Tag Archives: John D. MacDonald

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Crossroads,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I am and mean to remain a big booster of the author John D. MacDonald, especially his Travis McGee novels. That doesn’t mean, however, that I like all his books equally well. The Crossroads, published in the Murder Room series, is not (in my opinion) one of his stellar achievements.

Back in the early 20th Century, old Papa Drovek, cheerful and parsimonious, invested every dollar he could save up in buying land along the highway. In time it became a major intersection. He built a gas station. Then a café. And as the crossroads experienced increasing traffic, his little empire grew – a truck stop, hotels, strip malls. Today he’s retired, still living in his little cottage, keeping an eye on his beloved children as they carry on the business. He’s old school in his habits, and keeps his money in cash, in a safe deposit box at the bank.

But his children are not entirely happy. His oldest son Charles (Chip) has a good head for business, and is ambitious and hard-working. But his home life is tragic. The woman he married is now a barely functioning alcoholic. Chip loves another woman, but the doctors have told him that any major change in his wife’s situation will certainly lead to her rapid decline and death. So he sticks.

His sister Joan is equally smart and energetic. But she married a drone who seems content to go fishing and live off her money.

Their youngest brother, Pete, has never grown up. Given work in the company, he soon loses interest and turns his attentions to golf. He married a pretty girl, a former model, who shows no sign of any brain wattage whatever.

What none of them knows is that they have an enemy. A man with a deep grudge and a twisted plan to get his hands on Papa Drovek’s money. The plan will involve taking a couple lives, but that’s a sacrifice he has no trouble making.

The Crossroads seemed to me essentially a tragic soap opera. There are no real surprises in the story, and no real hero. Just fairly ordinary people making fairly ordinary mistakes and – in the end, if they’re lucky — learning from them. I’m afraid I found it all kind of dreary.

One thing I noticed in this book – and I probably should have noticed before in reading this series – is that it’s set up in British orthography. “Gas” is always “petrol.” “Gray” is spelled “grey.” “Dispatch case” is “despatch case.” Turns out the Murder Room series is published by an English company, and they must be using text from English editions of the books.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just makes the American dialogue awkward at times.

Authors, Bookselling

Going public

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Above, something I’ve never seen before – a clip of John D. MacDonald giving a speech. He reminisces on his struggling years as a writer. The advice here is still good in terms of a writer’s attitude, but happily we don’t have to worry about the condition of returned manuscripts anymore. Say what you like about digital publishing, but you can’t deny the pages are always just as pristine, however many times you send them out. Any blemishes are likely to be grammatical, and your own stinking fault.

One thing I’ve rarely done in my long but obscure career  as a writer is give a public reading of my work. I’ve done a few signings – generally a harrowing and not very rewarding experience, but only a few readings. Which is odd when you think of it, because I’m good at that. Radio and acting experience, as I’ve mentioned more often than necessary.

But I’m going to be doing a reading on Saturday. It’s Homecoming time at Waldorf University, Forest City, Iowa, one of my several alma maters. Waldorf is special to me, because it was the first college I attended. They’re doing an authors’ forum, featuring several Waldorf graduates who write books. I’ll be one of them. I’m supposed to do a 15-minute reading, and then there’ll be a question-and-answer period, and we’ll have the chance to sell our books.

Consequently, I won’t be blogging on Friday, since I’ll be traveling that day. We appreciate your patience, and thank you for flying Brandywine Books.

Reviews

YouTube film review: ‘Darker Than Amber’

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As I read John D. MacDonald’s A Deadly Shade of Gold, which I reviewed yesterday, I was reminded of the 1970 film production of another Travis McGee book, Darker Than Amber. I found that it was on YouTube (in a somewhat muddy recording), and figured I’d watch it. I’d seen it before, on television sometime in the ‘70s, I think. I remembered I liked it. I wondered how it held up.

The answer is, not very well. In my opinion, it should have been called Darker Than Camembert, because there’s a whole lot of cheese goin’ on here.

The movie plot follows the book fairly closely, I’ll give it that. Travis McGee (played by Rod Taylor) is fishing with his friend Meyer (Theodore Bickel) when a girl (Suzy Kendall) drops off a nearby bridge with a weight tied to her ankles (if I recall right, it was a concrete block in the book; here it’s a bodybuilder’s weight). This is the sort of thing that happens to McGee all the time, of course, and he is quickly overboard, diving to free the girl and bring her back to the surface alive. She turns out to be named Vangie, and she’s pretty messed up. She ignores Travis’ safety warnings, and is soon in trouble again. Which puts McGee on a collision course with Terry (the great heavy William Smith in his best paranoid mode), a bodybuilder (probably on too many steroids) who has been working a badger game with Vangie. The film culminates in a brutal fight between McGee and Terry on a cruise ship. (According to Smith’s own statement, Taylor hit him in earnest and he hit back, so the fight you see is genuine. Taylor broke three of Smith’s ribs, while Smith broke Taylor’s nose. Or so the story goes. I can’t imagine hitting William Smith at all, let alone hard enough for him to notice.)

