[PULP ART IDEA MILL #8] The Strange Color of John D. MacDonald's Prose

Watching Scorpion Releasing's Blu of THE GIRL HUNTERS back in March was a surprisingly important experience for me. Firstly, it stoked a newfound interest in the work (both written and cinematic) of Mickey Spillane, an author I'd always thought about trying, but had never quite.

In the ensuing weeks, I've read three Spillane books: his debut I, THE JURY, the novel version of GIRL HUNTERS, and the posthumously completed CONSUMMATA (co-written with Max Allan Collins; it is, from a writing standpoint, the least satsifying of the lot). And I've watched the 1982 bizarro version of I, THE JURY (recently released on MOD DVD; hopefully I'll get a review up soon) and re-watched, both with commentary and without, KISS ME DEADLY. All of the above with a growing context for the world that Spillane, with varying degrees of success, sought to  conjure.

The second side effect was a renewed interest in all things pulp. As a kid, this manifested in me reading countless Bantam paperback reprints of DOC SAVAGE (those James Bama covers!), as well as darker-edged characters like THE SPIDER  and THE SHADOW (I've lost track of the number of radio episodes I've heard). For this site, it showed up as the start of the Pulp Art Idea Mill series, where I sought to document some of the great pulp covers, authors, artists, series that can be found literally wall-to-wall online. I posted some of the  best work of pulp artist extraordinaire Robert McGinnis, key spy movie posters in my cinematic life, and the through-line that can be drawn from Woolrich's BLACK ALIBI, to Brown's SCREAMING MIMI, to Argento's BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.

So last week, in the midst of all this pulpy brew, I found myself in the one paperback bookstore in my town (a store whose stock is, sad to say, mostly past its prime), trawling around for vintage paperbacks of any of the abovementioned work. The Spillane they had on the shelf bore some of the best vintage covers I've seen in person, but all of them looked like they'd been run over by a truck (plus, most were water-stained beyond repair).

The book I most wanted to find was a copy of Philip MacDonald's LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (scroll down in this post for the iconic front and back covers). It's a book I read in that edition when I was a kid, but that I haven't been able to find since (in the age of the ubiquitous downloadable book, how are so many mystery-thriller-psychodrama classics still stubbornly out of print?). Instead, in the alphabet, I found another MacDonald, John D. His covers were eye-catching. And, best of all, the vintage editions didn't smell of water-logged basements.

So I decided to take a chance, picked two of the "Travis  McGee Suspense Classics" (a series character I assumed; I'm always up for a well-written series character), and went home and read the first 60 pages of what I came to find out was the eighth entry in the series, ONE FEARFUL YELLOW EYE.

Two things became immediately clear: 1. Whatever else MacDonald was as a writer, he was a bona fide literary stylist. His prose, from word one, existed somewhere between deep literary experimentation (lots of wordplay, register changes, acrobatic pace) and the clipped brevity of a hard-boiled beat. Take the passage that opens the book:

"Around and around we went, like circling through wads of lint in a dirty pocket. We'd been in that high blue up yonder where it was a bright cold clear December afternoon, and then we had to go down into that guck, as it was the intention of the airline and the airplane driver to put the 727 down at O'Hare."

Like the best Spillane and Fleming, the thriller-mystery plot is rendered in prose that could just as easily find a home in a post-postmodern graduate school class. Think Joseph McElroy's ACTRESS IN THE HOUSE, but less hypnotically dense, more recognizably linear.

"Passengers reached up and put their lights on. The sky had lumps and holes in it. It becomes tight-sphincter time in the sky when they don't insert the ship into the pattern and get it down, but go around again. Stewardesses walk tippy-dainty, their color not good in the inside lights, their smiles sutured so firmly in place it pulls their pretty faces more distinctly against the skull-shape of pretty bones ... And then we dipped a sickening wing, leaving my stomach back up there at ten o'clock high, stood precariously still on big flaps, then steadied down into the runway lights streaming by, bumped and squeaked, brake-blasted, and everybody began smiling at everybody for no special reason..."

The second truth that became clear: MacDonald had a few things to say about the environment. In an "airport mystery" published in 1966—"all titles in the 21-volume series include a color, a mnemonic device which was suggested by his publisher so that when harried travelers in airports looked to buy a book, they could at once see those MacDonald titles they had not yet read"—this seemed both startling and fairly unheard of. As series "salvage consultant" Travis McGee touches down in Chicago, MacDonald touches on the rank, irreparable state of Chicago's water:

"The wind began to search out my tropic bone marrow, and I could smell a sourness in the wind. I remembered that it blew across a dying lake. For a hundred years the cities had dumped their wastes and corruptions and acids into it, and now suddenly everyone was aghast that it should have the impertinence to start dying like Lake Erie. The ecology was broken, the renewing forces at last overwhelmed. Now the politicians were making the brave sounds the worried peopled wanted to hear.

Now they were taking half-measures. Scientists said that only with total effort might the process be slowed, halted, reversed. But total effort, of course, would raise havoc with the supposedly God-given right of the thousand lakeshore corporations to keep costs down by running their poisons into the lake. Total effort would boost the tax structure to pay for effective sewage disposal systems.

So in the night wind, the lake stank, and I went back in out of the wind, and thought of the endless garbage barges that are trundled out of Miami into the blue bright Atlantic. People had thought the lake would last forever. When the sea begins to stink, man better have some fresh green planets to colonize, because this one is going to be used up."

I've since read that this is a running theme in the series, esp. as it's tied to the Florida locations that serve as McGee's home base. And it's these two elements, almost regardless of how successful or unsuccessful the mystery plotting turns out to be, that'll keep me reading. With 21 books in the series, there should be ample chance at a good (and literate) pulp experience.

Leonard Jacobs

April, 2015