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Synopsis
From the author of the world-famous Travis McGee thrillers, thirteen of John D. MacDonald's earliest and best crime and mystery stories brought together in one volume.
Written at the beginning of his career and originally published in American magazines only, these stories give us a taste of MacDonald's early achievements and show the range of his skill in the realm of mystery and thriller writing.
'Sharp, taut, realistic ... an impressive selection' Times
Release date: June 11, 2013
Publisher: Random House
Print pages: 336
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
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The Good Old Stuff
John D. MacDonald
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 sense of character, his skill in
describing every sort of person, setting and event with economy and credibility, makes us keep turning the pages of his novels and his short stories. The thirteen stories in this collection
demonstrate how good his best work was at the very 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 many months. It was during this time that he discovered the great
joy of reading, and went through huge quantities of books. After he was well again, he continued his voracious reading, trying to work his way through the public library, shelf by shelf.
After graduating from the Utica Free Academy in 1933, MacDonald entered the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to Syracuse University where he earned a
Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration in January of 1938. He married Dorothy Prentiss, also a Syracuse graduate, that same year. He received his Master’s Degree in Business
Administration from Harvard in June of 1939. After an assortment of jobs which he did not care for, he accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the U.S. Army Reserve and was assigned to active
duty at the Rochester Ordnance District in Rochester, New York, in June of 1940. In June of 1943 he was reassigned to China-Burma-India Theater Headquarters in New Delhi. Later he was recruited
overseas by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and was appointed commander of the Branch Establishment of Detachment 404 in Colombo, Ceylon.
Because outgoing mail was heavily censored he found it difficult to find enough to write about in the letters he sent Dorothy. And so in one instance, instead of sending her a letter, he wrote a
short story and sent it to her. She liked it, typed it in proper format and sent it to the prestigious magazine of short fiction edited by Whit and Hallie Burnett and called Story Magazine.
It appeared in the July–August 1946 issue. They paid $25 for it. “I really can’t describe what it was like,” MacDonald said recently, “when I found out my words had
actually sold. . . . I felt as if I were an imposter . . . as if I were trying to be something I wasn’t. And then I thought that maybe I could actually be a writer.”
At the end of the war, after his separation promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, MacDonald was entitled to four months of terminal leave with pay. He spent that time at the typewriter, working
harder than ever before in his life, putting in eighty hours a week. In those four months he wrote 800,000 words of short stories and kept a couple of dozen of them in the mail at all times.
Finally he had learned enough by doing the equivalent of ten novels so that his work began to sell to the pulp magazines such as Detective Tales, Dime Detective, Black Mask, Doc Savage and
The Shadow as well as to such smooth-paper magazines as Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Liberty. By the end of 1946 he had earned about $6,000, enough to support himself and Dorothy
and their seven-year-old son in modest style. He sold hundreds of pulp magazine stories and dozens of slick magazine stories in the years 1947 through 1952.
During these years he honed his storytelling skills in the action-adventure-detection pulps as Hammett and Chandler and Gardner and Woolrich had done before him. The variety of stories in length
and in content is astonishing. There were 2 Westerns, at least 21 sports stories, and well over 40 ventures into science fiction, 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.
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 “Murder in Mind” to biter-bit yarns like “Death Writes the Answer” to psychological suspense tales like
“Miranda” to thrillers like “Noose 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’s spent the war. But magazine editor Babette Rosmond persuaded him to 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 war-haunted 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 readers alike to take notice of a new book-publishing medium they might otherwise have overlooked. In truth he published so many
novels in paperback, the fact that he also published hard-cover novels in 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1958, 1959 (two), 1960, 1962 and 1965—several of them both critical and commercial
successes—is often overlooked.
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 pick out the themes, you see what the composer is doing with
those themes, and then, just when you think you have him properly analyzed, and his methods identified, 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 Gowam, 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 Carnera 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.
In 1946 I tried to keep at least thirty stories in the mail at all times. When I finished a story, I would make a list of the magazines which might be interested and then send it out again and
again until either it was sold or the list was exhausted. There were lots of magazines then. There was an open market for short fiction. There were lots of readers. Bless them!
Assembling this collection was like walking into a room and finding there a lot of old and good friends you had thought dead. The stories are better than I expected them to be, and so in taking
the occupational risk of having them published, I hope you will enjoy them as much as they were enjoyed the first time around.