John D. MacDonald hated this movie, and never tired of saying so. He felt that its emphasis was on violence rather than human beings and feelings.

What didn’t I like? For one thing, Rod Taylor wasn’t the right physical type for McGee (Robert Culp, who was also considered for the role, would have been closer to MacDonald’s descriptions). And we see little of the thoughtful McGee in this script, which concentrates on action. Miss Agnes, McGee’s Rolls Royce pickup, is here approximated by an RR with a sort of camper rear-end, clearly built over an intact vehicle.

But the worst part was the whole aesthetic of the thing, I think. 1960s styles, colors, camera angles, music. And to top it all, a particular makeup appliance worn by Smith at the end just looks silly.

Still, if you’d like to see a Travis McGee story on film, you can find it on YouTube. The only other attempt was a TV pilot called Travis McGee, which couldn’t be saved even by the deathless Sam Elliot in the lead. Among its sins – McGee wears a mustache, his houseboat has become a sailboat, and the whole setting has been moved to California.

I didn’t embed the film in this post, because I suspect there may be copyright problems and the whole thing’s likely to be pulled any day now. Cautions for violence and brief nudity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Deadly Shade of Gold,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I motioned him back and had him get himself a shot glass. I filled it from my bottle. I held my glass up and said, “Drink to me, my friend. Drink to this poisonous bag of meat named McGee. And drink to little broken blondes, and a dead black dog, and a knife in the back of a woman, and a knife in the throat of a friend. Drink to a burned foot, and death at sea, and stinking prisons and obscene gold idols. Drink to loveless love, stolen money and a power of attorney, mi amigo. Drink to lust and crime and terror, the three unholy ultimates, and drink to all the problems which have no solution in this world, and at best a dubious one in the next.”

He beamed without comprehension, and said, “Salud!” We drank and bowed and I filled the glasses again.

I have favorites and less favorites among John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. I would not list A Deadly Shade of Gold as one of my favorites. It’s dark and convoluted, and unfortunately contains several authorial thoughts that annoy me. Still, it’s McGee, and I wouldn’t be without it.

Travis McGee, Florida houseboat-dwelling beach bum and “salvage specialist,” gets a call from his old buddy Sam Taggart, who’s been gone two years. Sam wants to know if Trav still “operates like he used to.” That means recovering stolen property for people and keeping half the value. He invites Trav to his seedy motel room and shows him an ugly golden statuette. There are 23 more like that, he tells Trav. Somebody took them from him and he wants them back.

Trav tells Sam that Nora wants to see him. That takes him aback. Sam was engaged to Nora before he ran off. Sam then says he’s changed his mind. If Nora will take him back, forget the salvage job. He says he’ll just dispose of this statue, and then Trav should bring Nora to see him tomorrow.

But when Trav and Nora show up, Sam is dead – killed with a knife in an ugly way.

Now it’s more than a salvage. It’s personal. Trav makes a trip to New York to talk to dealers and find out who might have owned the collection of gold statuettes. That leads him to a trip to Mexico (Nora comes along), to surveille the home of a reclusive, exiled Cuban government official.

Then things start getting complicated and violent, and it grows difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. It will all culminate in a fiery showdown in a billionaire’s home in Beverly Hills.

None of the Travis McGee books are exactly cheery, but A Deadly Shade of Gold is particularly dark. I think the author must have been depressed that year (1965). Aside from people dying in ways they don’t deserve, MacDonald expresses opinions which (in my view) have not largely held up well. He disses religion, and takes an entirely gratuitous swipe at all hunters. He warns of overpopulation. He talks about the dangers of right-wing extremism without even considering (apparently) that there might be an equal and opposite danger on the other side.

However, the story is consistently anti-communist. And a large part of the plot involves attempts by Communist agents to influence American politicians and entertainment people through sexual blackmail. That’s a theme right out of the headlines (or rather, the buried ledes).

If you’ve never read a Travis McGee novel, I wouldn’t recommend A Deadly Shade of Gold for a starter. Otherwise, buy it. Cautions for sex scenes and violence.

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.