Sat 11 Dec 2021
Reviewed by Tony Baer: JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything. Gold Medal #s1259, paperback original, 1962. Reprinted many times.
Kirby’s a clumsy doofus. Handsome. Winsome. But a doofus.
Kirby’s got a rich uncle. Super-duper rich. And Kirby has a cushy job from his uncle going around giving oodles and oodles of money, anonymously, to charitable causes.
Then his uncle dies, leaving him nothing, though Kirby was the sole surviving heir.
Nothing, that is, except a gold pocket watch.
In fact, the estate has nearly nothing — even though his uncle seemed to have millions and millions of buckaroos. What happened to the freaking money?
Turns out that Kirby’s uncle got rich by screwing the Mafia and other nogoodnicks by sneaky and conniving means — means of which were so top-secret as to never having been divulged to anyone — much less poor Kirby.
A couple of supervillains of the Boris and Natasha type try to kidnap Kirby to tell them his uncle’s business secrets and where hides the boodle.
Kirby doesn’t know. They can’t figure out if he’s really an imbecile or if he’s just a great actor.
Then one day Kirby is sleeping at a friend’s house, hiding from Boris and Natasha. A luscious, ravishing, blond bimbo leaps naked into his bed in the middle of the night, screwing his brains out, believing in the dark that Kirby is the guy Kirby is house-sitting for.
At first, she’s mad — but she forgives Kirby and they fall deeply in love, discovering meanwhile that the secret to his uncle’s success was the pocket watch!
Turns out, if you wiggle the watch just right, it freezes time!
Of course, freezing time wouldn’t do much good if it froze for everyone. But the bearer is immune from the time freeze.
So while time is frozen, you can engage in whatever high-jinks you like for up to an hour at a time: taking money from tills, changing the trajectory of bullets, sinking subs, altering evidence.
It’s all quite fun and silly. And nobody loses an eye.
Made into an even sillier made-for-TV movie starring Robert Hays (of “Airplane!†fame) in 1980.
December 11th, 2021 at 3:38 pm
I’m currently reading MacDonald’s Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. After three rather tedious chapters of backstory, it has finally got going. I think he had trouble writing full length novels.
December 11th, 2021 at 3:44 pm
David, them’s fightin’ words! I’d recommend starting with John d’s standalones, especially anything seconded by Ed Gorman: https://mysteryscenemag.com/blog-article/3389-my-10-favorite-john-d-macdonald-standalone-novels. Soft touch is terrific.
December 11th, 2021 at 3:57 pm
Early on in his career JDM tried his hand at almost everything, including sports stories and science fiction. He made a small name for himself in the latter, but he wisely (in my opinion) decided to abandon the latter and concentrate on crime fiction. I read GGWE when it first came out, but I don’t remember it all that well, so I can’t tell you how well he did with comic farce.
As for BROWN WRAPPER, I recall it as being one of the better Travis McGee’s, but again it was a long time ago. It may be that by the time he made it to number nine in the series, JDM was already starting to coast, having already carved the formula into stone.
December 11th, 2021 at 4:25 pm
Steve, you’re right on with calling it a comic farce. It’s so light it could blow away. But there’s a cool concept at its heart, and John d. has a breeziness of style that always makes me feel a bit more optimistic about life. Bad stuff happens, but his representation of mid century American culture is so palpable it makes me nostalgic for a time I never lived thru.
December 11th, 2021 at 9:11 pm
This is far from JDM’s only comic caper. PLEASE WRITE FOR DETAILS may be more grounded, but it is equally comical, and keep in mind much of JDM’s short fiction appeared in major Women’s mags like COSMOPOLITAN, and some of it was lighter than the work we associate with him.
I loved this one as a sort of Thorne Smith as a Gold Medal novel mix. It doesn’t work 100%, but it is at worst in the high 80’s and at best in the 90’s.
It’s all opinion of course, but ironic to hear someone considered the best of the Gold Medal writers and a man considered one of the best novelists in or out of the genre to struggle at novel length.
Not piling on, how you feel about a book is how you feel.
MacDonald is often rightfully compared to John O’Hara. Part of that is a similar structure he uses to O’Hara, but also because he nails a social milieu and time so accurately his books could be used as research into the morals, mores, and customs of his time.
He creates an accurate and recognizable portrait of a world many of us grew up in, matured in, lived in. I hear his women are unrealistic and yet I knew dozens of women of the good and bad types in his novels growing up. I still do, including the good, bad, and bad to be good types.
Granted he wrote about crime, about juvenile delinquency, about the shady side of big business, about adultery, murder, loss, the healing and the destructive side of sex, mortality, the art of the con (from three card monte to the big business kind), and small-town politics from crooked sheriffs to land developers.
He could ring suspense from a multi car pile-up on a freeway, a brewing hurricane, the operation of a casino, or a correspondence school swindle. His protagonists were men of their time, shaped by the War, growing up in the Depression coming of age in the Atomic world. If they were sexist, it’s because that is who the men of that time were. Some were good, some bad, some good despite themselves, and some bad even though they never set out to be villains.
But I still think he is important. I think he has more to offer to modern readers than many of his contemporaries precisely because he presented his characters warts and all.
What people forget reading JDM is that neither he nor McGee himself (or his other protagonists) and certainly not Meyer fully approve of McGee. McGee may be the most self-deprecating self-aware hero in the genre, he knows he’s not a very nice man. His attitudes and philosophy shape him, but he doesn’t pretend anyone should share them. Like Chandler has Marlowe say he knows his manners are poor and it keeps him up at night.
Somewhere it seems a lot of people lost the ability to read about people who aren’t perfect, who might challenge them, who might not be perfect in their thoughts and manners but could still be useful in a tight spot, the kind of people who mostly populate this particular genre, absolute bastards like Sam Spade, transactional heroes like Nick Charles, wise mouthed alcoholic philosophers like Marlowe, useful brutes like Mike Hammer, charming swashbucklers who would be sociopaths in the real world like the Saint, drunken reporters, spinsters, vain Belgians, obnoxious geniuses, nosy priests, snide dilatants, crooked private eyes, likable rogues, and dumb cops.
That used to be a given in fiction certainly mystery fiction. It was about people who might not be perfect, but in the right place at the right time could be useful.
December 12th, 2021 at 6:04 am
I’m well into Brown Wrapper now – just 75 pages to go – and the flimflam has continued all the way through. So much padding. McGee is supposed to be a ‘people’s philosopher’ type, but his views, and he has views on just about everything under the sun, haven’t stood the test of time very well. Just get on with it, John D!
December 12th, 2021 at 8:48 pm
That is some poise in reviewin’ (#5). Whew.