John D. MacDonald
Piseco, New York
June 20, 1982
Long ago he had given up trying to estimate what he would find in any house merely by looking at the outside of it. The interior of each house had a special flavor. It was not
so much the result of the degree of tidiness, or lack of it, but rather the result of the emotional climate that had permeated the house. Anger, bitterness, despair—all left their subtle
stains on even the most immaculate fabrics.
Darrigan parked the rented car by the curb and, for a long moment, looked at the house, at the iron fence, at the cypress shade. He sensed dignity, restraint, quietness. Yet he knew that the
interior could destroy these impressions. He was in the habit of telling himself that his record of successful investigations was the result of the application of unemotional logic—yet his
logic was often the result of sensing, somehow, the final answer and then retracing the careful steps to arrive once more at that same answer.
After a time, as the September sun of west-coast Florida began to turn the rented sedan into an oven, Darrigan pushed open the door, patted his pocket to be sure his notebook was in place, and
walked toward the front door of the white house. There were two cars in the driveway, both of them with local licenses, both of them Cadillacs. It was perceptibly cooler under the trees that lined
the walk.
Beyond the screen door the hallway was dim. A heavy woman came in answer to his second ring, staring at him with frank curiosity.
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Davisson, please. Here’s my card.”
The woman opened the screen just enough for the card to be passed through, saying, with Midwest nasality, “Well, she’s resting right now. . . . Oh, you’re from the
insurance?”
“Yes, I flew down from Hartford.”
“Please come in and wait and I’ll see if she’s awake, Mr Darrigan. I’m just a neighbor. I’m Mrs. Hoke. The poor dear has been so terribly upset.”
“Yes, of course,” Darrigan murmured, stepping into the hall. Mrs. Hoke walked heavily away. Darrigan could hear the mumble of other voices, a faint, slightly incongruous laugh. From
the hall he could see into a living room, two steps lower than the hall itself. It was furnished in cool colors, with Florida furniture of cane and pale fabrics.
Mrs. Hoke came back and said reassuringly, “She was awake, Mr. Darrigan. She said you should wait in the study and she’ll be out in a few minutes. The door is right back here. This
is such a dreadful thing, not knowing what has happened to him. It’s hard on her, the poor dear thing.”
The study was not done in Florida fashion. Darrigan guessed that the furniture had been shipped down from the North. A walnut desk, a bit ornate, leather couch and chairs, two walls of
books.
Mrs. Hoke stood in the doorway. “Now don’t you upset her, you hear?” she said with elephantine coyness.
“I’ll try not to.”
Mrs. Hoke went away. This was Davisson’s room, obviously. His books. A great number of technical works on the textile industry. Popularized texts for the layman in other fields. Astronomy,
philosophy, physics. Quite a few biographies. Very little fiction. A man, then, with a serious turn of mind, dedicated to self-improvement, perhaps a bit humorless. And certainly very tidy.
Darrigan turned quickly as he heard the step in the hallway. She was a tall young woman, light on her feet. Her sunback dress was emerald green. Late twenties, he judged, or possibly very early
thirties. Brown hair, sun-bleached on top. Quite a bit of tan. A fresh face, wide across the cheek-bones, heavy-lipped, slightly Bergman in impact. The mouth faintly touched with strain.
“Mr. Darrigan?” He liked the voice. Low, controlled, poised.
“How do you do, Mrs. Davisson. Sorry to bother you like this.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t able to sleep. Won’t you sit down, please?”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll sit at the desk, Mrs. Davisson. I’ll have to make some notes.”
She sat on the leather couch. He offered her a cigarette. “No, thank you, I’ve been smoking so much I have a sore throat. Mr. Darrigan, isn’t this a bit . . . previous for the
insurance company to send someone down here? I mean, as far as we know, he isn’t—”
“We wouldn’t do this in the case of a normal policyholder, Mrs. Davisson, but your husband carries policies with us totaling over nine hundred thousand dollars.”
“Really! I knew Temple had quite a bit, but I didn’t know it was that much!”
He showed her his best smile and said, “It makes it awkward for me, Mrs. Davisson, for them to send me out like some sort of bird of prey. You have presented no claim to the company, and
you are perfectly within your rights to tell me to be on my merry way.”
She answered his smile. “I wouldn’t want to do that, Mr. Darrigan. But I don’t quite understand why you’re here.”
