JOHN D. MacDONALD – A Deadly Shade of Gold. Gold Medal d1499, paperback original, 1965. UK edition: Robert Hale, hardcover, 1967. First US hardcover edition: J. B. Lippincott, 1974. Reprinted many times.

    The fifth of the Travis McGee series, and the first labeled a double novel ( or what would become the standard length for entries in the series), A Deadly Shade of Gold is probably the most interesting book in the McGee canon historically for undermining virtually everything critics, fans, and attackers tend to say (and repeat endlessly) about John D. MacDonald and McGee.

    In this book McGee not only doesn’t save a woman with redemptive sex, he doesn’t save one at all, suffers guilt over taking advantage of an emotionally vulnerable woman ( “Much of lust is a process of self delusion … back in my own bed I said surly things to jackass McGee about taking rude advantage of the vulnerable, about being a restless greedy animal …”), flat out turns down one such woman’s offer (or Meyer’s on her behalf), is rescued by an attractive woman who initially doesn’t want to have sex with him, watches their relationship deteriorate, and goes home sadder but wiser.

    If this is what some critics call the swinging sixties lifestyle as Hefner and Playboy defined it I must have missed a few issues or misread them. In addition he kills a sunbunny ( “… genus playmate californicus …” who is trying to kill him “Hero McGee wins the shootout. He’s death on sunbunnies.”).

    This isn’t as unusual as it seems. Critics of Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, and even Ernest Hemingway all tended to write a good deal of nonsense about their work based on a superficial and often unsympathetic reading. If it were only critics who made these incomplete statements it would be bad enough, but fans don’t seem to have read the books either in many cases.

    McGee here views himself with as jaundiced an eye as any contemporary bachelor in the post feminists world and judges himself more harshly than any critic could ( “We are all guilty. Also, we are all innocent, every one.”). If there is anything here paternalistic, it’s McGee’s constant worry that he will do more harm than good to the women in the case — and all the innocents, and even some of the guilty, who tend to get smashed along the way.

    MacDonald doesn’t think women are equal to men — if anything he thinks they are superior ( “I got the hell away from her before I had more awareness than I could comfortably handle.”)

    One fan-site that calls MacDonald’s books “classy trash” says more about the fan than MacDonald. Judith Krantz was classy trash. John D. MacDonald was a major American voice working within the boundaries of popular fiction.

    Classy trash seldom bears re-reading, MacDonald’s work begs it. Ian Fleming was classy trash, and glad to be that, but MacDonald had higher aspirations and achieved them even within the confines of a series character like McGee. Calling his work classy trash because it appeared in paperback originals is singularly narrow.

    Hemingway wrote for Esquire, Fitzgerald the Saturday Evening Post, and Nabokov for Playboy — Mackinlay Kantor, Stephen Becker, Robert Wilder, and Vivian Connell all wrote paperback originals (and all for Gold Medal) — you can’t always judge a writer by his milieu.

    A Deadly Shade of Gold opens with the death of McGee’s old friend Sam Taggart, who has just returned to Florida looking to reconnect with Nora Gardino ( “… a lean dark vital woman …”), an attractive local boutique owner he walked away from when he went to Mexico.

    With Taggart’s brutal murder McGee finds himself drawn into a case that involves some ancient gold figures Sam has found. The trail leads him to an auction house in New York where he sleeps with a young woman ( “With a brassy forlorn confidence …”) to get information and feels exploited and exploiter for it ( “The physical act, when undertaken for any for any motive but love, and need, is a fragmenting experience.”).

    This leads him with Nora to a small (fictional) Mexican fishing village ( “For all the years the generations of them, in the dust and mud and sea smell, had lived and worked and died in this coastal pocket …”) where he is drawn into the illegal trade in antiquities run by a ruthless American, and the schemes of some violent Cuban exile groups.

