Fri 28 Aug 2015
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: JOHN D. MacDONALD – You Live Once.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[12] Comments
JOHN D. MacDONALD – You Live Once. Popular Library #737, paperback original, March 1956; reprinted as You Kill Me, G507, 1961. Reprinted several times in paperback under its original title by Gold Medal, including d1761, 1966.
I read a lot of John D. MacDonald when I was twenty, and I always meant to get back that way someday. Well here I am. You Live Once is a tight, fast-paced and deftly-plotted thing, maybe no great shakes as a mystery, but it will keep you turning the pages right from the start.
Ah yes, the start: That’s when Clinton Sewell, a mid-level cog in the local branch of a giant manufacturing corporation (we used to have them here) is awakened by police who want to know what happened to the missing young lady he was last seen with last night—a local heiress named Mary Olen, known (according to the back cover) for her “easy-loving†ways.
Clint satisfies the cops that he doesn’t know where-the-hell she is, they leave, and minutes later he funds Mary’s body in his closet, strangled with his belt.
Now that’s how to start a story!
Clint knows he didn’t kill Mary last night, and it turns out he was only dating her as a cover for her affair with his sunuvabitch boss, but he also knows the police won’t look very far for the murderer if he calls them back, so he does what any Real Man would do in a paperback: he hides the body and tries to find out whodunit.
The next hundred pages are the usual thing, with sexy ladies and suspects looking equally guilty, a few beatings, tough cops and a too-smart private eye, all done up in the smooth style that made MacDonald a favorite over at Gold Medal a few years later. Like I say, the solution is nothing that will make you jump up and holler “Damn, that’s right!†but it’s agreeable getting there.
And I did notice a couple of things that lift this one a bit out of the ordinary: first, MacDonald paints a compelling picture of America in the mid-1950s, sharply-drawn and colorful, reflecting the fads and mores of the time without the fatuous moralizing that slowed down the Travis McGee books. And then there’s MacDonald’s women….
I liked the way he did this. When Clint Sewell / John D. MacDonald describes a woman for us, he does it like a man who loves women, appreciating their flaws and perfections in equal measure without the gaping, juvenile objectification of too many pulp-writers. It’s a mature, respectful and stylish lust, and just one of the pleasures of reading MacDonald.
August 28th, 2015 at 9:24 pm
While I didn’t think so at the time, I have to agree with your description of the Travis McGee books as being filled with “fatuous moralizing,” especially as the series went on. I’m sure it’s a big reason why I haven’t gone back and read any of them since they first came out — nor have I made much of an effort in recent years to read any that I missed at the time.
And you’re quite right in your last paragraph, Dan. The usual PI fare of the 50s and 60s really was meant for titillating the adolescent mind, which it did in fine fashion, and I should know. But MacDonald wrote about sex and lust as one adult to another.
August 28th, 2015 at 10:34 pm
Travis McGee’s habit of standing on a soapbox has been criticized by many readers and I have to admit being annoyed by many of his rants.
Concerning this novel, Steve Scott has a critical review on his blog back in 2010. You can read his extended comments by simply going to google.com and typing in THE TRAP OF SOLID GOLD: You Live Once.
August 28th, 2015 at 11:36 pm
Here’s the link. Steve Scott has mixed feelings about the book, coming down negatively on the love scenes, but finding much to admire in other passages:
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com/2010/06/you-live-once.html
August 28th, 2015 at 11:57 pm
One aspect of Americana MacDonald exceled at was the knife beneath the benign surface of the American business world. Few writers dissected middle class business ethics the way he did or with quite as clear an eye, including huge bestselling writers like Sloan Wilson, Jerome Weidman, and Cameron Hawley who wrote nothing really better or more shrewdly observed then MacDonald about the breed. Notice the setup here is not unlike Billy Wilder’s THE APARTMENT with a murder in the mix.
As for the fatuous observations in the McGee novels many of us read them for that in part. It was always MacDonald’s savage moral outrage that set him apart from other mystery and suspense writers. Complaining about McGee’s moralizing is a bit like complaining because James Bond spent too much time romancing women, it was part of what MacDonald always intended to do with the series. Without the moralizing and the sexual healing McGee is just another fantasy figure involved in a violent world. The moralizing is what sets the series apart as much as Ross Macdonald’s doomed family histories or Spillane’s fetishized violence.
Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t like it you don’t like it, but it’s at the point when MacDonald increased the tendency to moralize and the sexual healing setups that he became a bestselling author, so one mainstream audience was looking for more than a paperback thriller series, and based on sales that is what he gave them.
I don’t think he was trying to write the type of book he gets criticized for not writing in the later MacDonald books. It’s a bit like critics that complain Ian Fleming wasn’t writing serious spy novels or suspense novels when neither of those things were his intention.
I think one place where some readers are turned off by MacDonald in retrospect is that as he matured he became a more novelistic writer. It was always there, but very few of his novels are as straight forward standard suspense as this one once he began the upward climb that culminated on the bestseller lists. Many of his books don’t pay off in anything like a standard suspense thriller manner with neatly tied plot elements. His books are often as untidy as life in that way with maybe a resolution of sorts for the hero and heroine and villain, but not neatly tied ends and happily ever afters.
