The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald
By Hugh Merrill
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About this ebook
Although John D. MacDonald published seventy novels and more than five hundred short stories in his lifetime, he is remembered best for his Travis McGee series. He introduced McGee in 1964 with The Deep Blue Goodbye. With Travis McGee, MacDonald changed the pattern of the hardboiled private detectives who preceeded him. McGee has a social conscience, holds thoughtful conversations with his retired economist buddy Meyer, and worries about corporate greed, racism and the Florida ecolgoy in a long series whose brand recognition for the series the author cleverly advanced by inserting a color in every title. Merrill carefully builds a picture of a man who in unexpected ways epitomized the Horatio Alger sagas that comprised his strict father's secular bible. From a financially struggling childhood and a succession of drab nine-to-five occupations, MacDonald settled down to writing for a living (a lifestyle that would have horrified his father). He worked very hard and was rewarded with a more than decent livelihood. But unlike Alger's heroes, MacDonald had a lot of fun doing it.
Hugh Merrill
Hugh Merrill lives in Pensacola, Florida.
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The Red Hot Typewriter - Hugh Merrill
CHAPTER 1
From the 1950s through the 1980s, John Dann MacDonald was one of the most popular and prolific writers in America. He was a crime writer who managed to break free of the genre and finally get serious consideration from critics. Seventy of his novels and more than five hundred of his short stories were published in his lifetime. When he died in 1986, more than seventy million of his books had been sold.
But it was not just sales figures that made MacDonald important. London Times critic H. R. F. Keating selected his 1979 novel, The Green Ripper, as one of the one hundred best mysteries of all time. That same novel won him the American Book Award for the best mystery of the year. His books were translated into Afrikaans, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian. Eight of his novels were made into motion pictures, including The Executioners, which became the critically acclaimed Cape Fear. Kurt Vonnegut said of MacDonald, To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.
The author and critic Stephen Vizinczey said MacDonald sketched the laidback life of golf, boating, long cool drinks, the peculiar callousness bred by hot climates and luxurious comfort, better than anyone else since Graham Greene.
As a master of detective fiction, MacDonald adapted a uniquely American hard-boiled style that influenced writers around the world. In 1995 the Library of America canonized this tough direct prose when it published a collection of the writing of Raymond Chandler. What was once dismissed as cheap literary entertainment now has a place beside Hawthorne and Faulkner. But hard-boiled literature is no museum piece. It began in the 1920s with the novels of Dashiell Hammett and the stories by other writers for Black Mask, the best of the thousands of pulp magazines of the era. The hard-boiled style continued with Raymond Chandler in the 1940s and redefined itself in the 1950s and 1960s with the novels of Jim Thompson, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald.
Some purists believe the style eroded with the grotesque, comic-book-like, violent novels of Mickey Spillane and his imitators and then vanished forever. It did not. John D. MacDonald returned hard-boiled writing to the realm of literature and pulled it from the sewer of sadism where Spillane had dragged it. Because MacDonald’s early career was as a paperback writer, it was a long time before he was taken seriously by most critics. However, beginning in 1953, Anthony Boucher became his champion in The New York Times. [His] writing is marked by sharp observation, vivid dialogue, and a sense of sweet, warm horror,
Boucher wrote. He also called MacDonald the John O’Hara of the crime suspense story.
In his Travis McGee novels, MacDonald gave the hard-boiled tradition something new, a likable hero. Both Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Sam Spade were failed policemen who lived alone, had no friends, and went to the office every day. Hammett’s other detective, the Continental Op, didn’t even have a name. These hard-boiled heroes had small, lonely apartments in the middle of the city and ate greasy diner food. Travis McGee, on the other hand, lived on a houseboat in the Florida sunshine, drove a Rolls-Royce pickup truck, had lots of friends and scores of women, ate good food, and worked as little as possible. Millions of readers wanted to be Travis McGee, and after MacDonald’s death in 1986 other writers—Jimmy Buffett and Carl Hiaasen, for example—created heroes in McGee’s image.
And yet McGee was more than a detective. He was the mouthpiece for MacDonald’s diatribe against the spoiling of the environment and the corrupting of civilization.