    McGee makes some forays against the American behind the racket ( “… a dull, self-important, rich, silly, sick little man.”), meets a whore who loved Taggart and who is quite human, real and lacking a heart of gold, emotionally smashes an aging playgirl to find out what he needs, feels guilt about exploiting Nora’s grief sexually and gets Nora killed (or blames himself for it), returns to Los Angeles, meets the fabulous Connie ( “I have a very rational approach to my needs and desires.”), who agrees to help him but wants nothing to do with him as a sex partner ( “It would take us too long to find out who was winning, and in the process I might lose.”) because they would fight for control of the situation, avenges Sam, scores a nice profit, damn near gets killed, is rescued by Connie ( “I do not think she expected anything for herself …”), has a brief affair with her that is redemptive for neither of them, and ends up fleeing back to Florida before all that is left are bitter memories ( “There is one thing Senor McGee that is the exact opposite of death.”).

    Remind me again about the jovial boat bum who saves all the damsels with his charm and sexual charisma and patented sexual healing while living the Playboy lifestyle:

    Are we reading the same books?.

    And always there are the little moments many of us read MacDonald for, snippets from here and there:

    These are just a few at random, simply page flipping. This too is another reason to read MacDonald, and why he is not simply classy trash, and why attention should be paid, and the memory of his best work should be accurate and clear, and not the mere repetition of what we have read elsewhere and been told and accepted without testing and knowing for ourselves.

    He, and we, deserve better.

    John D. MacDonald was the only writer to ever win the National Book Award in the mystery category (for The Green Ripper) it is time we recall who he was, what he did, and admit his achievements go beyond just entertaining us. He wrote a portrait of a place and time and world as real and as accurate as has ever been written, and it is our loss if we forget that or lessen it because he is not as politically correct as some would like.

    Much of what he had to say about the American character and American society is as true and accurate today as it was when it was written, and while we should admit his flaws and that he was a man of his world and time, it is past time to discard our own prejudices and honestly evaluate his remarkable contribution.

    He was a remarkable writer for his time, or any time. We are only cheating ourselves if we throw him out because we changed while failing to recognize that in many ways the world he showed us has not.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Green Ripper. J. B. Lippincott, 1979. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback, June 1980. Reprinted many times since.

   This relatively recent entry is one of the worst in the Travis McGee series. It is bloody and violent, involving a strange paramilitary cult and all the attendant cliches, and McGee’s personal vendetta against the cult seems to rob him of his more human qualities.

   In a prior novel (The Empty Copper Sea, 1978), McGee fell in love with a woman named Gretel Howard. She lived with him aboard the Flush for a while, but recently has moved out to be closer to her job at Bonnie Brae, a “combination fat farm, tennis club, and real estate development.”

   The relationship is still as warm as ever, though, and when Gretel dies suddenly of a mysterious and debilitating illness, Travis is devastated. Not so devastated, however, that he doesn’t wander sideways into inquiring about the strange events that occurred at Bonnie Brae right before Gretel’s death and determining that her death was somehow murder.

   The rather thin story line leads McGee from Fort Lauderdale to Ukiah, California, looking for a man known as Brother Titus who heads an organization called the Church of the Apocrypha. Posing as a man looking for his daughter, Travis locates an encampment, formerly a religious commune but now as closely guarded as a top,secret military base. He is imprisoned, then recruited, and the events that transpire are too brutal and depressing to reiterate.

   If there is anything positive about the resolution of this novel, it is that McGee eventually recovers; unfortunately, it is a recovery that fails to recognize that vengeance seldom leaves any real satisfaction in the soul of the avenger.

   Other, much better, titles in the McGee series are The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964), The Quick Red Fox (1964), A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965), The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1969), and Dress Her in Indigo (1969), and The Lonely Silver Rain (1985).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Only Girl in the Game. Gold Medal s1015, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1960. First hardcover edition: Robert Hale, UK, 1962. Reprinted many times.

