But there was nothing like what I looked at when I whipped that piece of cloth aside. Nothing. I was one man when I pried the locks loose. And I was somebody else after I looked at the money. And I knew in some crazy way that I couldn’t ever go back to being the man who pried the locks, no matter how desperately I might want to.
The classic Noir is a moral tale, when it comes down to it. Something almost like a demonstration of the doctrine of Original Sin. Some ordinary guy, one like you or me, is faced with an irresistible temptation in a moment of vulnerability, and grabs it. And in that moment the trap is sprung, his fate is sealed, though he may not know it for a while.
Jerry Jamison, the “hero” of Soft Touch, a 1958 John D. MacDonald novel, is a World War II veteran. He did honorable service in the OSS in Southeast Asia. After his service he became a builder in Florida. Then he fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a land developer, married her, and went to work for her old man.
Only gradually did he realize that the old man is an idiot and the company is headed downhill. And his beautiful wife is an alcoholic. He wants to get out, but he’s short of resources.
Then his old war buddy Vince shows up. Vince has kept busy doing shady business in South America, and he has a business proposition. He knows a way to steal a fortune being transferred by a corrupt businessman planning a military coup. Nobody will claim the money, he promises. Finders keepers. After some brief hesitation, Jerry agrees.
The job doesn’t go as smoothly as they planned, of course. But they do get the money. More money than they even imagined.
And that’s when things really start going bad…
MacDonald, smart pro that he was, did not handle this story at all as I would have, which is just fine. Jerry Jamison is a well-drawn character, easy to identify with, which makes the tragedy all the more horrific. One element that’s unusual in this story (for a MacDonald book) is the inclusion of a humble Christian character, who tries – in all innocence – to steer Jerry the right way. Whether her admonitions are meant to be taken seriously, or rather as echoes of futility, is up to the reader to determine.
Soft Touch is a very effective Noir novel. Recommended, if you like the genre.
A horrific multi-car smashup on a four-lane highway forms the narrative center of John D. MacDonald’s 1956 novel, Cry Hard, Cry Fast.
The book begins with a lot of dramatic tension, as we are introduced to several carloads of fragile human beings and informed matter-of-factly that they are about to die. There’s a young businessman mourning his wife, concerned about a thumping in his tire but too preoccupied to stop and get it fixed. A family of four, dominated by an angry father who drives too fast. A young couple trying to save their marriage with a nostalgic vacation. A young woman fleeing a failed affair. A couple bank robbers in a stolen car, and the girl they picked up, trying to put distance between themselves and the police. An aging truck driver contemplating retirement.
After the accident happens, the survivors (those who are conscious) do their best to start putting their lives together, struggling with guilt, rethinking their plans, or scheming to reclaim lost loot.
Not even John D. MacDonald could knock it out of the park with every book. Cry Hard, Cry Fast isn’t a bad novel, especially considering it was originally meant for the men’s pulp market. It’s certainly more profound than most of its competition. But I felt the treatment here was a little superficial, the characters a little stereotyped, the resolution not as satisfying (especially viewed in the light of changed societal attitudes since this book’s publication) as it might have been.
It was interesting to note (as a native of the era) the changes that have been made in life on the road since 1956 – MacDonald describes “the yellow octagon of the stop sign” and nobody wears seat belts (this book makes a pretty good argument for their use).
Worth reading, but not the top of the crop.
There’s a fair amount of sex in this book, and one troubling scene where a naked 17-year-old girl is described (through her mother’s eyes, but still…)
The breeze was crisp. She turned toward it, her hands jammed into the jacket pockets. I wanted her carved on the bow of my next clipper ship, but it would have to be a good guy to capture the way that silvery hair moved in the wind.
John D. MacDonald actually wrote in various genres before finding his niche in mystery fiction. His first published mystery novel, in 1950, was The Brass Cupcake. I had read it before, and remembered it positively. But it’s clearly an immature work, and a little derivative.
