“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!”
– Max Shulman, *Sleep ‘Til Noon*
Shulman’s parody of Mickey Spillane’s tougher than tough guy style probably represents what most people thought of “detective stories” when I was young. They were considered one of the lower rungs on literature’s evolutionary ladder.
Sherlock Holmes and a few other Brits passed muster with the literary crowd – they were British, after all, and mostly upper class. I thought they were insufferable, arrogant ponces and their brilliant deductions the product of their authors’ blatantly obvious cheating, (except for Chesterton’s Father Brown, whose understanding of human frailties informed his detections, and who exemplified what I thought a priest ought to be – humble, shrewd and forgiving).
Neither Chandler nor Hammett had yet been recognized for their introduction of actual human characters into the genre or their realistic portrayals of urban corruption as the normal state of things in America. Such recognition as they received resulted from movie versions of their books – The Big Sleep, Lady in the Lake, The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man. These reached enough people that the readers among them went to the original versions of the screenplays and found that both Chandler and Hammett were damned good writers. Not literachoor, or course, but….
I suppose I shared this snobbish view of crime fiction through high school and college, where “the canon” – those books that all the best people agreed were obligatory reading – was almost entirely the product of the well-known dead white men, mainly those who spoke with British accents. Only when I hit Northwestern did the books and spoken routines of some very much alive American white men begin to challenge my acceptance of the prevailing view that “serious” writers should have been embalmed at least a hundred years ago. My contemporary friends and I came to converse almost entirely in lines from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley lps. These people were talking about the world we were growing up in, and they were saying that it didn’t much resemble the official version of it. Reading began to provide me with the older brothers I’d never had, guys who’d been around, who’d been through the Big War I knew only through the Hollywood versions, who told the old truth that General Smedley Butler had tried to get across in his book War Is a Racket, who pointed out that the increasingly corporatized world was a similar racket. As in music, pop culture was beginning to challenge “high” culture.
The Army was kind enough to send me to a permanent duty station in Germany, where I was free to read whatever I could find to read at the kaserne my battalion inhabited when not out in the field. In the remarkable post library, I found mainly some excellent journalism, about which I’ll write presently. In the post PX I discovered the books of John D. MacDonald.
MacDonald had been destined for a business career when Pearl Harbor changed everyone’s plans. He served in various low-ranking officer positions in India, and in the OSS there. He was an alert observer of organizational corruption and idiocy, and he began to write fiction to retain his sanity and find a way to write to his wife about his life overseas. She sent the very first short story he mailed home to Story magazine, where it was accepted. By the time he got back to the States, he’d decided against a business career. He would be a writer. For nearly the next decade, he supported his wife and son by writing ten hours a day, turning out story after story for the pulp magazines at a penny a word, then for the brand new paperback original book market. By the mid 1960s, when I first encountered his work, he’d become widely respected and so successful that his publisher, Fawcett Gold Medal, had encouraged him to begin a series.
The series featured an unusual protagonist, Travis McGee. McGee lived on a houseboat in a Fort Lauderdale marina and, unlike most previous private eyes in fiction, had no public or private law enforcement experience. He had, instead, considerable combat experience from the Korean conflict, which experience had led him to conclude that a fellow ought to take his retirement whenever he could afford to, for as long as he could afford to. To support his serial retirements, McGee pretty much invented a career. That career consisted of helping the victims of various sorts of predators, both criminal and “legitimate,” regain whatever they’d been robbed of, and keeping half of what he recovered.
Writing many years later, Geoffrey O’Brien pinpointed what appealed to me so strongly in MacDonald’s books: “To read him is to hear a spoken voice – pausing, digressing, joking, all the while drawing you into the yarn. It’s not that the story is so remarkable; you’ve heard something like it before, you may even recognize chunks of it from another of his books, and after a while, it will blend into all the others. The anecdote may be utterly banal. It’s the voice that grabs you, the sure rhythms with which it measures out its story.”