    If there was justice in the world, writers would rise each morning and bow three times in the direction of John D. MacDonald’s grave. If that seems a bit extreme, read this description of a typical night in a Las Vegas casino, better still “listen” to it, its cadences and its rhythms:

    There is a tendency to discuss MacDonald’s work as if he was yet another suspense novelist, and while he wrote some fine suspense novels, I have always thought of him as first and foremost a novelist. His concerns are those of the mainstream of American literature, and while few writers had his skill or ability at creating suspense, what sets him apart from almost every other writer in the field in that novelist’s eye.

    His special skill was not only in creating suspense and character but illuminating the darker byways of the everyday world of business and life. His plots and characters intersect at the place where the day to day world of business breaks down and lines are crossed morally and criminally. No one ever took a more jaundiced or more clear eyed view of the morality — and lack of it — of the average American business enterprise, whether it be a Florida real estate deal gone bad, a con game out of control, or the operation of Vegas casinos.

    Vegas and its casinos are the perfect milieu for both MacDonald’s savage moral eye and his very human and sometimes morally fragile characters. Hugh Darren, the hero of this novel, is the assistant manager at the Cameroon’s hotel, one of the big casinos. He is ideally suited to his job, a person with a sharp mind, people skills, and a clear eyed view of the world.

    The Cameroon was once the worst run hotel on the strip. Hugh changed all that. But this is a city and a world where success isn’t measured just by results. Sometimes it is measured by whose knife is in your back or at your throat.

    Hugh has just run afoul of Max Haines, who runs the casino side of the operation who “knows a lot about how things run around here.” He knows things about their boss Al Marta too, and about secrets the manager of the hotel might not know — or care to know.

    Hugh wants to run the hotel at a profit. Max is old school and believes the hotel should lose money to better support the casino, the real source of money. And making sure the margins for the casino stay where they always have been is a job Max does, and boss Al Marta turns his head from, at any cost.

    As might be expected, there are two notable examples of MacDonald women in this one. First is Betty Dawson, “a tall brunette with unusually dark blue eyes, and a loveliness of face that was reminiscent of Liz Taylor.” Betty is a singer (“I’ve got no voice and I can’t play much piano …”) who works in one of the hotels rooms and has recently fallen hard for Hugh, the kind of stand up guy she never had in her life before: “We just didn’t have this kind of thing in stock when you first started to trade with us, Betty,” is how she sees it:

    Betty also acts as a hostess at the hotel. It’s not exactly prostitution — she doesn’t have to sleep with customers — but she does have to lead them on. She knows who and what she is, she doesn’t yet know what it will cost her beyond what it has already cost, her self respect, and something of her heart and her soul.

    But for the time being Betty is the happiest she has been in a long long time, and anyone who has ever read John D. MacDonald should know that excess joy is never a good sign.

    Sex is one of MacDonald’s great themes, not only the healing power of good sex, but the destructive dangers of the other kind. He sees it both as a blessing and a curse, a redemption and a damnation. His heroes tend to redeem the women in their lives both with sex and with compassion, but it is never cut and dried.

    Too much has been made over the redemptive aspect of sex in MacDonald’s books, and not enough perhaps of the awful toll it sometimes takes. Contrary to what some critics like to suggest, a good man is not always enough to save a MacDonald heroine, and even in the McGee books there is a stubborn refusal to allow easy answers.

    His heroes are often catalysts in the life of the women in his books, but MacDonald seldom suggests that is enough. It is only one part of healing, one part of life, not everything.

    Some critics would do better to actually read MacDonald, rather than simply repeat what they have read about him.

    The other MacDonald woman is Vicky Shannard, “… in her thirtieth year, a cuddly dumpling, a pwetty widdle pigeon, a blonde, pink and white, cushiony little cupcake …” who parlayed a history of stripping and living as a professional guest to marriage to Temple Shannard a moneyed older man from New Providence, a golden tongued promoter who operates in the Bahamas and is now in Vegas. But lately their marriage is drifting apart and coming to the Cameroon isn’t going to help.