The title is the narrator’s joking nickname for a policeman’s badge. He is Cliff Bartells, an insurance investigator in the fictional (I think) town of Florence City, Florida, somewhere near Tampa. He used to carry a badge himself, but he left the Florence City police force because of its prevailing corruption. Now he has a reputation for brokering the recovery of stolen property – it’s cost-effective for both the criminals and the insurers to buy the stuff back rather than paying out full settlements. He’s trusted by the crooks, because he never informs on them.
Only now a case has come up that’s a whole different matter. A wealthy old woman has been murdered in a jewel robbery. When he hears from the thieves, Cliff’s position is impossible – if he doesn’t betray the robbers, the local police (who hate him) will arrest him as an accessory. And if he does betray them, his professional reputation will be shot.
Then there’s a further complication – the old woman’s beautiful niece and heir. They dislike each other on first meeting, only to find themselves irresistibly drawn together. The police suspect them both. Can he trust her? Can he trust anyone?
It’s easy to see why author MacDonald impressed his publishers with this book. It’s almost ideal for its time – a tough-guy story with a principled hero in a bad spot, featuring fights and police beatings and a little sex (mild by our standards). Noir cinema seems to have been an inspiration: “I pushed the draperies back so that the neon sent its pale redness into the room, off and on, off and on, the furniture bulking oddly large in the intermittent shadow.” I have an idea the story may have been inspired in part by James M. Cain – though that’s an ignorant opinion, as I’ve never read Cain.
The book’s age is made apparent in several ways, not only in the cars and the smoking – but especially in the featured idea that women (or some women, anyway) need a slap or two to figure out what they really want.
Anyway, that’s The Brass Cupcake. Underdeveloped MacDonald, but certainly entertaining and worth a read.
He wore round glasses with steel rims and the glasses were always slipping down his blunt nose and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and brown and watchful and they could have been the noses of two bullets dimly seen in the cylinder when you look toward the muzzle of a gun.
The idea of a story in which travelers in a random group are thrown together and react to each other like chemicals in a laboratory is an old one. It certainly goes back to Chaucer, and probably further, though author John D. MacDonald uses the setup for a different purpose in his 1956 novel, Murder in the Wind (also published as Hurricane).
Along Highway 19 in west Florida, several vehicles are traveling north. There’s a hurricane blowing in the Gulf, but it’s forecast to move west and north. Nobody knows it’s going to turn east, block a couple bridges, and strand these particular people in a derelict house, hoping to ride the storm out.
There’s the defeated young businessman, headed back north with his wife and two kids, all their possessions packed into their station wagon. The hotshot property developer sharing his ride with a subordinate he’s planning to humiliate. The tennis bum with his new bride, a plain heiress he married for her money – and she knows it. The young widow, carrying the ashes of her suicide husband home with her. The stolen van with three juvenile delinquents in it. And the federal agent between assignments.
Over the course of the next day some will live and some will die. Some of the least likely characters will display courage and honor, as others will turn out to be cowards, sometimes to their own surprise.
Murder in the Wind caught me up completely. MacDonald ushers us deep into the heart of each one of them, telling their stories, bringing them vividly to life. It’s a masterful tale, carried along in increasing dramatic tension as the barometer steadily drops.
An amusing typo gave the federal agent character the name “Steve Maiden” at the beginning, before a proofreader seems to have caught the OCR error and corrected it to Steve Malden.
The book contains a slur against homosexuals which went over fine back when the book was published, but is offensive today – even to puritans like me.
Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it.
Among all the riches of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Empty Copper Sea holds a place all its own. Aside from being an artifact of MacDonald’s strongest period, it’s also the book where we get to see our hero most emphatically and ecstatically in love. Even willing to (drum roll, wait for it) commit.
McGee, semi-legal “salvage specialist,” is not at his best as the story begins. He’s just gotten home from a grueling voyage, undertaken as a favor for a friend. He just wants to relax a while. He’s tired; he’s feeling old. The world seems dull and full of irritations.