“You could call me a sort of investigator. My actual title is Chief Adjuster for Guardsman Life and Casualty. I sincerely hope that we’ll find a reasonable explanation for your
husband’s disappearance. He disappeared Thursday, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t come home Thursday night. I reported it to the police early Friday morning. And this is—”
“Tuesday.”
He opened his notebook, took his time looking over the pages. It was a device, to give him a chance to gauge the degree of tension. She sat quite still, her hands resting in her lap,
unmoving.
He leaned back. “It may sound presumptuous, Mrs. Davisson, but I intend to see if I can find out what happened to your husband. I’ve had reasonable success in such cases in the past.
I’ll cooperate with the local police officials, of course. I hope you won’t mind answering questions that may duplicate what the police have already asked you.”
“I won’t mind. The important thing is . . . to find out. This not knowing . . .” Her voice caught a bit. She looked down at her hands.
“According to our records, Mrs. Davisson, his first wife, Anna Thorn Davisson, was principal beneficiary under his policies until her death in 1978. The death of the beneficiary was
reported, but it was not necessary to change the policies at that time as the two children of his first marriage were secondary beneficiaries, sharing equally in the proceeds in case of death. In
1979, probably at the time of his marriage to you, we received instructions to make you the primary beneficiary under all policies, with the secondary beneficiaries, Temple C. Davisson, Junior, and
Alicia Jean Davisson, unchanged. I have your name here as Dinah Pell Davisson. That is correct?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Could you tell me about your husband? What sort of man is he?”
She gave him a small smile. “What should I say? He is a very kind man. Perhaps slightly autocratic, but kind. He owned a small knitting mill in Utica, New York. He sold it, I believe, in
1972. It was incorporated and he owned the controlling stock interest, and there was some sort of merger with a larger firm, where he received payment in the stock in the larger firm in return for
his interest. He sold out because his wife had to live in a warmer climate. She had a serious kidney condition. They came down here to Clearwater and bought this house. Temple was too active to
retire. He studied real estate conditions here for a full year and then began to invest money in all sorts of property. He has done very well.”
“How did you meet him, Mrs. Davisson?”
“My husband was a sergeant in the Air Force. He was stationed at Drew Field. I followed him here. When he was sent overseas I had no special place to go, and we agreed I should wait for
him here. The Davissons advertised for a companion for Mrs. Davisson. I applied and held the job from early 1974 until she died in 1978.”
“And your husband?”
“He was killed in a crash landing. When I recieved the wire, the Davissons were very kind and undemanding. At that time my position in the household was more like a daughter receiving an
allowance. My own parents died long ago. I have a married sister in Melbourne, Australia. We’ve never been close.”
“What did you do between the time Mrs. Davisson died and you married Temple Davisson?”
“I left here, of course. Mrs. Davisson had money of her own. She left me five thousand dollars and left the rest to Temple, Junior, and Alicia. Mr. Davisson found me a job in a real estate
office in Clearwater. I rented a small apartment. One night Mr. Davisson came to see me at the apartment. He was quite shy. It took him a long time to get to the reason he had come. He told me that
he had tried to keep the house going, but the people he had hired were undependable. He also said that he was lonely. He asked me to marry him. I told him that I had affection for him, as for a
father. He told me that he did not love me that way either, that Anna had been the only woman in his life. Well, Jack had been the only man in my life, and life was pretty empty. The Davissons had
filled a place in my life. I missed this house. But he is sixty-one, and that makes almost exactly thirty years’ difference in ages. It seemed a bit grotesque. He told me to think it over and
give him my answer when I was ready. It occurred to me that his children would resent me, and it also occurred to me that I cared very little what people thought. Four days later I told him I would
marry him.”
Darrigan realized that he was treading on most dangerous ground. “Has it been a good marriage?”
“Is that a question you’re supposed to ask?”
“It sounds impertinent. I know that. But in a disappearance of this sort I must consider suicide. Unhappiness can come from ill health, money difficulties, or emotional difficulties. I
should try to rule them out.”
“I’ll take one of those cigarettes now, Mr. Darrigan,” she said. “I can use it.”
He lit it for her, went back to the desk chair. She frowned, exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“It has not been a completely happy marriage, Mr. Darrigan.”
“Can you explain that?”
“I’d rather not.” He pursed his lips, let the silence grow. At last she said, “I suppose I can consider an insurance man to be as ethical as a doctor or a
lawyer?”