    Vicky is a type MacDonald is never particularly kind to, but he does draw them as they are with due prejudice, but also with an honest eye. She isn’t a monster and Tempe isn’t a victim. They are just people who can’t overcome who and what they are.

    At heart John D. MacDonald has the pure American streak of the Calvinist about him. He is attracted to and repelled by the glamour of money and power. Glitter, sin, and easy money bring out the savage in him even as he cannot ignore them or stay away.

    All of these people might not create quite so much drama anywhere else, but as Hugh explains to Vicky in a statement that might be the theme of the novel:

    Finally there is Homer Gallowell of Fort Worth, Texas, a figure that appears in many MacDonald novels in many forms. Homer is a canny old coot, a player and an operator, the sane voice of a man who “had the hard bitten look of a man who had spent the first half of his life sleeping on the ground.”

    Gallowell is the kind of individualist who MacDonald always champions over the corporate mind of any business enterprise, smart, tough, straight, and sentimental about only two things — good men and women and good booze.

    He’s a fairly common figure in business related novels of the fifties and sixties, the last of a breed before buttondown minds accompanied button-down collars, before the bottom line became the moral standard.

    Homer has come to Vegas and the Cameroon to beat the house at its own game.

    Homer is an old friend of Betty Dawson too, which is why Max Haines thinks she may be able to play him, because Homer is the one thing Vegas fears more than card counters and con-men — an intelligent gambler with enough money to give them a run for their money, to play their odds, and to win. Max had used Betty for this kind of thing before:

    To give him full credit, MacDonald makes the operations and philosophy of a casino and the machinations of Homer, Max, Al Marta, and Tempe Shannard as suspenseful as any spy novel or bank heist. No one wrote as compellingly about the high pressure world of money and power.

    As the strands of the novel tighten into a single skein, the center falls apart as it so often does in MacDonald’s novels. The sham that is Tempe and Vicky’s marriage begins to shatter, Betty’s past begins to catch up with her, and Hugh Darren’s basic morality and honesty is about to come in conflict with Vegas version of the bottom line.

    We are all familiar with MacDonald’s use of color- coded themes, but someone should write a paper on his use of the color pink. He seems to embody all the sins and flaws of the American Dream in the color pink.

    The crisis comes when Betty Dawson, her own morality awakened by being asked to play Homer, defies and crosses Max Haines, and through her Hugh Darren faces his own moral and ethical crisis. But when Max and Al push Hugh too far and hit him too hard, he reacts in the true manner of a MacDonald hero and with a little help from Homer …

    Hugh and Homer bring down Max Haines and his pals, but at a cost they would neither of them have cared to pay. Some heroines can’t be saved and some dragons are never really slain.

    The names have changed, the strip is bigger and gaudier than ever, more a playground and fantasy than ever, but MacDonald’s savage critique remains as true and as well observed as before. No one ever looked harder, longer, or more honestly at the phony sentiment, cruel lies, and emotional paucity of big money and big business.

    Whether in the standalone novels or the Travis McGee books, whether writing about crime or business that deteriorates into crime, his great theme was an anger and even grief over the soul-numbing results of wounded people in a society with too few second chances.

    MacDonald, in the true tradition of the American novel, and not just the hard-boiled school, still echoes Twain’s Huck Finn at the end of his adventures. “I been there before.” That echoes across American literature, that sense of loss and frustration, that realization that life indeed goes on, and we have all “been there before” and will be there again.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Good Old Stuff: 13 Early Stories. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1982. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback, 1983.

   MacDonald, like so many other writers, learned his craft in the pulps. Between 1946 and 1952, he sold hundreds of crime stories to such magazines as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Tales, New Detective, Mystery Book, and Doc Savage (as well as other short fiction to science fiction, fantasy, sports, and western pulps).

   A few of these criminous tales have been reprinted here and there over the years, but the greater percentage languished in (mostly undeserved) obscurity until 1981 , when Martin Greenberg, Francis M. Nevins, and Walter and Jean Shine — MacDonald aficionados all — persuaded John D. to collect the best of them.