This description had applied to only a limited extent to MacDonald’s pre-McGee books, in which the narrative voice had been largely restricted to “objectivity” by the conventions of the market. When he found a 1st-person narrator in McGee, MacDonal was set free to air his personal interests and admirations and revulsions. He gratefully recognized this new freedom: “Travis is my mouthpiece, depending on what areas we’re talking about. Every writer is going to put into the mouths of the people he wants you to respect opinions that he thinks are respectable. It’s that simple. Suppose we’re talking about a social, ecological ruin – the environment area….That’s my comment as well as his. As long as I’m making him a hero, it would be grotesque for me to give him an opinion with which I’m at odds.”
MacDonald’s opinions were largely conservative, not in a political sense – he seemed to view politicians of all persuasions as mere flunkeys of far more powerful forces – but in its original sense: he desired to preserve the good of the past and disdained much that was claiming to “improve” upon that past. His values were largely those of his father, who’d grown up reading and attempting to live by the works of Horatio Alger: hard, honest work and honorable conduct toward others were the watchwords a man should embrace. His Harvard MBA and his brief experiences in the business world had left him with a lifelong fascination for the multiple corruptions of those ideals he saw around him. McGee frequently remarked on one or another of them, but as often his friends or his clients supplied the analysis.
For example, explaining the possible source of a set of inferior postage stamps that have been somehow substituted for the true rarities he’s bought for one of his customers, an old dealer tells McGee,
‘Let me tell you what is maybe the history of this piece of junk here. Back in 1893 maybe some uncle goes to the Exposition and he brings back a fine gift, all the stamps, and maybe a souvenir album. So a kid licks this one like putting it on an envelope and sticks it in the album, along with the others. This one maybe had one straight edge, where it was at the edge of the sheet when it was printed. Okay, maybe it spends thirty, forty years in that album. Finally somebody tries to soak it off. Hard to do after the glue has set. They don’t get it all off. Some of the stamp comes off on the album paper. That leaves a place called a thin. A nice centered stamp like this with no gum and two thins and a straight edge, nothing else is wrong, it goes for maybe a hundred and fifty, hundred and a quarter retail, perhaps ninety bucks wholesale. Okay, last year or the year before, somebody buys this dog along with some others of the same kind of high-value dogs. They take them to Germany. Right now, working somewhere in West Germany, there is a pure genius. He makes up some kind of stuff to fill the thins. He gets the gum from low-denomination Columbians. He puts it on perfect, no slop-over between the perfs. And he reperfs the straight edge perfect as an angel. I’m telling you back around World War One, Sam Singer was the stamp doctor in this country. Then there was a fellow in Paris names Zareski who was pretty good, especially faking cancellations. But this German is the best yet. Very dangerous.”
That’s a good example of one of the durable delights of the McGee series. MacDonald followed his curiosity relentlessly. I suspect he did most of his research not in libraries but by searching out experts in whatever field he’d become curious about and pumping them relentlessly. He wanted to know how things worked, in the kind of detail only a practitioner can provide, and he delighted in passing on such knowledge to his readers. He gave you the details of chicanery, of thuggery, of organized corporate crime, which he came to view as the natural outgrowth of laissez-faire capitalism. He explained this view in a letter to his hometown paper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:
[Any] corporation…is a monolithic thing, a legalistic invention which thrives and flourishes upon profit, and is made sick, sometimes mortally, by loss. No matter how much feeling of public obligation the executive staff of any corporation might possess, the corporate entity is involved in maximizing short and long run profit and minimizing short and long term loss….The controls are scattered, hodge-podge, an illogical patchwork of state laws and county and municipal ordinances. Under these circumstances it becomes the policy of the management people to obstruct enforcement, to weaken existing laws, to deceive inspectors, all to avoid additional expense which…comes out of profit….The old [profit] yardstick is deadly but we cannot abandon it because it is what makes our society function. But it is turning our land, from sea to shining sea, into a sour jungle, noisy, dirty, gritty, and infinitely depressing.
In McGee’s voice, MacDonald put his criticism of the new, postwar consumer economy more concretely: “Far off on the north-south highways there was the insect sound of the fast moving trucks, whining toward warehouses, laden with emergency rush orders of plastic animals, roach tablets, eye shadow, ashtrays, toilet brushes, pottery crocodiles, and all the other items essential to a constantly growing GNP.”