“Of course.”
“For several months it was a marriage in name only. I was content to have it go on being that way. But he is a vigorous man, and after a while I became aware that his attitude had changed
and he had begun to . . . want me.” She flushed.
“But you had no feeling for him in that way,” he said, helping her.
“None. And we’d made no actual agreement, in so many words. But living here with him, I had no ethical basis for refusing him. After that, our marriage became different. He sensed,
of course, that I was merely submitting. He began to . . . court me, I suppose you’d call it. Flowers and little things like that. He took off weight and began to dress much more youthfully.
He tried to make himself younger, in his speech and in his habits. It was sort of pathetic, the way he tried.”
“Would you relate that to . . . his disappearance?”
For a moment her face was twisted in the agony of self-reproach. “I don’t know.”
“I appreciate your frankness. I’ll respect it, Mrs. Davisson. How did he act Thursday?”
“The same as always. We had a late breakfast. He had just sold some lots in the Lido section at Sarasota, and he was thinking of putting the money into a Gulf-front tract at Redington
Beach. He asked me to go down there with him, but I had an eleven o’clock appointment with the hairdresser. His car was in the garage, so he took my convertible. He said he’d have lunch
down that way and be back in the late afternoon. We were going to have some people in for cocktails. Well, the cocktail guests came and Temple didn’t show up. I didn’t worry. I thought
he was delayed. We all went out to dinner and I left a note telling him that he could catch up with us at the Belmonte, on Clearwater Beach.
“After dinner the Deens brought me home. They live down on the next street. I began to get worried at ten o’clock. I thought of heart attacks and all sorts of things like that. Of
accidents and so on. I phoned Morton Plant Hospital and asked if they knew anything. I phoned the police here and at Redington and at St. Petersburg. I fell asleep in a chair at about four
o’clock and woke up at seven. That was when I officially reported him missing.
“They found my car parked outside a hotel apartment on Redington Beach, called Aqua Azul. They checked and found out he’d gone into the Aqua Azul cocktail lounge at eight-thirty,
alone. He had one dry martini and phoned here, but of course I had left by that time and the house was empty. He had another drink and then left. But apparently he didn’t get in the car and
drive away. That’s what I don’t understand. And I keep thinking that the Aqua Azul is right on the Gulf.”
“Have his children come down?”
“Temple, Junior, wired that he is coming. He’s a lieutenant colonel of ordnance stationed at the Pentagon.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-six, and Alicia is thirty-three. Temple, Junior, is married, but Alicia isn’t. She’s with a Boston advertising agency, and when I tried to phone her I found out
she’s on vacation, taking a motor trip in Canada. She may not even know about it.”
“When is the son arriving?”
“Late today, the wire said.”
“Were they at the wedding?”
“No, but I know them, of course. I met them before Mrs. Davisson died, many times. And only once since my marriage. There was quite a scene then. They think I’m some sort of dirty
little opportunist. When they were down while Mrs. Davisson was alive, they had me firmly established in the servant category. I suppose they were right, but one never thinks of oneself as a
servant. I’m afraid Colonel Davisson is going to be difficult.”
“Do you think your husband might have had business worries?”
“None. He told me a few months ago, quite proudly, that when he liquidated the knitting-company stock he received five hundred thousand dollars. In 1973 he started to buy land in this
area. He said that the land he now owns could be sold off for an estimated million and a half dollars.”
“Did he maintain an office?”
“This is his office. Mr. Darrigan, you used the past tense then. I find it disturbing.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional.” Yet it had been. He had wanted to see how easily she would slip into the past tense, showing that in her mind she considered him
dead.
“Do you know the terms of his current will?”
“He discussed it with me a year ago. It sets up trust funds, one for me and one for each of the children. He insisted that it be set up so that we share equally. And yet, if I get all that
insurance, it isn’t going to seem very equal, is it? I’m sorry for snapping at you about using the past tense, Mr. Darrigan. I think he’s dead.”
“Why?”
“I know that amnesia is a very rare thing, genuine amnesia. And Temple had a very sound, stable mind. As I said before, he is kind. He wouldn’t go away and leave me to this kind of
worry.”
“The newspaper picture was poor. Do you have a better one?”
“Quite a good one taken in July. Don’t get up. I can get it. It’s right in this desk drawer.”
