{"id":20472,"date":"2025-02-11T19:52:37","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T00:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=20472"},"modified":"2025-02-11T19:52:37","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T00:52:37","slug":"murder-in-the-wind-by-john-d-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=20472","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Murder in the Wind,&#8217; by John D. MacDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-amazon wp-block-embed-amazon\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Murder in the Wind: A Novel\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"474\" height=\"550\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen style=\"max-width:100%\" src=\"https:\/\/read.amazon.com\/kp\/card?preview=inline&#038;linkCode=kpd&#038;ref_=k4w_oembed_Mohi87ecndjQy0&#038;asin=B00AP2VGI8&#038;tag=kpembed-20\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The idea of a story<\/strong> 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, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Murder-Wind-John-D-MacDonald-ebook\/dp\/B00AP2VGI8\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=X8C8KW6266PQ&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.MoJQP02B6LOii33j_UAJhVYc_vIZii5qC6V0Yxnm7pVqaSnu9bl5gT9HtpjqTI1ZCpQgO-nf3AEUGrbT3f_TIdbAE3QDsYbbyJflehO32MufNp7WQxtjAsY0hqcUZ-IelsIZUlSIrIP1OVeGeKKd35F1xnUaEV0YDOA4pkf50-RZpaMklt7jg0G5sfG3Fb6gg9pBqhS3xTRUNhu_71fFqC6P2-i528jk19dCzzgzGBTcfPaGsO6bF42xzaF0puqfbZFVrAfn3NW8_tUtq0uU_w.xyZO3k-MaNMN1jLkUv2ExyDuE3DrupJzvMdRd5RfCGQ&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=murder+in+the+wind+macdonald&amp;qid=1739319384&amp;s=digital-text&amp;sprefix=murder+in+the+wind+macdonald%2Cdigital-text%2C126&amp;sr=1-1&amp;tag=brandbooks-20\">Murder in the Wind<\/a><\/em> (also published as <em>Hurricane<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Along Highway 19 in west Florida, several vehicles are traveling north. There\u2019s a hurricane blowing in the Gulf, but it\u2019s forecast to move west and north. Nobody knows it\u2019s going to turn east, block a couple bridges, and strand these particular people in a derelict house, hoping to ride the storm out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There\u2019s 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\u2019s planning to humiliate. The tennis bum with his new bride, a plain heiress he married for her money \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Murder in the Wind<\/em> 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\u2019s a masterful tale, carried along in increasing dramatic tension as the barometer steadily drops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An amusing typo gave the federal agent character the name \u201cSteve Maiden\u201d at the beginning, before a proofreader seems to have caught the OCR error and corrected it to Steve Malden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The book contains a slur against homosexuals which went over fine back when the book was published, but is offensive today \u2013 even to puritans like me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=20472\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8216;Murder in the Wind,&#8217; by John D. MacDonald<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[5461,3868,5460],"class_list":["post-20472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-hurricane","tag-john-d-macdonald","tag-murder-in-the-wind"],"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\/20472","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=20472"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20474,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20472\/revisions\/20474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}