Far off on the north-south highways there was the insect sound of the fast moving trucks,
MacDonald wrote, 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
To understand John D. MacDonald, his writing, his life, and his rebelliousness against mainstream society, you have to go back a generation, to his father, Eugene Andrew MacDonald. A believer in the bootstrap theory, he was devoted to the juvenile novels of Horatio Alger, the Gilded Age dime novelist whose books taught boys that hard work, education, good manners, and a little luck could give them everything capitalism could offer.
Eugene Andrew MacDonald was born in 1888 in a house in Gildeas Alley, New Haven. His own father, Hugh MacDonald, had come to America from the suburbs of Glasgow. He was twenty when Eugene was born. Eugene’s mother, Catherine King MacDonald, was seventeen.
Hugh MacDonald was a gardener and a handyman. He didn’t make much money, but his desire to own property so possessed him that food and clothing for his family were secondary considerations.
He was overwhelmingly jealous. He constantly accused Catherine of having affairs with other men. He apparently beat her regularly, although Eugene MacDonald doesn’t say so in his memoirs. His jealous rages became so bad that doctors advised Catherine that she would suffer a mental breakdown if she didn’t leave her husband. Her brother, Edward King, worked in Washington, and he sent her enough money to come south and live. Bur he didn’t send enough to bring her two children, Eugene and his younger sister, Lillian, with her. She kissed us both goodbye and told us somehow, some way, she would secure enough money to come back to New Haven and get us,
Eugene wrote in an unpublished memoir. But she never did.
While Catherine was in Washington, Hugh tried to put his children in an orphanage. Eugene remembered a cold, snowy evening with my sister and I hand in hand, being led up to one orphan asylum after another. Each asylum told my Dad that they could not take us in because both of our parents were living.
A few months later, Catherine and Hugh reconciled and she returned to New Haven.
Eugene was an excellent student. His teacher gave him copies of a few volumes of Horatio Alger’s books to take home, along with The Youth’s Companion. The books made a deep impression on him. The stories gave me confidence, hope and ambition,
he wrote.
In 1902, when he was fourteen, he put those lessons to work. When he entered high school, he got a paper route to earn money for books. On the first Saturday he went out, he signed up fifteen subscribers to the New Haven Union. I gave them a good story about wanting to stay in high school. It proved that Americans are always ready and willing to help the underdog.
He was so successful that the Union’s rival paper, the New Haven Register, hired him away. But no matter how well he did, there was never enough money at home. He and his mother got work sewing hooks and eyes on cards, he added another paper route, he got a job as a lamplighter for the gaslights that dotted the New Haven streets. With it all he still managed to get good grades.
But there was another problem: Hugh was beating Catherine again. I realized that unless I could get my mother and sister away from such unpleasant surroundings, they would sooner or later crack up,
he wrote. It was then I decided to work during the summer to build up a fund which some day I could use to start life anew somewhere with my mother and sister.
One of his paper route customers was a foreman in the cartridge department of the Winchester Arms Company, and he helped Eugene find a job polishing .22 caliber cartridges. He took the new job but kept delivering the papers and lighting the lamps. By the end of the summer he had saved $66. Still there was not enough money. Congressman N. D. Sherry, one of his paper route customers, told Eugene he wanted to nominate him to attend West Point. I was flattered and thanked him profusely,
Eugene writes. But financial and home considerations were such that I could not accept.
Another customer on his paper route, a professor at Yale, arranged for a college scholarship. Again Eugene thanked his benefactor and refused. After the first of the year, I noticed that my mother was failing in health. The doctor advised us that she would never be herself again until she was relieved of the mental strain she was experiencing.
In June 1906, on the night Eugene was to graduate from high school, Catherine was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. She was not expected to live. Eugene made his graduation speech and then hurried by cab to his mother’s bedside. The doctor told me they had done everything known to medical science to improve her condition without success.
But four weeks later she showed some improvement and was discharged.
Soon after she arrived home, there was a telegram from her brother, Edward, in Washington. His wife had died. Edward had a nine-year-old daughter and a thirteen-year-old son and needed someone to take charge of his household. Could Catherine and the children come as soon as possible? The three of them began counting the days.
On the first of August, Eugene resigned from his job and booked tickets to Washington. Catherine left a letter for Hugh. It was a bleak, gray day. With fear and trepidation in my heart, I was not relieved until the train pulled out of the depot,
Eugene wrote. Nine hours later, the three MacDonalds arrived in Washington in a heavy rainstorm.