She sat lithely on her heels and opened the bottom desk drawer. Her perfume had a pleasant tang. Where her hair was parted he could see the ivory cleanness of her scalp. An attractive woman,
with a quality of personal warmth held in reserve. Darrigan decided that the
For millions of readers John D. MacDonald is the consummate storyteller of our time, a writer who, with his energetic prose, his sense of character, his skill in
describing every sort of person, setting and event with economy and credibility, makes us keep turning the pages of his novels and his short stories. The thirteen stories in this collection
demonstrate how good his best work was at the very 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 many months. It was during this time that he discovered the great
joy of reading, and went through huge quantities of books. After he was well again, he continued his voracious reading, trying to work his way through the public library, shelf by shelf.
After graduating from the Utica Free Academy in 1933, MacDonald entered the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to Syracuse University where he earned a
Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration in January of 1938. He married Dorothy Prentiss, also a Syracuse graduate, that same year. He received his Master’s Degree in Business
Administration from Harvard in June of 1939. After an assortment of jobs which he did not care for, he accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the U.S. Army Reserve and was assigned to active
duty at the Rochester Ordnance District in Rochester, New York, in June of 1940. In June of 1943 he was reassigned to China-Burma-India Theater Headquarters in New Delhi. Later he was recruited
overseas by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, and was appointed commander of the Branch Establishment of Detachment 404 in Colombo, Ceylon.
Because outgoing mail was heavily censored he found it difficult to find enough to write about in the letters he sent Dorothy. And so in one instance, instead of sending her a letter, he wrote a
short story and sent it to her. She liked it, typed it in proper format and sent it to the prestigious magazine of short fiction edited by Whit and Hallie Burnett and called Story Magazine.
It appeared in the July–August 1946 issue. They paid $25 for it. “I really can’t describe what it was like,” MacDonald said recently, “when I found out my words had
actually sold. . . . I felt as if I were an imposter . . . as if I were trying to be something I wasn’t. And then I thought that maybe I could actually be a writer.”
At the end of the war, after his separation promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, MacDonald was entitled to four months of terminal leave with pay. He spent that time at the typewriter, working
harder than ever before in his life, putting in eighty hours a week. In those four months he wrote 800,000 words of short stories and kept a couple of dozen of them in the mail at all times.
Finally he had learned enough by doing the equivalent of ten novels so that his work began to sell to the pulp magazines such as Detective Tales, Dime Detective, Black Mask, Doc Savage and
The Shadow as well as to such smooth-paper magazines as Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Liberty. By the end of 1946 he had earned about $6,000, enough to support himself and Dorothy
and their seven-year-old son in modest style. He sold hundreds of pulp magazine stories and dozens of slick magazine stories in the years 1947 through 1952.
During these years he honed his storytelling skills in the action-adventure-detection pulps as Hammett and Chandler and Gardner and Woolrich had done before him. The variety of stories in length
and in content is astonishing. There were 2 Westerns, at least 21 sports stories, and well over 40 ventures into science fiction, 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.
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 “Murder in Mind” to biter-bit yarns like “Death Writes the Answer” to psychological suspense tales like
“Miranda” to thrillers like “Noose 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’s spent the war. But magazine editor Babette Rosmond persuaded him to 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 war-haunted 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 readers alike to take notice of a new book-publishing medium they might otherwise have overlooked. In truth he published so many
novels in paperback, the fact that he also published hard-cover novels in 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1958, 1959 (two), 1960, 1962 and 1965—several of them both critical and commercial
successes—is often overlooked.
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 pick out the themes, you see what the composer is doing with
those themes, and then, just when you think you have him properly analyzed, and his methods identified, 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 Gowam, 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 Carnera 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.
In 1946 I tried to keep at least thirty stories in the mail at all times. When I finished a story, I would make a list of the magazines which might be interested and then send it out again and
again until either it was sold or the list was exhausted. There were lots of magazines then. There was an open market for short fiction. There were lots of readers. Bless them!
Assembling this collection was like walking into a room and finding there a lot of old and good friends you had thought dead. The stories are better than I expected them to be, and so in taking
the occupational risk of having them published, I hope you will enjoy them as much as they were enjoyed the first time around.
John D. MacDonald
Piseco, New York
June 20, 1982
Long ago he had given up trying to estimate what he would find in any house merely by looking at the outside of it. The interior of each house had a special flavor. It was not
so much the result of the degree of tidiness, or lack of it, but rather the result of the emotional climate that had permeated the house. Anger, bitterness, despair—all left their subtle
stains on even the most immaculate fabrics.
