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.