   They chose thirty stories; on rereading those thirty, MacDonald considered all but three worthy of reprinting. (Minor changes were made to update certain references for the sake of clarity; otherwise he allowed them to stand as first published.)

   But the final total of twenty-seven was deemed too many for a single book; the result is two volumes — The Good Old Stuff and its companion, More Good Old Stuff (Knopf, 1984).

   The thirteen stories in this first volume demonstrate MacDonald’s considerable range within the mystery! detective format, as well as his narrative talent and power. Among them are such gems as “The Simplest Poison” (whodunit); “Death Writes the Answer” (biter-bit); “Noose for a Tigress” (pure suspense); “Death on the Pin” (character study — and the world’s first and only crime story about bowling); and the novelette “Murder for Money,” whose protagonist, Darrigan, is a prototype of Travis McGee.

   No fan of MacDonald’s work should miss either this batch or the fourteen equally excellent and diverse stories in More Good Old Stuff.

   Until these volumes, MacDonald’s collected short fiction was restricted almost entirely to selections from such slick magazines as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and Playboy — fifteen stories in End of the Tiger (1966) and seven in Seven (1971).

   His only previously collected pulp story was the title piece in the 1956 gathering of two novellas, Border Town Girl. Another two-story collection (both from the pulps), this one unauthorized, appeared in 1983 under the title Two.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Executioners. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1958. Crest s295, reprint paperback, May 1959. Reprinted many times. Film: Universal International, 1962, as Cape Fear (with Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, Polly Bergen; director J. Lee Thompson). Also: Universal, 1991, as Cape Fear (with Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange; director: Martin Scorsese).

   Suppose you’re a lawyer in a small Florida town, happily married, with an attractive fourteen-year-old daughter and two younger sons. Suppose some fifteen years ago you witnessed the brutal rape of a teenager and subsequently gave testimony that put the rapist, Max Cady, behind bars.

   Suppose Max Cady finally gets out of prison and comes back to your town — and suppose he begins making veiled threats and following you and your family, paying special attention to your fourteen-year-old daughter, Suppose you know Cady is a dangerous psychopath, that sooner or later he intends to rape your daughter and harm you and your other loved ones.

   What do you do?

   This is the dilemma that faces Sam Bowden, and this is the stuff of one of MacDonald’s finest suspense novels. The tension mounts to an almost unbearable pitch as Bowden suffers frustration after frustration and Cady moves inexorably toward explosive violence.

   The climax is MacDonald at his most compelling. A must-read for anyone who enjoys expertly written, beautifully plotted suspense fiction.

   Surprisingly enough, considering what Hollywood has done to quality novels in the past, the film version — Cape Fear (1962) — is every bit as tense and powerful, and features a bravura performance by Robert Mitchum; he literally radiates evil in the role of Max Cady.

   Almost as good are Gregory Peck and Polly Bergen as the Bowdens. Don’t miss it when it appears on the Late Show.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Editorial Comment: This will be John D. MacDonald week here on this blog, at least for the next couple of days. Besides the three JDM reviews posted today, coming up soon will be two more: The Good Old Stuff and The Green Ripper, by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller respectively; then two by David Vineyard: The Only Girl in the Game and A Deadly Shade of Gold.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – Darker than Amber. Gold Medal d1674, paperback original, 1966. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1970. Reprinted many times. Film: National General, 1970 (with Rod Taylor as Travis McGee, Theodore Bikel as Meyer, and Suzy Kendall as Vangie.)

   The Travis McGee series, with its color-coded titles, is one of the phenomenally popular successes of the mystery genre, and it’s easy to see why. McGee, who refers to himself as a “salvage consultant” (in actuality, he gets folks out of trouble the police can’t help them with), has many of those larger-than-life qualities contemporary readers seem to favor.

