The Good Old Stuff (2 page)

Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

For millions of readers John D. MacDonald is
the
consummate storyteller of our time, a writer who, with his energetic prose, his vivid sense of character, his all but miraculous skill at describing every sort of person and setting and event with economy, elegance, and total credibility, makes us turn and turn his pages with our minds in awe and our hearts hovering around our Adam’s apple. The thirteen stories in this collection demonstrate how fantastically good his best work was at the start of his career.

MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on July 24, 1916. His father was a strong-willed workaholic who rose Horatio Alger-like from humble origins to become a top executive at a firearms company in Utica, New York. A near-fatal attack of mastoiditis and scarlet fever at age twelve confined young MacDonald to bed for a year, and lack of anything else to do in those days before radio and TV virtually forced him to read or have his mother read to him, huge quantities of books. As soon as he was back on his feet, he began haunting the public library, compulsively devouring every book on the shelves.

After graduating from the Utica Free Academy in 1933, MacDonald took some courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance, then transferred to Syracuse University where, in 1938, he received a B.S. in Business Administration. He married fellow Syracuse graduate Dorothy Prentiss the same year, and was awarded an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in June 1939. After an assortment of jobs that he hated, he accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the Army in June 1940, and was assigned to procurement work in Rochester, N. Y. until June 1943, when he was sent overseas to Staff Headquarters, New Delhi, India. A year later he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and served in Columbo, Ceylon as a branch commander of an Intelligence detachment, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

During the idle times, instead of writing his wife letters that
he knew would be heavily censored, MacDonald began writing and sending her short stories. One of these, “Interlude in India,” Dorothy sold for $25 to Whit and Hallie Burnett’s prestigious
Story Magazine
, in whose July-August 1946 issue it appeared. “I can’t describe what it was like,” MacDonald said recently, “when I found out that my words had actually sold…. I felt as if I were a fraud … as if I were trying to be something that I wasn’t. Then I thought, my goodness, maybe I could actually be one.”

At the end of the war MacDonald was entitled to four months of stateside terminal leave with pay before his official discharge. He spent the time behind the typewriter, working harder than ever before in his life, putting in 80 hours a week, cranking out 800,000 words worth of short stories, keeping 30 to 35 yarns in the mail at all times—and selling not a word. Finally, early in 1946, a few of the less-than-first-class pulp mystery magazines like
Detective Tales
and
Mammoth Mystery
began to buy from him, and by the end of the year he had earned about $6,000, enough to support himself and Dorothy and their seven-year-old son in modest style. For the next half-dozen years most of MacDonald’s income was from magazines, primarily the great pulps like
Black Mask, Dime Detective, Doc Savage, The Shadow
, and
Mystery Book
, whose gaudy and lurid covers could still be seen on every newsstand in those immediate postwar years. Once in a while a MacDonald story would sell to a slick periodical like
Esquire, Liberty
, or
Cosmopolitan
that paid top dollar, but the vast majority of his tales of the late forties and early fifties went to the pulps, and his name became a fixture on those garish covers several times a month. He made so many pulp sales so quickly that some magazines would run two, three, or even four of his stories in a single issue, one under his own byline, and the rest under “house names.”

MacDonald was the last great American mystery writer who honed his storytelling skills in the action-detective pulps as Hammett and Chandler and Gardner and Woolrich had done before him. During the half-dozen years after the war he produced more than two hundred pulp tales whose variety in length and content is astonishing. There were two Westerns,
¹
at least
21 sports stories, well over 40 ventures into science fiction,
²
but most of MacDonald’s energies during his formative years as a writer were concentrated in the crime-suspense genre, to which he contributed more than 160 stories between 1946 and the early 1950s.
³

Gingerly turning the now brown-edged pages of those old pulps and tracing MacDonald’s apprenticeship as a tale-spinner, we can watch him growing stronger in countless ways in record time. He was writing everything from straight detective stories like “The Simplest Poison” and biter-bit yarns like “Death Writes the Answer” to psychological suspense tales like “Miranda” or thrillers like “Trap for a Tigress.” He was writing about disturbed war veterans, professional criminals and gamblers, city cops, country cops, and all sorts of private adventurers, including one or two recognizable prototypes of that perpetually disappointed boat bum and contemporary knight, Travis McGee. He was experimenting with mini-minis of under two thousand words and short novels the length of a Simenon and everything in between. The best of his stories are masterful and the worst marginal, but in grinding them out at breakneck speed he was evolving the uncanny instincts that shape his sixty-plus novels, from
The Brass Cupcake
(1950) to
Cinnamon Skin
(1982).

Several of MacDonald’s earliest pulp crime stories were set in the China-Burma-India locales in which he’d spent the war. But magazine editor Babette Rosmond persuaded him to take off the pith helmet and start writing about the United States, and from then on the majority of his stories dealt with the postwar American scene. Indeed MacDonald portrayed more vividly and knowledgeably than any other crime writer the readjustment of American society in general and American business in particular from a war footing to a consumer-oriented peacetime economy, and the redemption and return to the real world of all sorts of warhaunted people on the verge of self-ruination by drink and detachment. Several stories of this sort, such as “They Let Me Live” and “She Cannot Die,” are collected here, and even though MacDonald has eliminated or
updated some of the topical references that he feels would be lost on today’s reader, perhaps enough remains of the ambience of the late forties and early fifties to demonstrate how the best crime fiction of any period bears witness to later generations about the way we lived then.