And along comes Van Harder, an old boating acquaintance. Van is a former drunk who’s now a born-again Christian, punctiliously maintaining his sobriety and rebuilding his life. He had been captaining a boat for a rich man up in the town of Timber Bay, when he suddenly got sick and lost consciousness. When he was awakened (by a kick from the sheriff’s boot) his boss had disappeared and he was being blamed for the disaster. The sheriff believes he had fallen off the wagon. Now no one will hire him.
Van says he knows that Trav recovers things for people, in return for half the value. He estimates the value of his personal reputation, he says, at twenty-thousand dollars. So he’ll pay Trav ten-thousand dollars to go up to Timber Bay and prove his innocence. To either find the boss’s body, or locate him wherever he’s run off to.
Trav and his economist friend Meyer travel to Timber Bay, to find that there’s a lot of speculation about the missing boss. The body was never recovered, and an increasing number of indications suggest he has absconded to Mexico with his Scandinavian mistress.
They encounter and interview a series of characters – all of them well-rounded and interesting. But Trav’s heart isn’t in it – he’s flirting with too many women and getting into too many bar fights.
Until he meets Gretel Tuckerman. Gretel is tall and healthy and beautiful, sister to the missing boss’s right-hand man, for whom she is caring, as he has suffered a brain injury. Some of John D. MacDonald’s most lyrical prose follows, as we watch Travis blissfully in love.
It’s doomed, of course, but that’s for another book (The Green Ripper).
A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging. What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn’t be experimental, I don’t think.
Another deal on a Travis McGee e-book means another Travis McGee review, to the joy of all. Author John D. MacDonald was at the peak of his powers back in the 1970s when The Dreadful Lemon Skycame out; the result is a neat, tight, engaging mystery.
Our hero Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale boat dweller and beach bum, is not technically a private eye. He basically does favors for friends and friends referred by friends, mostly recovering stolen property, retaining a large percentage of the value as his fee. The Dreadful Lemon Sky begins with something less than a “salvage” job. Carrie Milligan, an old friend, asks him to hold a large amount of cash for her for one month. If she doesn’t come to claim it by then, he should get it to her sister in New Jersey.
But it doesn’t take that long. A few days later, there’s a news item – Carrie Milligan was killed by a truck while crossing a highway near her home in Bay City (which appeared to me to resemble very much the city of Palm Bay, where I once lived). McGee and his economist friend Meyer sail north in McGee’s houseboat for the funeral. There he meets the sister along with Carrie’s circle of friends. And at that point McGee starts getting suspicious. Something is going on under the surface here – he will discover drug smuggling, political corruption, sexual kink and betrayal. The solution will prove to be a complex one, and cruel.
Every McGee novel includes scenes that stick in my mind, even after decades. This one includes a great moment where McGee rescues Carrie’s sister from being fleeced by a funeral director, and McGee’s meditation on the corrosive nature of corporate takeovers of smaller brands. Also, he rents a yellow AMC Gremlin in Bay City, which happened to be exactly the car I was driving back when I first read the book. We Gremlin drivers needed all the support we could get.
Great story. Great reading experience. Cautions for violence, drug use and a pretty lyrical sex scene.
Death comes while you are struggling with your application or lack of application of the Judeo-Christian ethic. While you work out the equation which says, If I don’t kill him, he will kill me, so even if I have been taught not to kill, this is an exception—while you are working that out, he is blowing chunks of bone out of your skull. The quick and the dead is an ancient allusion. They were quick and I was quick and lucky.
I always knew it was coming. Even when this book first came out (and I read it back then) I had to expect that when John D. MacDonald gave his hero Travis McGee the girl of his dreams, a big, healthy, well-balanced woman who seemed to be made for him, he would have to kill her off in the next book. (The author is the true villain of every story.) And so it was. The Green Ripper is the darkest and saddest of the Travis McGee series, and incidentally a harbinger of what future detective fiction would be.
Gretel Tuckerman, Trav’s new woman, has taken a job at a property development and health spa near Fort Lauderdale. One day she notices a stranger on the grounds, and recognizes him from a brief encounter years ago in California. A couple days later she is dead, apparently the victim of a rare disease carried by an insect bite.