   He’s big, rawboned, handsome in a rugged way. A former minor pro-football player, he now lives an enviable life-style in retirement aboard his “sybaritic” houseboat, the Busted Flush, in Fort Lauderdale. It is a retirement from which he periodically emerges whenever the cash reserves are getting low, and he’s fond of saying he likes taking it in installments rather than all at sixty-five when he won’t be able to enjoy it much anyway.

   But McGee’s life is not all girls and glitter; there’s a dark, broody side of him, a part of his mind that tells him he’s capable of being a better man than he thinks he is. And he proves this, time and time again, as he fights the forces of corruption that have victimized his friends and clients.

   McGee is no cool professional; he takes on every case as if it were a personal crusade. And it’s there that his true charm lies: He is an emotional man who realizes he’s fallible and constantly strives to overcome it, knowing all the while that he never can.

   McGee also has his irritating points, however. He is constantly editorializing, and in the later entries in the series these asides become overly long and predictable. (Eventually one says, “Oh, Travis, not again!” and skips a page.)

   He also has a bad habit of indulging in therapeutic sex: A woman character has been traumatized; Travis takes her on a cruise on the Flush, makes love to her, and she is as good as new. And the women characters, while generally likable, all talk alike-a bright, sophisticated patter that makes them fairly difficult to tell apart.

   Darker than Amber begins with a unique introduction to one of these women: As Travis explains it in the classic first sentence, “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.”

   The girl, whom McGee narrowly rescues from drowning, is Vangie Bellemer, a “dead-eyed cookie” who has been working as a high-priced call girl. Unlike many of MacDonald’s women characters, she is not very pleasant, nor is she understandable until McGee’s best friend, economist Meyer, breaks through her tough shell.

   What he finds is a frightened woman involved in something way over her head, something that concerns money taken from “dead ones.” Vangie’s associates have tried to kill her once, and she knows they will try again. They do — and succeed.

   And Travis, feeling guilty because he didn’t prevent Vangie’s death, interested because there is money involved, and curious because of the seeming magnitude of whatever is going on, starts on his crusade. He finds other high-priced call girls, a setup involving Caribbean cruises, luxury, and death.

   And when he and Meyer close in on the truth of the matter, through a series of elaborate machinations that are fun to watch, they find it is of even greater magnitude than they supposed.

   Darker than Amber is among the best in this entertaining series.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

[UPDATE] Later the same day. David Vineyard’s comment about the movie made with Rod Taylor (#1), reminded me that I hadn’t included the film in the opening credits above. So I’ve added that, the photo image below, and regardless of the overall entertainment value of the rest of the movie, here’s a link to one of the greatest one-on-one fight scenes you might ever see on film.

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Brass Cupcake. Gold Medal #124, paperback original, 1950. Reprinted many times.

   The career of John D. MacDonald has been a long and varied one, beginning with the publication of this excellent first novel. His books have ranged from modest paperback originals to the immensely popular Travis McGee series, as well as fat best sellers such as Condominium (1977) and the recent One More Sunday (1984).

   Likewise, the quality of his work has varied, from the truly terrible Weep for Me (a 1951 original that MacDonald himself refuses to allow to be reprinted) and the boring small-town drama Contrary Pleasure (1954), to such outstanding novels of suspense as The Damned (1952), Murder in the Wind (1956), and The Last One Left (1967).

   The recurring theme in MacDonald’s work is corruption — personal, corporate, societal-and his heroes are men and women who pit themselves against it. MacDonald draws heavily upon his knowledge of finance, land development, and Florida politics in constructing intricate plots, and his novels, particularly the later ones, are filled with editorial tirades about the abuse of the environment, corporate greed, personal greed, or whatever else happens to have been bothering him at the time of writing.

   In the earlier novels, these statements of position seem a natural outgrowth of the narrators’ personalities, but in later books they become long-winded and intrusive.

   In The Brass Cupcake, the evil is police corruption. The hero, Cliff Bartells, now an insurance adjuster, was once on the Florence City, Florida, force, but lost his badge for not going along with the local “arrangements” between the police and gambling establishments.

