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John D. MacDonald paints with words
Book Review
By Derryll White
MacDonald, John D. (1982). The Good Old Stuff
John D. MacDonald is the popular storyteller I grew up with.
I started reading seriously when I was about 10, graduating from Thomas Mallory and King Arthur to Kerouacâs On the Road. But, as this book illustrates, MacDonald had been polishing his craft since I was born. And by the time I was 15 I had him in my pocket often, intrigued with the characters he developed and, in the 1970s, by the environmental ethos he was starting to promote.
The 13 stories in this volume show that MacDonald did his apprenticeship, like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler before him, in the old action-detective pulp magazines of the mid-1940s and earlyâ50s. From these early stories he garnered credibility and style, which led to the publication in 1950 of âThe Brass Cupcake,â the first of MacDonaldâs more than 60 published novels.
What drew me to John D. MacDonald (and has brought me back) was his singular ability to focus on America and the change overtaking it, both politically and economically, as it emerged from the Second World War. His characters portrayed the real social problems I experienced in the 1950s â shell-shocked relatives, hard-drinking uncles and neighbours who were having a hard time leaving the war behind and re-integrating into a more boring peacetime society.
Why am I reading these stories now, some 65 years after they were written? Why am I suggesting you should as well? MacDonald himself says it best: âFirst 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 â emotional, moral, spiritual, whatever, and I want to live with them while theyâre 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 writerâs 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 â good writing â should be like listening to music, where you identify the themes, you see what the composer is doing with those themes, and then, just when you think you have him properly identified, and his methods identified, then 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 a story, wit, music, wryness, color and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.â
What is so very good about MacDonaldâs writing is that he paints, with words.
The reader gets a great story, but much more as well. The images are sharp and full and one is fully immersed in the wonderful web of description and detail. I hate to say this, because I donât want to increase the competition, but I comb garage sales, thrift shops and used bookstores incessantly for old copies of John D. MacDonaldâs novels. If you are a reader you may want to as well.
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Excerpts from the book:
MURDER â âHow perfectly dreadful,â Kathy said in a low tone.
âIt always is. Natural death is enough to give us a sort of superstitious fear. But violent death always seems obscene. An assault against the dignity of every one of us.â
PAIN â Pain to the average person is just that. Pain. Nothing else. A mashed finger or a bad headache. But when you have it a long time something else happens to it. It turns into something else. You live with it and get to know it. With me, it was a color. Green. Green is supposed to be restful. I would see it behind my eyes. Eye, I should say. Iâd wake up in the night and look at the color. Dull dark green. That was good. That was above standard. That was more than you could expect. But there were the nights in the beginning when it was a hot, bright, harsh green, pulsating like a crazy living plant. That was when the night nurse was always there. During the first weeks she used the needle when it was bad, and later it was pills, which never worked as fast or as well.
PICTURES â When I awoke in the morning, a fat rain, oyster colored, viscid, was coming down in straight lines. I could see it bouncing off the roof peaks across the street.
SETTING â The sun rested on the rim of the horizon, a hot rivet sinking into the steel plate of the sea. The angle made visibility bad.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org .