But before long, a stricken McGee and his friend Meyer get a visit from some government agents with questions. Thanks to Meyer’s security clearance, they get to ask a few questions of their own. It appears there’s a terrorist network within the US, connected to a secretive religious cult in California. It was Gretel’s misfortune to recognize one of its members, and apparently they murdered her by clandestine means.
This is where McGee goes underground. He assumes a new identity, that of a working fisherman with a drinking problem, headed to California to find his daughter, whom he believes joined the cult. He will find the cult. He will join them. Get to know them. Make friends.
And he will get terrible revenge.
Here, I believe, we see the genesis of the detective thriller as we know it today – the Jack Reacher and Gray Man books and others in the same vein, some better, some not so good. Most Travis McGee books are about the mystery, the problem, with a generous helping of violence thrown in. Today, most detective series are primarily about the violence, with just enough of a mystery to hold the plot together.
As an old fogy, I generally find the older way more enjoyable. And as far as I recall, MacDonald never again went as far into ultra-violence as he did in this story. It’s not that I judge The Green Ripper a bad novel, it’s just that the combination of grief and vengeance makes it a downer.
Also, Meyer, supposedly a genius, makes a lot of economic predictions in this book that haven’t played out well in the real world. On the other hand, we have here an object lesson about avoiding religious groups run by women.
So, not my favorite Travis McGee. But it’s a great series.
On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the safest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.
It’s always cause for celebration for this reader when another Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald shows up on bargain sale. This time it was One Fearful Yellow Eye, notable (in this reader’s opinion) for the quality of its prose.
Years ago, our hero Travis McGee, lanky and languid Florida “salvage specialist,” found a young woman named Glory contemplating suicide on a beach. She’d had an astonishing run of bad luck and tragedy. He took her home, fed her and reassured her and took her to his bed, and eventually she went on with her life. She met an older man, Dr. Fortner Geiss, a prominent Chicago physician, who admitted to her he was dying, but they gave each other a couple good years, in spite of his adult children’s hostility. Now he’s dead, and she’s discovered that his considerable wealth has disappeared. In his last months, he’d converted everything to cash, which is nowhere to be found. The inevitable – but counterintuitive in such a good man – conclusion is that he’d been blackmailed.
So Glory calls on McGee. His deal is to look for things people have had stolen from them, and if he finds it he keeps half. That’s okay with her.
McGee flies to Chicago and agrees to look into the problem. He’s a little out of his element in a Chicago winter, and Dr. Geiss’s son and daughter are no warmer – especially his daughter Heidi, a gorgeous ice queen. It’s not a big surprise when Heidi becomes McGee’s special rehabilitation project.
One Fearful Yellow Eye is not, in my opinion, one of the best McGee novels in terms of plot. I thought the ending strayed a little close to deus ex machina.
But in terms of prose, I’d rate it one of MacDonald’s best. He was soaring as a stylist in those days. Although I’d entirely forgotten the plot here, I found more lines and passages than usual that had stuck in my mind from previous readings:
“Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”
The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city….
I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report: The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. And you can’t hardly taste the additives.
Anyway, I got a kick out of One Fearful Yellow Eye. Cautions for sexual situations and violence.
Yes, it’s my birthday, thank you. I guess I was a little obscure about that yesterday.
Aside from his Travis McGee novels, John D. MacDonald was a prolific author of stand-alone thrillers. Today’s pick is April Evil, from 1956.
The setting is the town of Flamingo, Florida, whose most eccentric resident is old Dr. Paul Tomlin. It’s well known that Dr. Tomlin keeps all his money in cash, in a safe in his big stone house, as he doesn’t believe in banks.
This eccentricity attracts interest. Naturally his ne’er-do-well nephew Dil Parks is interested, as is Dil’s sexy, scheming wife, Lenora. And then there’s a more distant relation, young Joe Preston, who came to visit with his wife, Laurie. Dr. Tomlin despises Joe, but he likes Laurie, and so allows them to stay with him, while he teaches Laurie about books and music.