Darrigan parked the rented car by the curb and, for a long moment, looked at the house, at the iron fence, at the cypress shade. He sensed dignity, restraint, quietness. Yet he knew that the
interior could destroy these impressions. He was in the habit of telling himself that his record of successful investigations was the result of the application of unemotional logic—yet his
logic was often the result of sensing, somehow, the final answer and then retracing the careful steps to arrive once more at that same answer.
After a time, as the September sun of west-coast Florida began to turn the rented sedan into an oven, Darrigan pushed open the door, patted his pocket to be sure his notebook was in place, and
walked toward the front door of the white house. There were two cars in the driveway, both of them with local licenses, both of them Cadillacs. It was perceptibly cooler under the trees that lined
the walk.
Beyond the screen door the hallway was dim. A heavy woman came in answer to his second ring, staring at him with frank curiosity.
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Davisson, please. Here’s my card.”
The woman opened the screen just enough for the card to be passed through, saying, with Midwest nasality, “Well, she’s resting right now. . . . Oh, you’re from the
insurance?”
“Yes, I flew down from Hartford.”
“Please come in and wait and I’ll see if she’s awake, Mr Darrigan. I’m just a neighbor. I’m Mrs. Hoke. The poor dear has been so terribly upset.”
“Yes, of course,” Darrigan murmured, stepping into the hall. Mrs. Hoke walked heavily away. Darrigan could hear the mumble of other voices, a faint, slightly incongruous laugh. From
the hall he could see into a living room, two steps lower than the hall itself. It was furnished in cool colors, with Florida furniture of cane and pale fabrics.
Mrs. Hoke came back and said reassuringly, “She was awake, Mr. Darrigan. She said you should wait in the study and she’ll be out in a few minutes. The door is right back here. This
is such a dreadful thing, not knowing what has happened to him. It’s hard on her, the poor dear thing.”
The study was not done in Florida fashion. Darrigan guessed that the furniture had been shipped down from the North. A walnut desk, a bit ornate, leather couch and chairs, two walls of
books.
Mrs. Hoke stood in the doorway. “Now don’t you upset her, you hear?” she said with elephantine coyness.
“I’ll try not to.”
Mrs. Hoke went away. This was Davisson’s room, obviously. His books. A great number of technical works on the textile industry. Popularized texts for the layman in other fields. Astronomy,
philosophy, physics. Quite a few biographies. Very little fiction. A man, then, with a serious turn of mind, dedicated to self-improvement, perhaps a bit humorless. And certainly very tidy.
Darrigan turned quickly as he heard the step in the hallway. She was a tall young woman, light on her feet. Her sunback dress was emerald green. Late twenties, he judged, or possibly very early
thirties. Brown hair, sun-bleached on top. Quite a bit of tan. A fresh face, wide across the cheek-bones, heavy-lipped, slightly Bergman in impact. The mouth faintly touched with strain.
“Mr. Darrigan?” He liked the voice. Low, controlled, poised.
“How do you do, Mrs. Davisson. Sorry to bother you like this.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t able to sleep. Won’t you sit down, please?”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll sit at the desk, Mrs. Davisson. I’ll have to make some notes.”
She sat on the leather couch. He offered her a cigarette. “No, thank you, I’ve been smoking so much I have a sore throat. Mr. Darrigan, isn’t this a bit . . . previous for the
insurance company to send someone down here? I mean, as far as we know, he isn’t—”
“We wouldn’t do this in the case of a normal policyholder, Mrs. Davisson, but your husband carries policies with us totaling over nine hundred thousand dollars.”
“Really! I knew Temple had quite a bit, but I didn’t know it was that much!”
He showed her his best smile and said, “It makes it awkward for me, Mrs. Davisson, for them to send me out like some sort of bird of prey. You have presented no claim to the company, and
you are perfectly within your rights to tell me to be on my merry way.”
She answered his smile. “I wouldn’t want to do that, Mr. Darrigan. But I don’t quite understand why you’re here.”
“You could call me a sort of investigator. My actual title is Chief Adjuster for Guardsman Life and Casualty. I sincerely hope that we’ll find a reasonable explanation for your
husband’s disappearance. He disappeared Thursday, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t come home Thursday night. I reported it to the police early Friday morning. And this is—”
“Tuesday.”