   That badge — fancy and gold — is Bartells’ brass cupcake: “Anything you got by guile … was called a cupcake So when they took it away from me, it wasn’t even a badge any more. Just a cupcake. Something I chiseled and then got chiseled out of. A brass cupcake. Something of no importance.”

   The murder with which the story opens — the death of a wealthy old woman in the process of a jewel theft — pits Bartells against the police force he used to belong to. They want him to keep out of it; he wants to follow the insurance agency’s usual procedure of attempting to buy back the jewels.

   His motives are not so pure, however — there is a fat bonus for him if he manages this. But Bartells is up against more than he bargains for: The dead woman has a lovely niece, someone Bartells can’t look at in a purely professional way; the niece has a boyfriend who is little more than a gigolo; a pair of servants seem to know more about the theft than they claim to the police.

   By the time Bartells has sorted through the evidence — as well as his personal feelings on a number of issues — a second murder has occurred, shots have been fired at him, and he knows his future in Florence City is not promising. Unless …

   Cliff Bartells is an early version of MacDonald’s later male characters: a complex man who wants to do the right thing and worries about it, because he knows he himself is not incorruptible.

   And in the niece, Melody Chance, we see many of the same qualities that appear in later women characters: strength, independence, and straightforwardness, a woman just a trifle weary of life who would like a good man to occasionally lean on.

   MacDonald’s depiction of secondary and even incidental characters is also excellent.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

       Previously on this blog —

April Evil (reviewed by Steve Lewis)
Linda, film and novella (reviewed by Steve Lewis)

MICHELLE NOLAN – Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930’s through 1960’s. McFarland, hardcover, February 2010.

   Over the decades I have collected just about every pulp genre except for love pulps and sport pulps. I have several issues of each type, but every time I’d try to read a romance or sports story, the strict formula that these magazines followed would defeat me.

   Most of the fiction was very upbeat with happy endings, even more formula-bound than the western pulps. At least I can read the other genres (western, SF, detective, adventure, etc), but not the love and sport pulps.

   And this prejudice is not mine alone. I’ve come across a few collectors like Digges La Touche and Steve Lewis who occasionally buy a love pulp, but until I met Michelle Nolan and possibly Randy Vanderbeek, I never really met someone who was seriously collecting runs of sport and love magazines.

   At PulpFest 2010 I had an opportunity to talk to Michelle and we briefly discussed her book, Love on the Racks, which mainly covers the romance comics with a few pages on the love pulps. But the main topic was her new book recently published by McFarland, Ball Tales. Copies are available on amazon.com for $35.00.

   If you are at all interested in sports fiction, then you should buy this book. The book mainly discusses sport fiction in books and paperbacks. However pulps are referred to in several chapters, and this is of course of interest to pulp collectors. I counted around 20 cover illustrations of pulps showing a sports scene and many other photos of book covers.

   The book is 279 pages long. Pulps are discussed in Chapter One, but the main subject is dime novels. Chapter Two is titled “The Great Pulp Sports Rally During the Depression” and covers sport fiction in many of the pulps like Argosy, Sport Story, and so on.

   However the best chapter on the pulps (this chapter is a nice long 32 pages) is Chapter Five where Michelle covers sports in many sport and even some love titles. She then covers in Chapter Twelve the only example of female sports competition portrayed on a sports cover (Sport Story, 1st March 1939). This is a very interesting observation when you consider that there were over 1500 sport pulp magazine covers.

   She also covers the fact that there have been very few sport pulp anthologies, only three that she lists. Think of it; we live in the Golden Age of Pulp Reprints, but no sport or love reprints from the pulps. (I quickly ordered the three anthologies from abebooks.com).

   Finally there is a very valuable appendix: three pages listing the different sport pulp titles, publishers, and years published.