In 1950 MacDonald had his first novel published, not in hardcover but as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, and throughout that decade and most of the sixties he continued to write paperbacks so prolifically and well that he forced critics and intelligent readers to take notice of a new book-publishing medium that they might otherwise have dismissed as junk. With the debut of his series character Travis McGee in 1964, MacDonald’s royalties and readership soared even higher, and in due course the author and his hero migrated to hardcover publication and to the best-seller lists.

What’s the secret of his success? The values he admires most in others’ fiction and embodies in his own have been best summarized by MacDonald himself. “First, there has to be a strong sense of story. I want to be intrigued by wondering what is going to happen next. I want the people that I read about to be in difficulties—emotional, moral, spiritual, whatever, and I want to live with them while they’re finding their way out of these difficulties. Second, I want the writer to make me suspend my disbelief.… I want to be in some other place and scene of the writer’s devising. Next, I want him to have a bit of magic in his prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry. I want to have words and phrases really sing. And I like an attitude of wryness, realism, the sense of inevitability. I think that writing—good writing—should be like listening to music, where you identify the themes, you see what the composer is doing with those themes, and then, just when you think you have him properly identified, and his methods identified, then he will put in a little quirk, a little twist, that will be so unexpected that you read it with a sense of glee, a sense of joy, because of its aptness, even though it may be a very dire and bloody part of the book. So I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.”

In these thirteen early tales MacDonald gets what he wants, and so will his millions of fans. This is the good old stuff indeed. Read, and be carried away.

These stories have been selected from hundreds written and published during the five-year period from 1947 to 1952.

This was the process of selection: Martin H. Greenberg of the University of Wisconsin and Francis M. Nevins, Jr., both of them aficionados of the pulp mystery story, wrote me that it would be a useful project to make a collection of the best of the old pulp stories of mine. I was not transfixed with delight. Mildly flattered, yes. But apprehensive about the overall quality of such a collection.

With the invaluable aid of Jean and Walter Shine, they acquired copies of those stories they had not read, and between the four of them, they whittled the list down to thirty. The tear sheets of these stories were obtained from the archives at the University Libraries, the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Sam Gowan, the Assistant Director of Special Resources, sent them along. I had them all turned back into typed manuscript form before looking at them.

I brought the hefty stack of thirty stories up here to the Adirondacks and went through them with care. To my astonishment, I found only three which I felt did not merit republication. The twenty-seven remaining totaled a quarter million words, so I divided them into two lots of approximately equal length. This is the first.

I have made minor changes in
all
these stories, mostly in the area of changing references which could confuse the reader. Thirty years ago everyone understood the phrase “unless he threw the gun as far as Camera could.” But the Primo is largely forgotten, and I changed him to Superman.

I have updated some of the stories, but only where the plot line was not entangled with and dependent upon the particular era. Those that depend for their effect on the times, the period pieces (“Death Writes the Answer,” “They Let Me Live”), were not updated.

Those stories which could happen at any time, such as “A Time for Dying,” have been updated. I changed a live radio show to a live television show. And in others I changed pay scales, taxi fares, long-distance phoning procedures, beer prices, and so forth to keep from watering down the attention of the reader. This may offend the purists, but my original intention in writing these stories was to entertain. If I did not entertain first the editor and then the readers, I did not get paid. And if I did not get paid, I would have to go find honest work. So the intention is still to entertain, to bemuse, and even to indicate how little changed is our time from that time when these were written.

I was horribly tempted to make other changes, to edit patches of florid prose, substitute the right words for the almost right words, but that would have been cheating, because it would have made me look as if I were a better writer at that time than I was. I was learning the trade.

The fifth and sixth stories in this collection intrigued me because they dealt with the same hero, one Park Falkner, who in some aspects seems like a precursor of Travis McGee. And in other aspects he foreshadows the plots of a lot of bad television series which came along later.

I remember with a particular fondness those editors who gave honest and valuable advice during the early years: Babette Rosmond at Street & Smith; Mike Tilden, Harry Widmer, and Alden Norton at Popular Publications; Bob Lowndes at Columbia Publications.

I remember Mike Tilden saying, “John, for God’s sake stop
telling
us about people. Stop saying, for example, ‘She was a very clumsy woman.’ Show her falling downstairs and ending up with her head in the fishbowl. Don’t ever say, ‘He was an evil man.’ Show him doing an evil thing.”

I remember Babette Rosmond saying to me, after I had sent her a couple of dozen stories which used my Ordnance and
OSS background in the China-Burma-India Theater, “John, now is the time to take off your pith helmet and come home.”

These stories, with the hundreds of others, were written and rewritten at 1109 State Street, Utica, New York; at 8 Jacarandas, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico; at rented houses on Gardenia Street, Clearwater Beach, Florida, and Bruce Avenue three blocks away during the next season; at a rented house on Casey Key, Florida; at Piseco, New York, where I have been editing this collection; and finally at 1430 Point Crisp Road, Sarasota, where we lived for eighteen good years.

I wrote stories in such dogged quantity that often, when I had more than one in a magazine, the second had to be published under a house name: Peter Reed, John Wade Farrell, Scott O’Hara. In this collection, “A Time for Dying” was published under the name of Peter Reed and “Check Out at Dawn” as by Scott O’Hara.