He opened his notebook, took his time looking over the pages. It was a device, to give him a chance to gauge the degree of tension. She sat quite still, her hands resting in her lap,
unmoving.
He leaned back. “It may sound presumptuous, Mrs. Davisson, but I intend to see if I can find out what happened to your husband. I’ve had reasonable success in such cases in the past.
I’ll cooperate with the local police officials, of course. I hope you won’t mind answering questions that may duplicate what the police have already asked you.”
“I won’t mind. The important thing is . . . to find out. This not knowing . . .” Her voice caught a bit. She looked down at her hands.
“According to our records, Mrs. Davisson, his first wife, Anna Thorn Davisson, was principal beneficiary under his policies until her death in 1978. The death of the beneficiary was
reported, but it was not necessary to change the policies at that time as the two children of his first marriage were secondary beneficiaries, sharing equally in the proceeds in case of death. In
1979, probably at the time of his marriage to you, we received instructions to make you the primary beneficiary under all policies, with the secondary beneficiaries, Temple C. Davisson, Junior, and
Alicia Jean Davisson, unchanged. I have your name here as Dinah Pell Davisson. That is correct?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Could you tell me about your husband? What sort of man is he?”
She gave him a small smile. “What should I say? He is a very kind man. Perhaps slightly autocratic, but kind. He owned a small knitting mill in Utica, New York. He sold it, I believe, in
1972. It was incorporated and he owned the controlling stock interest, and there was some sort of merger with a larger firm, where he received payment in the stock in the larger firm in return for
his interest. He sold out because his wife had to live in a warmer climate. She had a serious kidney condition. They came down here to Clearwater and bought this house. Temple was too active to
retire. He studied real estate conditions here for a full year and then began to invest money in all sorts of property. He has done very well.”
“How did you meet him, Mrs. Davisson?”
“My husband was a sergeant in the Air Force. He was stationed at Drew Field. I followed him here. When he was sent overseas I had no special place to go, and we agreed I should wait for
him here. The Davissons advertised for a companion for Mrs. Davisson. I applied and held the job from early 1974 until she died in 1978.”
“And your husband?”
“He was killed in a crash landing. When I recieved the wire, the Davissons were very kind and undemanding. At that time my position in the household was more like a daughter receiving an
allowance. My own parents died long ago. I have a married sister in Melbourne, Australia. We’ve never been close.”
“What did you do between the time Mrs. Davisson died and you married Temple Davisson?”
“I left here, of course. Mrs. Davisson had money of her own. She left me five thousand dollars and left the rest to Temple, Junior, and Alicia. Mr. Davisson found me a job in a real estate
office in Clearwater. I rented a small apartment. One night Mr. Davisson came to see me at the apartment. He was quite shy. It took him a long time to get to the reason he had come. He told me that
he had tried to keep the house going, but the people he had hired were undependable. He also said that he was lonely. He asked me to marry him. I told him that I had affection for him, as for a
father. He told me that he did not love me that way either, that Anna had been the only woman in his life. Well, Jack had been the only man in my life, and life was pretty empty. The Davissons had
filled a place in my life. I missed this house. But he is sixty-one, and that makes almost exactly thirty years’ difference in ages. It seemed a bit grotesque. He told me to think it over and
give him my answer when I was ready. It occurred to me that his children would resent me, and it also occurred to me that I cared very little what people thought. Four days later I told him I would
marry him.”
Darrigan realized that he was treading on most dangerous ground. “Has it been a good marriage?”
“Is that a question you’re supposed to ask?”
“It sounds impertinent. I know that. But in a disappearance of this sort I must consider suicide. Unhappiness can come from ill health, money difficulties, or emotional difficulties. I
should try to rule them out.”
“I’ll take one of those cigarettes now, Mr. Darrigan,” she said. “I can use it.”
He lit it for her, went back to the desk chair. She frowned, exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“It has not been a completely happy marriage, Mr. Darrigan.”
“Can you explain that?”
“I’d rather not.” He pursed his lips, let the silence grow. At last she said, “I suppose I can consider an insurance man to be as ethical as a doctor or a
lawyer?”
“Of course.”
“For several months it was a marriage in name only. I was content to have it go on being that way. But he is a vigorous man, and after a while I became aware that his attitude had changed
and he had begun to . . . want me.” She flushed.
