious malady involving short-term memory loss, and has attempted suicide several times. McGee can’t imagine what he could do to help with a problem like that, but guilt (and the large check enclosed with the letter) motivate him to travel to their central Florida home and check things out.

Some things don’t add up. And then people start physically attacking McGee, which just gets him mad. There’s a lot of rot in this community, it turns out, and McGee is ready to kick it over to see what’s underneath. And – hopefully – save a life or two.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper is one of the darkest books in the series, and features one of its most shocking climaxes. There’s a lot of sex, but it’s described metaphorically, and quite beautifully. The rough language, as always, is consistent with the times, which means it’s cleaner than you’ll generally find in books written today. The book deals quite heavily with the race issue, in what seems to me fairly prophetic terms, though the scenes were a little awkward to my ear.

When I pick up a John D. MacDonald novel, I have a sense of plain, solid quality, like Shaker furniture. Nothing dazzling (though MacDonald can turn a fine phrase with the best of them), but every part is strong, and the whole thing is assembled with a craftsman’s eye. The books just work. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightmare in Pink,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Captain McGee. Private cruises. Personalized therapy. And a little twinge of pain when the plane took off, pain for McGee, because she was too close to what-might-have-been. If there’s no pain and no loss, it’s only recreational and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.

In 1963, Fawcett Publications (which began, as I’ve told you before, in Robbinsdale, Minn., the town where I live, but had by this time been in New York state for decades) faced a business crisis. Fawcett was one of the pioneers in the field of “paperback originals” – novels published specifically for the paperback market, generally sensational and lowbrow in character. Their most popular writer was Richard S. Prather, author of a series of racy hard-boileds starring a randy private eye named Shell Scott. Prather had received an irresistible offer from Pocket Books, and was jumping over to their house. Fawcett desperately needed a new series detective.

In a moment of sanity (fairly rare in publishers) they turned to one of their most dependable and talented writers, John D. MacDonald. “Give us a series hero,” they said.

MacDonald’s response was a character he planned to call Dallas McGee. Dallas would be a lanky beach bum, living on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Instead of a private eye, he would call himself a “salvage specialist.” When people were robbed or cheated out of valuable possessions or large sums of money, they could go to McGee. He would try to retrieve them, and if he succeeded he got to keep half.

Fawcett green-lighted the project, and McDonald quickly churned out several short novels starring Dallas McGee to launch the series rapidly. They were nearly ready to release the first one when disaster struck – inconvenience for Fawcett, but tragedy for the nation. Pres. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22. Everyone understood that it would be very poor taste to offer a series hero named Dallas in the present atmosphere. They consulted with the author and settled on a new name – Travis McGee. The pages were all re-set, and the first book, The Deep Blue Goodbye, appeared in early 1964.

Not long ago, a sale price showed up for the e-book version of Nightmare in Pink, the second offering in the series. I figured, “Why not? Let’s see how it holds up.”

I was amazed how much I enjoyed it.

Travis McGee, it is explained, is a veteran of the Korean War. One day during the war, his buddy Mike Gibson was substituting for McGee while he was on leave. Mike came under attack, and ended up crippled and blinded. Today he lives in a VA hospital. McGee visits him from time to time. Now he’s facing life-threatening surgery. He has a favor to ask.

His sister Nina, he says, is a commercial artist in Manhattan. She’s gotten engaged to a businessman, an investment broker. Would McGee check the guy out, see if he’s kosher?

McGee can’t say no. But by the time he’s arrived, the issue seems moot. Nina’s fiancé is dead, victim of an apparent mugging. Only the evidence doesn’t add up. When McGee starts poking around his life and his associations, it looks as if he suspected some crooked goings-on. Could he have been murdered to keep him quiet?

As McGee slips into a relationship with Nina (no surprise there), he also steps on some trip wires, alerting people who are very powerful and very ruthless, who will not hesitate to destroy both him and his new girl.

I had a strange sensation as I read Nightmare in Pink. A clarity, a cleanness I don’t experience with most contemporary novels, even ones with better sexual morals. It was a feeling something like stepping out of a smoke-filled room into the fresh outdoor air.

What Nightmare in Pink was not polluted with was Wokeness. Travis McGee came before men felt obligated to be apologetic about being men. He’s proud to be a man, comfortable in his masculinity. He likes women and they like him. I read books like these to live vicariously, and Travis McGee offers a mainline shot of pure, vicarious testosterone.

I’ve often written about my pleasure in hard-boiled narration. McGee does hard-boiled narration, but in his own way. Instead of the jewel-like aphorisms you find in Raymond Chandler, MacDonald’s McGee offers thoughtful meditations. He makes observations of the world, of humanity, and right and wrong. I don’t always agree with him, but there’s more genuine thought going on here than you’d expect in a straight-to-paperback potboiler from Fawcett.

In short, I had a blast with Nightmare in Pink, and recommend the whole series (though I consider the e-books a little overpriced).

[The book has a new introduction by Lee Child which does little to advance MacDonald criticism, in my opinion. His best argument to persuade modern people to read the books seems to be that MacDonald was ecologically aware. That’s true, but misleading. Current environmentalism tends to the Luddite side, and MacDonald was no Luddite. He had a business degree, and sympathetic businessmen are not rare in his books.]