MacDonald viewed the homogenization of pretty much everything in America as one of the depressing products of “the profit yardstick,” and he was adept at putting his views into fictional form, most effectively through dialog. Searching for an old family-run Italian restaurant he used to patronize, McGee is distressed to find it’s no longer where he remembers it stood. He asks a store clerk if he knows what’s become of the place.
“‘That old house was right down there where that big red and white chicken is flapping its wings. Chicky-Land….’
“‘If you wanted to find a meal that good right now, where would you go?’ I asked him.
“He took my money and made change as he thought it over. Finally he said, ‘Damn if we just don’t eat that good anymore anywhere. Funny, sort of. Big, rich country like this. Everything starting to taste like stale sawdust. Maybe it’s just me.’
“‘We are all living in chicky land,’ I told him.”
All the toilet brushes and pottery crocodiles, their production and transport, were produced at the cost of the despoliation of the natural world, destruction which MacDonald viewed as verging already on the irreparable. Musing on a proposed jaunt to the Caribbean islands, McGee thinks, “Yes indeed. I would have truly enjoyed showing her the islands. How the big aluminum plant and the oil refinery of Amerada Hess blacken the stinking skies over St. Croix. Maybe she’d like the SanJuan Guayama and Ybucoa areas of Puerto Rico where Commonwealth Oil, Union Carbide, Phillips Petroleum, and Sun Oil have created another new industrial wasteland where the toxic wastes have killed the vegetation, where hot oil effluents are discharged into the sea and flow westward along the shoreline in a black roiling stench, killing all sea life.”
MacDonald saw the economy’s mass production distorting the most formerly sacred spaces of the culture, molding the consumer into prefabricated and ultimately meaningless behaviors. While hardly immune to sexual desire, McGee, like his author, viewed the swinging 60s as not only another instance of homogenization but as an absurd and pernicious over-reaction to the enforced prudishness of the 1950s: “These are the playmate years and they are demonstratively fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantities, but there is a curious tastelessness about them….They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel….”
He concluded his diatribe against “the playmate years” with an idealism that must have come as a surprise to readers of standard tough-guy fiction: “Only a woman of pride, complexity, and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guilt or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave.” While McGee did as well with women as his fictional counterparts, his views were far more complex than those of Bond or Matt Helms or any of Spillane’s sadistic woman-haters. MacDonald had married young and luckily, and stayed married to the same woman all his life, in a love match anchored in mutual respect and friendship. While McGee was constrained to avoid domesticity by the expectations of the paperback thriller readership, he was the first man in the genre to form permanent friendships with female characters, friendships based, like MacDonald’s marriage, on admiration and respect for women as strong, as integrated, as dedicated to their work as he was to his.
By the time I came back from Germany, I was a confirmed MacDonald/McGee reader, and I kept up with the series and with MacDonald’s other writing as long as he lived. In a column for the Miami Herald, MacDonald outlined what McGee represented to him and to me and many other readers:
McGee resents being processed, programmed, fed through the machinery by experts trained in handling people rather than persons. He knows that the dentist, the post office, the County, the IRS, the airline hostess, the librarian, the highway engineer, the supermarket, the city government, the census bureau, the banker, the advertising agent, the automobile agency, the hospital, and the mortician are all intent on using him as a statistic, as one atom in a manageable mass, then studying him, weighing him, measuring him, predicting his actions on some huge probability table. They use manuals and trade journals and computers and statistical methods and psychological testing devices to predict mass reaction, and handle mass demand on a totally impersonal and totally efficient basis….It makes him feel degraded, and he reserves his little bit here and there to startle the processors out of their compulsion to flatten and deaden all human contact….Everybody knows something is wrong, and everybody has an eerie and formless nostalgia for something he has never known.
MacDonald, like Bob Dylan, like the Beatles, pioneered huge new territories of expression for the writers who would follow him. The Travis McGee books created the possibility that a writer could use the “detective story” as a delivery device for the kind of social observation the literary novel had once provided, but had largely abandoned by the 1950s, and for the likewise abandoned virtues of clever plotting, vividly described setting, and the full range of human character. Many other writers gratefully saw what he’d made possible, and followed his example toward their own ends.
