{"id":17043,"date":"2022-07-18T18:55:20","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T22:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17043"},"modified":"2022-07-18T18:55:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T22:55:20","slug":"judge-me-not-by-john-d-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17043","title":{"rendered":"‘Judge Me Not,’ by John D. MacDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u201cYou stay in town long enough, and I\u2019ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you\u2019ll eat grass. I know. You\u2019re telling yourself you\u2019re a big strong guy and you\u2019d die before you\u2019d take orders like that. That\u2019s fairy story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren\u2019t 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\u2019t have to know. Keep the five grand. You like this little girl? Take her home with you. She\u2019ll do anything you tell her to do.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I said of the last<\/strong> old, republished John D. MacDonald novel I reviewed that it felt like a \u201cprogrammer,\u201d a quick project slapped together to meet a deadline. MacDonald did, after all, work on contract for the pulp paperback trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judge Me Not<\/a><\/em>, 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 \u2013 or at least with Dashiell Hammet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019ve gotten themselves hired as city manager and assistant in the town of Deron, New York. They\u2019re on schedule with their plan to expose and oust the current mayor and the gang that supports him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Teed isn\u2019t quite the straight arrow his boss, a widowed father of two daughters, is. Teed\u2019s a bit of a swinger. And right now he\u2019s sleeping with the mayor\u2019s wife. Who could it hurt?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What he and his boss don\u2019t realize is how seriously corrupt and vicious the gang running the town is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That becomes very clear when Teed wakes up one day to find the mayor\u2019s wife murdered in his lake cabin. He manages to dump the body before the cops show up (heroes disposing of women\u2019s bodies seems to have been one of MacDonald\u2019s go-to tropes at the start of his career; it\u2019s featured in the last three of his novels I\u2019ve read), but that doesn\u2019t prevent his being arrested and beaten within an inch of his life by the cops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s just the beginning. It will get much, much worse before Teed manages to take the fight back to the enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Judge Me Not<\/em>\u2019s plot genuinely surprised me. It was troubling and a little shocking. Very bad things happen to people who don\u2019t deserve it, but there\u2019s a moving redemptive element too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was highly impressed with Judge Me Not<\/em>. Cautions for sexual situations (1950s vintage, so they\u2019re not very explicit). Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou stay in town long enough, and I\u2019ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you\u2019ll eat grass. I know. You\u2019re telling yourself you\u2019re a big strong guy and you\u2019d die before you\u2019d take orders like that. That\u2019s fairy story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren\u2019t like that. … Continue reading ‘Judge Me Not,’ by John D. MacDonald<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[3868,4264],"class_list":["post-17043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-john-d-macdonald","tag-judge-me-not"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17044,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17043\/revisions\/17044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}