But even more darkly, a man named Harry Mullin has come to town. He’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and he’s heard a rumor about a lot of money in an old man’s house. He’s assembled a team of specialists, and they’re planning a quick, easy job and a clean getaway.
Lawyer Ben Piersall is not involved in any of this. When Dil’s wife, Lenora, tried to get him to help them have the old man declared incompetent, he laughed her off. What he doesn’t know is that the criminal Harry Mullin has moved in next door, and his own son has developed a powerful curiosity about these secretive strangers.
It’s a powder keg situation, with several different fuses burning to it, and it’s all set to go off on one terrible afternoon.
April Evil is not the best of John D. MacDonald’s novels (I found it a little melodramatic), but it’s well-written and fairly representative. As always, the characters are the great strength. They’re varied and believable, and they sometimes surprise the reader.
Recommended. Cautions for violence and sexual situations.
I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
Another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald – and this is another important entry in the series, if only by virtue of its being the first.
I’ve told the story here before, because it amuses me. So I’ll just summarize it now. In 1963, Fawcett Publications, a major popular paperback house, hired a new author to create a detective series, replacing Richard S. Prather, their former top seller, who’d followed deeper pockets to greener pastures (to mix a metaphor). John D. MacDonald, the new kid, came up with a slightly reclusive hero, a beach bum living on a houseboat, called Dallas McGee (changed quickly to Travis McGee after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas). McGee called himself a “salvage expert,” but he didn’t salvage shipwrecks or cars. He recovered stolen objects or money, in return for half the value as a finder’s fee. The first book to appear, in 1964, was The Deep Blue Good-bye. (Every volume would incorporate a color in the title.)
McGee is persuaded by a friend, a dancer, to talk to another dancer named Cathy Kerr. Cathy is a country girl, a single mother, living hand to mouth. But she thinks she might have a right to a missing treasure. Her father, she explains, came home from the war with some secret package that he hid carefully, before being sent to prison for murder. He died before his release, but after a while his former cellmate Junior Allen showed up – a big, strong, dynamic type who swept Cathy off her feet and soon had her completely dominated. He also dug holes all over their farm. And one day he found something and vanished. Cathy is pretty sure he found her father’s stash, and she and her kid could sure use half of it, if McGee could get it back for her.
McGee doesn’t need work just now, but he’s impressed with Cathy’s dignity after all she’s been through. He traces Junior Allen’s footsteps, learning he was last seen on a yacht with a rich, beautiful woman. McGee finds the woman, Lois Atkinson, in her home, cast off by Allen and now a wreck of herself. Allen systematically broke her down and degraded her, and she has nearly starved herself to death in despair and self-disgust. McGee nurses her back to health, and at last begins a gentle affair with her, one which threatens to break through his prickly personal defenses.
But he still has Junior Allen to catch, and he formulates a devious plan to con the con man.
Unfortunately, as with all plans of battle, this one does not survive contact with the enemy. And Junior Allen is a formidable enemy indeed. The climax is one of the most harrowing and memorable in the series.
I read a review some time back that argued that The Deep Blue Good-bye is unworthy of the rest of the books, weighed down by the standard tropes of 1960s men’s fiction. I cannot agree. MacDonald certainly serves up the expected necessaries – plenty of violence and sex. But I think the original readers back in 1964 must have been puzzled by this book – there’s a lot of genuinely excellent prose here, and even the obligatory sex scenes are lyrical and revelatory of character, rather than sordid. (Though I do not approve of the sexual mores.)
Some of MacDonald’s prose – I would argue – is as good as that of his contemporaries Hemingway and O’Hara, only ensconced in far more interesting stories.
I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tinwork, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.
Another notable element in this book was one moment – never to be repeated again that I can recall – when McGee hints at some trauma in his earlier life that left him perpetually commitment-averse.
To draw a line under it all, I highly enjoyed The Deep Blue Good-bye and recommend it. Not for kids.