   Fellow pulp readers and collectors, this is an excellent piece of original research and if you love sports fiction, or you collect pulps,then it should be in your library.

ADDENDA:  Three anthologies taken entirely from the sports pulps are:

Baseball Round-Up, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1948).

All American Football Stories, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1949).

While the Crowd Cheers, edited by David C. Cooke (E. P. Dutton, 1953)

   Michelle also calls The Argosy Book of Sports Stories edited by Rogers Terrill “wonderful,” but these came from the time when Argosy was a men’s adventure magazine, not a pulp. Buy the hardback (A. S. Barnes, 1953) because the paperback (Pennant P-61, 1954) cuts five stories.

LUKE SHORT – First Claim. Bantam A2057, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1960. Reprinted several times.

   I was disappointed with this one. Short is one of my favorite western authors, but this slender book (only 152 pages) can be read very quickly – not so much because it’s short, but because there’s but a single straight line that can be drawn from the beginning of the story to the end.

   When Giff Ballew returns to his home town of Harmony to claim his father’s land that had been confiscated during the Civil War, he finds that it had been taken over by a family of rich ranchers who also own the local lawyer and sheriff, and who aren’t about to give it up now without a fight.

   Only the local newspaper editor and publisher is willing to lend him a sympathetic ear, and that doesn’t include the young, good-looking widow who works for him. Her father owes the Weybrights money, and she doesn’t want any trouble aroused by Giff to tumble back on him.

   Giff, of course, is stubborn, if not bull-headed, but he’s also in the right. Many of the folks he meets along his way are against him, but he comes also across a growing number who are for him and have not been able to speak up against the Weybrights until now.

   The characters are interesting, and they find themselves in very human situations. But for the most part, anyone who’s read a lot of westerns has read this all before. What’s there is tasty enough, but there’s not enough meat in this particular entree to keep you satisfied till breakfast.

  STEVEN SAYLOR – Catilina’s Riddle. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, October 1993. Reprint paperback: Ivy Books, August 1994. Other reprint editions exist. Roma sub Rosa #3.

   I thought the first of this trilogy, Roman Blood, was the best first novel of 1991, and one of the best of that year, period. I have yet to read the second, Arms of Nemesis.

   Now Gordianus the Finder (the Roman equivalent of a private eye) is Gordianus the Farmer, having inherited a farm in Etruria from an old friend. He is surrounded by that friend’s relatives, who bitterly contested the will but were defeated in the Roman courts by Gordianus’s old acquaintance and employer, Cicero.

   Now Cicero is calling in his marker. He wants Goridianus to allow Catalina, one of Rome’s radical politicians, to occasionally use the farm as a refuge. Not because he’s Catalina’s friend, though; au contraire. He sees this as a way to keep track of his comings and goings. Gordianus reluctantly acquiesces, and thus is drawn into what history was to label the Catiline Conspiracy.

   I remain tremendously impressed by Saylor’s skill at interweaving history and fiction and by his ability as a wordsmith. He has created a memorable character and chronicler in Gordianus, whose portrayal has deepened over the course of the series. He has acquired a larger family in the interim between the first and third books, and they too are finely drawn.

   As I remarked at the end of the first book, Saylor’s love and knowledge of Roman history is evident on every page – as is his own opinion of the various historical personages.

   This is less of a mystery than the first, though there is one, dealing with a series of headless corpses that appear on the farm. Mystery included or mystery aside, though, it’s an excellent novel. I can’t imagine you not liking it.

      The Roma sub Rosa series —

1. Roman Blood (1990)
2. Arms of Nemesis (1992)

3. Catilina’s Riddle (1993)
4. The Venus Throw (1995)

5. A Murder On the Appian Way (1996)
6. The House of the Vestals (1997)
7. Rubicon (1999)

8. Last Seen in Massilia (2000)
9. A Mist of Prophecies (2002)
10. The Judgement of Caesar (2004)
11. A Gladiator Dies Only Once (2005)
12. The Triumph of Caesar (2008)