Praise for John D. MacDonald
“My favorite novelist of all time.”
—Dean Koontz
“For my money, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction—not crime fiction; fiction, period—and millions of readers surely agree.”
—The Washington Post
“MacDonald isn’t simply popular; he’s also good.”
—Roger Ebert
“MacDonald’s books are narcotic and, once hooked, a reader can’t kick the habit until the supply runs out.”
—Chicago Tribune Book World
“Travis McGee is one of the most enduring and unusual heroes in detective fiction.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Remains one of my idols.”
—Donald Westlake
“A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”
—Sue Grafton
“The Dickens of mid-century America—popular, prolific and … conscience-ridden about his environment … a thoroughly American author.”
—The Boston Globe
“It will be for his crisply written, smoothly plotted mysteries that MacDonald will be remembered.”
—USA Today
“MacDonald had the marvelous ability to create attention-getting characters who doubled as social critics. In MacDonald novels, it is the rule rather than the exception to find, in the midst of violence and mayhem, a sentence, a paragraph, or several pages of rumination on love, morality, religion, architecture, politics, business, the general state of the world or of Florida.”
—Sarasota Herald-Tribune
BY JOHN D. MACDONALD
The Brass Cupcake
Murder for the Bride
Judge Me Not
Wine for the Dreamers
Ballroom of the Skies
The Damned
Dead Low Tide
The Neon Jungle
Cancel All Our Vows
All These Condemned
Area of Suspicion
Contrary Pleasure
A Bullet for Cinderella
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
You Live Once
April Evil
Border Town Girl
Murder in the Wind
Death Trap
The Price of Murder
The Empty Trap
A Man of Affairs
The Deceivers
Clemmie
Cape Fear (The Executioners)
Soft Touch
Deadly Welcome
Please Write for Details
The Crossroads
The Beach Girls
Slam the Big Door
The End of the Night
The Only Girl in the Game
Where Is Janice Gantry?
One Monday We Killed Them All
A Key to the Suite
A Flash of Green
The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything
On the Run
The Drowner
The House Guest
End of the Tiger and Other Stories
The Last One Left
S*E*V*E*N
Condominium
Other Times, Other Worlds
Nothing Can Go Wrong
The Good Old Stuff
One More Sunday
More Good Old Stuff
Barrier Island
A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974
The Travis McGee Series
The Deep Blue Good-by
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
The Quick Red Fox
A Deadly Shade of Gold
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Darker Than Amber
One Fearful Yellow Eye
Pale Gray for Guilt
The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
Dress Her in Indigo
The Long Lavender Look
A Tan and Sandy Silence
The Scarlet Ruse
The Turquoise Lament
The Dreadful Lemon Sky
The Empty Copper Sea
The Green Ripper
Free Fall in Crimson
Cinnamon Skin
The Lonely Silver Rain
The Official Travis McGee Quizbook
2013 Random House eBook Edition
Copyright © 1965 by John D. MacDonald
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1965.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82703-6
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
v3.1
The Singular John D. MacDonald
Dean Koontz
When I was in college, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.
Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.
Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.
I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.
Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.
Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced cha
racters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.
Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more. Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.
In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of Strangers to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that, as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.
In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.
Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
About the Author
• • FOREWORD • •
This is not a luvums-duvums-itsyboo book, about pooty-tats.
I keep forgetting who said what, and am generally too impatient to trace it down. Someone said: Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
It would be a strange injustice to the breed to write a sentimental book about Roger and Geoffrey. House cats are implacable realists. Their affections are as honest as their lust for the hunt. Their vanity is not diluted by any lack of confidence. Their codes of behavior are based upon an essential dignity which, in careful proportion, demands and awards respect.
Portions of this book may strike the pretty-kitty set as being unnecessarily unpleasant. Without apology I say that life for any mammal from mouse to man is a precarious and bloody gamble wherein, despite the most astute management of resources and shrewdness of play, the house percentage will eventually win.
I am beginning this account in the spring of 1964. Roger the Lodger, sometimes known as Gladys, is downstairs drowsing on the corner of the sill of the picture window overlooking a blue mile of Little Sarasota Bay. Should he survive until September of this year, he will be nineteen years old. His half brother, Geoffrey, died during the summer of 1960, a few months past his fourteenth birthday.
Dorothy and I, in talking over the episodes and impressions which make up this book, are aware of our tendency to anthropomorphize these house-guest beasts, to attribute to them awareness and responses beyond their capacities. In so doing, we have perhaps made too generous interpretations of observed behavior. Such generosity is inevitably a product of affection. As is so true of children, the cherished cat is inevitably exceptional.
