John D. MacDonald

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John D. MacDonald

Born July 24, 1916(1916-07-24)
Sharon, Pennsylvania, United States
Died December 28, 1986 (aged 70)
Occupation novelist, short story writer
Nationality American
Writing period 1945-1986
Genres Detective fiction

John Dann MacDonald (July 24, 1916–December 28, 1986) was an American author.

MacDonald was a prolific writer of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida. His best-known works include the popular and critically-acclaimed Travis McGee series, and his novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962, MacDonald was named a grand master of the Mystery Writers of America, and he won the American Book Award in 1980. Stephen King[1] praised MacDonald as "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller."

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[edit] Early life

Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, MacDonald enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out during his sophomore year to work menial jobs in New York City. While attending the School of Management at Syracuse University, he met Dorothy Prentiss. They married in 1937, and he graduated from Syracuse the following year. In 1939, he received an MBA from Harvard University. MacDonald was later able to make good use of his education in business and economics by incorporating elaborate business swindles into the plots of a number of his novels.

[edit] Writing career

[edit] Early pulp story

In 1940 MacDonald accepted a direct commission as a First Lieutenant in the army Ordnance Corps. He later served in the OSS in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II. While still in the military, his literary career began accidentally when he wrote a short story in 1945 and mailed it home for the amusement of his wife. She submitted it to the magazine Story without his knowledge, and it was accepted. Discharged in September 1945 as a Lieutenant Colonel, he spent the next four months writing short stories, generating some 800,000 words and losing 20 pounds while typing during 14-hour daily sessions seven days a week. It netted him only hundreds of rejection slips, but in the fifth month, a $40 sale to the pulp magazine Dime Detective set his career in motion, and he continued to sell to the detective, mystery, adventure, sports, western and science fiction pulps. As the boom in paperback novels expanded, he successfully made the jump to longer fiction with his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, published in 1950 by Fawcett Publications' Gold Medal Books. His science fiction included the story "Cosmetics" in Astounding (1948) and the three novels Wine of the Dreamers (1951), Ballroom of the Skies (1952), and The Girl, the Gold Watch, & Everything (1962), which were collected as an omnibus in Time and Tomorrow (1980).

[edit] Hardboiled thrillers

Between 1953 and 1964, MacDonald specialized in crime thrillers, many of which are now considered masterpieces of the hardboiled genre. Most of these novels were published as paperback originals, although some were later republished in hardbound editions. Many, such as Dead Low Tide (1953), were set in his adopted home of Florida, and were effective in suggesting a sinister aura lurking beneath the glittery surface of that state. Novels such as The Executioners (1957) (which was twice filmed as Cape Fear, first in 1962 and again in 1991) and One Monday We Killed them All (1962) penetrated the minds of psychopathic killers. As Macdonald honed his craft, he developed his narrative "voice," one of the most distinctive in the suspense fiction field.

[edit] Travis McGee

MacDonald's protagonists were often intelligent and introspective men, sometimes with a hard cynical streak. Travis McGee, the "salvage consultant" and "knight in rusting armor," was all of that. He first appeared in the 1964 novel The Deep Blue Good-by and was last seen in The Lonely Silver Rain in 1985. All titles in the 21-volume series include a color, and the novels usually feature an ever-changing array of female companions, plus an appearance by a sidekick known only as "Meyer," a retired economist. As Sherlock Holmes had his well-known address on Baker Street, McGee had his trademark lodgings on his 52-foot houseboat Busted Flush, named for the poker hand that started the run of luck in which he won her. She's docked at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

[edit] Influence

Various writers have acknowledged the trail that MacDonald and McGee blazed, including Carl Hiaasen in an introduction to a 1990s edition of The Deep Blue Good-by: "Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty."

Most of the current crop of Florida-based mystery writers acknowledge a debt to MacDonald, including Randy Wayne White, James Hall, Les Standiford, Jonathon King, Tim Dorsey to name just a few. And Lawrence Block's New York-based fictional hero, Matthew Scudder, is a character who makes his living doing just what McGee does -- favors for friends who have no other recourse, then taking his cut.

Homage to MacDonald was evident in the 1981-88 CBS-TV series Simon & Simon with scenes showing Rick Simon's boat docked at Slip F-18 in San Diego.

The science fiction writer Spider Robinson has made it clear that he is also among MacDonald's admirers. The bartender in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Mike Callahan, is married to Lady Sally McGee, whose last name is almost certainly a tribute to Travis. In a recent sequel to the Callahan's series, Callahan's Key, a group of regulars from the former saloon decide they've had enough of Long Island, so they move to Key West, Florida, in a colorful caravan of modified school buses. On their way to Key West, they stop at a marina near Fort Lauderdale specifically to visit Slip F-18 (where Busted Flush was usually moored) and meet a local who was the prototype for McGee's sidekick Meyer. The slip is empty, with a small plaque mentioning Busted Flush.

The popular mystery writer Dean Koontz has also acknowledged in an interview with Bookreporter.com's Marlene Taylor that MacDonald is "(His) favorite author of all time... I've read everything he wrote four or five times."

[edit] Media adaptations

MacDonald's novel Soft Touch was the basis for the film Man-Trap (1961). His 1957 novel The Executioners was filmed in 1962 as Cape Fear, a dark thriller of strong suspense and menace starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. Martin Scorsese directed the 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Among other film or television adaptations of MacDonald's work, the 1984 A Flash of Green with Ed Harris was probably the most successful artistically. When Travis McGee arrived on the big screen in 1970 with Darker Than Amber, the film received favorable reviews from Roger Ebert and other critics, but there was no follow-up into a series. The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything was adapted for a 1980 TV movie. It failed to capture the spirit of the original novel but still led to a 1981 sequel, "The Girl, the Gold Watch and Dynamite." The novella "Linda" was filmed twice for television, in 1973 (with Stella Stevens in the title role) and 1993 (with Virginia Madsen). The 1980 TV movie Condominium, based on MacDonald's novel, starred Dan Haggerty and Barbara Eden. The 1983 TV movie Travis McGee: The Empty Copper Sea starred Sam Elliott. The novel Cry Hard, Cry Fast was adapted as a two-part episode of the TV series Run for Your Life in November of 1967.

[edit] Death

MacDonald died on December 28th, 1986 at St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin following a heart bypass operation.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Travis McGee novels

In chronological order:

[edit] Non-series novels (excluding science fiction)

[edit] Anthologies

[edit] Short story collections

[edit] Science fiction

[edit] Non-fiction

[edit] References

  1. ^ King, Stephen. On Writing (Hodder and Stoughton, 2000, ISBN 0340769963)

[edit] External links

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