“But you had no feeling for him in that way,” he said, helping her.
“None. And we’d made no actual agreement, in so many words. But living here with him, I had no ethical basis for refusing him. After that, our marriage became different. He sensed,
of course, that I was merely submitting. He began to . . . court me, I suppose you’d call it. Flowers and little things like that. He took off weight and began to dress much more youthfully.
He tried to make himself younger, in his speech and in his habits. It was sort of pathetic, the way he tried.”
“Would you relate that to . . . his disappearance?”
For a moment her face was twisted in the agony of self-reproach. “I don’t know.”
“I appreciate your frankness. I’ll respect it, Mrs. Davisson. How did he act Thursday?”
“The same as always. We had a late breakfast. He had just sold some lots in the Lido section at Sarasota, and he was thinking of putting the money into a Gulf-front tract at Redington
Beach. He asked me to go down there with him, but I had an eleven o’clock appointment with the hairdresser. His car was in the garage, so he took my convertible. He said he’d have lunch
down that way and be back in the late afternoon. We were going to have some people in for cocktails. Well, the cocktail guests came and Temple didn’t show up. I didn’t worry. I thought
he was delayed. We all went out to dinner and I left a note telling him that he could catch up with us at the Belmonte, on Clearwater Beach.
“After dinner the Deens brought me home. They live down on the next street. I began to get worried at ten o’clock. I thought of heart attacks and all sorts of things like that. Of
accidents and so on. I phoned Morton Plant Hospital and asked if they knew anything. I phoned the police here and at Redington and at St. Petersburg. I fell asleep in a chair at about four
o’clock and woke up at seven. That was when I officially reported him missing.
“They found my car parked outside a hotel apartment on Redington Beach, called Aqua Azul. They checked and found out he’d gone into the Aqua Azul cocktail lounge at eight-thirty,
alone. He had one dry martini and phoned here, but of course I had left by that time and the house was empty. He had another drink and then left. But apparently he didn’t get in the car and
drive away. That’s what I don’t understand. And I keep thinking that the Aqua Azul is right on the Gulf.”
“Have his children come down?”
“Temple, Junior, wired that he is coming. He’s a lieutenant colonel of ordnance stationed at the Pentagon.”
“How old is he?”
“Thirty-six, and Alicia is thirty-three. Temple, Junior, is married, but Alicia isn’t. She’s with a Boston advertising agency, and when I tried to phone her I found out
she’s on vacation, taking a motor trip in Canada. She may not even know about it.”
“When is the son arriving?”
“Late today, the wire said.”
“Were they at the wedding?”
“No, but I know them, of course. I met them before Mrs. Davisson died, many times. And only once since my marriage. There was quite a scene then. They think I’m some sort of dirty
little opportunist. When they were down while Mrs. Davisson was alive, they had me firmly established in the servant category. I suppose they were right, but one never thinks of oneself as a
servant. I’m afraid Colonel Davisson is going to be difficult.”
“Do you think your husband might have had business worries?”
“None. He told me a few months ago, quite proudly, that when he liquidated the knitting-company stock he received five hundred thousand dollars. In 1973 he started to buy land in this
area. He said that the land he now owns could be sold off for an estimated million and a half dollars.”
“Did he maintain an office?”
“This is his office. Mr. Darrigan, you used the past tense then. I find it disturbing.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t intentional.” Yet it had been. He had wanted to see how easily she would slip into the past tense, showing that in her mind she considered him
dead.
“Do you know the terms of his current will?”
“He discussed it with me a year ago. It sets up trust funds, one for me and one for each of the children. He insisted that it be set up so that we share equally. And yet, if I get all that
insurance, it isn’t going to seem very equal, is it? I’m sorry for snapping at you about using the past tense, Mr. Darrigan. I think he’s dead.”
“Why?”
“I know that amnesia is a very rare thing, genuine amnesia. And Temple had a very sound, stable mind. As I said before, he is kind. He wouldn’t go away and leave me to this kind of
worry.”
“The newspaper picture was poor. Do you have a better one?”
“Quite a good one taken in July. Don’t get up. I can get it. It’s right in this desk drawer.”
She sat lithely on her heels and opened the bottom desk drawer. Her perfume had a pleasant tang. Where her hair was parted he could see the ivory cleanness of her scalp. An attractive woman,
with a quality of personal warmth held in reserve. Darrigan decided that the
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