As for MacDonald’s women, I agree with Dan, I have been lucky enough to know the breed and he writes about them as clearly as anyone ever did. I will grant they are not ordinary or everyday, but they are as true to type as you will find in fiction.
It always amazes me to hear complaints about MacDonald’s women from readers who seemed happy to accept Spillane or Prather’s animated sex dolls without comment or who praised Robert Heinlein’s utter fantasy of women blindly worshiping men. The women in MacDonald and Fleming are much more common than the standard model lethal bitch goddess in Chandler or Hammett and there is solid evidence that MacDonald and Fleming liked women a good deal more.
August 29th, 2015 at 12:30 am
Before I came back to find your comment, David, which I found very well said, I went to Amazon.com to check on an assumption I’ve been making, to wit, that JDM is no longer popular, that Travis McGee’s moralizing was outdated and no one cares about him any more.
I was wrong. THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BYE, still in print, has a sales rank of #58,377.
NIGHTMARE IN PINK: #115,532
DARKER THAN AMBER: #373,990
PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING: #312,601
These may seem high for anyone who concentrates only on top ten lists, but I’m trying to sell some mystery paperbacks on Amazon that are ranked in the #15 millions.
As used books, if you were to price books like these super-competitively, they’d go out the door immediately.
My new theory is that (for whatever reason) long-time mystery fans have become more jaded with the McGee books than the general reading public has.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read one myself, as I alluded to in Comment #1. It’s time to change that. I know where my copy of YOU LIVE ONCE is, though. I’ve never read it, and that’s the JDM I’m going to do something about first.
August 29th, 2015 at 6:09 am
Steve, let us know what you think of it!
August 29th, 2015 at 11:51 pm
“My new theory is that (for whatever reason) long-time mystery fans have become more jaded with the McGee books than the general reading public has.”
I think you may be onto something. It is a bit like how devoted film fans always complain that directors were better before they became successful and came out with their best known films and then if the slump they suddenly become good again.
After a point MacDonald was not writing for the Gold Medal audience, anymore than the Chandler of THE LONG GOODBYE was writing for the audience of THE BIG SLEEP or Hammett circa THE GLASS KEY was still writing for people who loved RED HARVEST. Even Mickey Spillane mainstreamed compared to the savagery of the first Hammer books.
I suspect the things many hardcore mystery fans are complaining about in MacDonald are exactly what turned the tide and made him a bestseller, longer length, less clear cut plots, moralizing, and more sex. For their own taste they aren’t wrong, but I do think the sales show his reputation with the general reading public is unvarnished.
Incidentally, I see the McGee’s in bookstores still, not just e-books, where I also see Spillane and Ross Macdonald. I don’t think any of them have been as abandoned by readers as what you read within the genre might suggest. I hear the same thing about Fleming, who has greater critical acceptance than ever, and who also is kept in print.
We may be getting too insular for our own good at times. Currently I cant think of anyone major whose work isn’t getting some recognition even if it isn’t in the genre. Donald Hamilton, Leslie Charteris, Geoffrey Household, a lot of familiar names are in print either in e-book or print form.
August 30th, 2015 at 9:04 am
Synchronicity strikes again: check out today’s ROUGH EDGES:
http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2015/08/sunday-morning-bonus-pulp-thrilling.html
August 30th, 2015 at 9:20 am
I read some of JDM’s science fiction, but that was way back in the 1950s. I don’t even remember which stories or book titles. My feelings all these years has always been that it was a good thing he abandoned SF for mystery fiction. I’d be curious to see what I think of his SFnal work now.
PS> THRILLING WONDER STORIES in the late 40s and through most of the 50s was one of my favorite magazines, even more than ASTOUNDING at the same time.
August 30th, 2015 at 9:55 am
Stephen King in today’s Sunday NY Times calls the Travis McGee novels “…embarrassingly dated.” He then goes on and says the over 40 other novels that JDM wrote are mostly a mishmash of Ernest Hemingway and John O’Hara. He does admit a couple of the novels rise to the heights of being called literature.
It’s been 30 years since I read all the Travis McGee novels and I’m not sure how they would stand up to a rereading. But I do remember even back then that I had problems with the soapbox scenes and Travis’ sexual therapy for curing girls of their hang ups and problems.
Then again, Hemingway and O’Hara are big favorites with me, so I don’t mind JDM being compared with them!
August 30th, 2015 at 7:04 pm
Here’s the link to the piece in the Times by Stephen King:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html?_r=0
The question he mulls over is whether or not an author can be both prolific and good, beginning his essay with Joyce Carol Oates.
It’s well worth reading, even though he does mistakenly believe that John Creasey created Sexton Blake.
August 30th, 2015 at 7:27 pm
Nonetheless MacDonald and Hemingway are still read, and I haven’t been able to read King for twenty years now.