Though it is considered bad artistic judgment to state bluntly the theme of any book, and quite possibly pretentious to infer that a pet book can have such a weighty increment, I herewith state my pot of message: When any higher order of animal is given security, attention, affection, and treated in a consistent and predictable manner, that animal will respond with a continuing revelation of those factors of intelligence and personality which differentiate it from the norm of the breed. This is especially true of both cats and people. The barn cat, in the hard bargain of shelter in return for mousing, withdraws to that standardized catness which the uninitiated think typical of all cats regardless of vocation. Were a Martian to observe us only in throngs, during our surly passages to and from work, he might think us a sorry and unrewarding species indeed and generalize about us in an unflattering way.
Though the house cats will respond to a trusted environment in astonishing ways, their reactions will be related to varying quotients of intelligence and personality, even as you and I. If Roger seems to take over more than his share of the episodic account, it is not because he was the first acquired and has survived longest, nor is it because his intelligence is greater than was Geoffrey’s, but rather because his personality—clown, neurotic, reckless hero, inept hunter, nag, hypochondriac, experimenter—shows more deviation from the anticipated norm than did Geoffrey’s.
Another aspect is worth comment. With half of the world’s billions on such short rations that a few hundred calories can make the difference between survival and disaster, there is an effete and trivial overtone to the pet-keeping habit. Yet I cannot help but sense herein some supra-historical instinct more constant than the contemporary economics of starvation. We and our domesticated animals have shared hundreds of thousands of years of a precarious mutual existence on this whirling mudball, have tested the scents borne on ancient winds, died in the same rude tempests, bled the same color, feared the same darkness, protected our young with the same desperate instinct. We have shared this journey, and now in a world where we are busily interposing more layers of plastic, paper, transistors, and asphalt between ourselves and reality, where we are poisoning the air, the earth, and the waters in our hot wars against insects and our cold wars against each other, it is a needful reminder to have, close at hand, that striped, furry camouflage, that functional honesty of fang and talon, the sleekness of the muscles of the hunt. In its best form the relationship is ceremonial-symbiotic, composed of grave courtesies and considerations, a sharing rather than an ownership structure. In its worst form, wherein the dignity of both species is degraded, it is suffocatingly pooty-tat.
I can not properly dedicate this book to the two cats. In 1960 Simon and Schuster published a suspense novel of mine entitled The End of the Night. As a result of a momentary attack of the quaints, the dedication reads, “To Roger and Geoffrey, who left their marks on the manuscript.”
In an abashed penance, I dedicate this book to all those doctors of veterinary medicine who, despite all the cutenesses of the pooty-tat trade, have retained a respect, liking, and consideration for animals on their own primitive terms. In these affluent days of the teeny cashmere sweaters, tiny electric blankets, pedicures, exotic diets, and dear little kitty-coffins, such gentlemen are becoming ever more rare. The ones mentioned in this account are included in this dedication.
Sarasota, Florida
April 2, 1964
• • ONE • •
I grew up with a smooth-haired fox terrier named Prince. He was acq
uired before I started school and was still living when I went off to college. When I was little, he was very much the country dog. We lived in Sharon, Pennsylvania. We had a summer cottage on the Pymatuning River in Orangeville, Ohio.
Much to my mother’s indignation and despair, Prince buddied up with a jovial pack of farm dogs and would run off with them on a periodic debauch, which involved hurrying down to a country slaughterhouse and rolling in some pungent horror, and coming home wearing a bashful and guilty smirk. The invariable procedure was to put on gloves, take him out along the boathouse dock, and eject him into the river. After this was repeated three or four times, the stench was diminished to the point where he could be washed. He came to expect this as the inevitable end result of fragrant holiday and as a price which, though he made a great show of reluctance, he was willing to pay. It was a canine variation of a night in the drunk tank. When he was at last clean, his morale was excellent.
My maternal grandfather was an avid hunter of the Ohio woodchuck, and Prince became of such value in this patient sport my grandfather bragged about him to anyone who would listen.
When my father went with another company, we moved to Utica, New York, and Prince made the transition from country dog to city dog. We lived on Beverly Place in Utica, and across the street lived a rugged Airedale named Mike. He belonged to the Robinson Family. My kid sister, Doris, later married Bill Robinson. It became Mike’s mission to kill the overconfident fox terrier across the street. Their brawls were loud, bloody, and in deadly earnest. Prince was outclassed. We managed to separate them in time, every time.
My grandfather developed an effective system. There was an old turret-top refrigerator in the back hallway at that time. He kept a supply of very loud flash crackers and kitchen matches atop the refrigerator. At the first sounds of combat he would run out, light a firecracker, and toss it into the snarling turmoil. The bang would send both dogs screaming in opposite directions. In time truce was established, and thereafter they ignored each other, with the infrequent exception of a mild sneer at long range.