Eugene went to work at the Bliss Electrical School, keeping the books for $25 a month. Life certainly seemed better than it had been in New Haven, but then Uncle Edward decided to remarry and the MacDonalds had to move out. Eugene changed jobs and went to work for the Potomac Telephone Company; Catherine repaired old rugs and carpets for $5 a week.
MacDonald’s first assignment for the Potomac Telephone Company was cleaning out old phones in a brothel. They assigned me to the red light district with instructions to call the office every half hour … I took [the first phone, a heavy coin-box phone] from the wall and laid it against the stair post with the [large] transmitter sticking out. One of the girls of the house, dressed in a funny gown and half awake, came down the steps and hit the set and bruised her toe. I never heard such a string of foul oaths in my life, not even by a man. I was so embarrassed I sweated like a horse, and the job, which ordinarily took ten minutes to do, took me one half hour, fortunately in time to put in my first report call.
A few months after Eugene’s whorehouse job, he was reassigned to the White House, where he accidentally listened in on President Theodore Roosevelt. What’s that? Somebody is listening on this line,
he heard the President say. Fifteen minutes later, Eugene was arrested by the Secret Service. Potomac Telephone cleared him, and he was assigned permanently to White House duties. Even so, telephone work didn’t seem the way to success. Times were better for the MacDonalds now—Eugene was making more money, his sister, Lillian, was working as a telephone operator, and his mother was able to quit her job.
Then Eugene was befriended again by N. D. Sherry, the congressman who had offered to nominate him for West Point. Sherry got him a job mailing the Congressional Record along with garden seeds to his constituents. The pay was $75 a month. But Catherine fell ill again and was advised to get out of Washington; the heat and humidity were killing her. Luckily, Eugene found work at the Winchester Arms Company in New Haven.
My mother occasionally questioned me about the future, and insisted that I must look around for someone to marry, someone who had a good business head and knew how to watch the pennies,
he wrote. Most of the time Eugene was too busy working to pay any attention to girls. Then, in the Savin Rock amusement park in New Haven, he saw a redhead riding a white horse on the merry-go-round.
That,
he told a friend who was with him, is a Wow.
The redhead was Marguerite Dann (called Margie, with a hard G), a secretary at the New Haven YMCA. Her mother had died when she and her sister were young children, and she had been raised by her father, Edward Odell Dann, and her mother’s spinster sister, Emily Grace (Nana) Williams.
Eugene and Margie began courting in 1911 when she was eighteen and he was twenty-three. Before they were married, Eugene had been successful in helping to liquidate the assets of the Gotham Shirt Company for a New York bank and had moved to New York City. Here he was able to streamline the business offices of the company that made the Owen Magnetic, an electric automobile with an automatic transmission. The car sold well for a time, until it turned out that no one knew how to repair it.
In the midst of this business crisis, on June 21, 1915, Eugene and Marguerite were married. They moved to an apartment in the Bronx. Within a few months, Eugene’s mother and sister took an apartment next door to the newlyweds. Again there was not enough money. Then Margie announced she was pregnant.
Eugene went back into the arms business. World War I had begun. His first job was supervising the manufacture of six-inch shells for the British navy. The MacDonalds moved again, this time to Sharon, Pennsylvania, where Eugene’s employer had a plant.
On July 16, 1916, the same day the MacDonalds’ furniture arrived on the train from New York City, Margie went to the hospital and began labor. It lasted for fifteen hours. It appeared that a cesarean section might be necessary, but finally the baby was born. It was an eight-and-a-half-pound boy. Eugene and Margie named him John Dann MacDonald. They called him Jack.
CHAPTER 2
Eugene MacDonald, born in a dingy dwelling in a New Haven alley, had achieved stability and financial security while still in his twenties. He was no longer the handyman’s son. After years of working at odd jobs, taking correspondence courses, and inching his way up the social and professional ladder, he was respectable. It was within this cocoon of middle-class respectability that Jack and his sister, Doris, grew up.
During World War I, Eugene had prospered. Moonlighting as an accountant for an elderly businessman named Stevenson, he discovered that the man had overpaid his taxes by $100,000. The grateful Stevenson made him secretary-treasurer of the Standard Tank Car Company in Sharon, which he had acquired. At thirty, MacDonald was earning the handsome salary of twenty thousand dollars a year plus bonuses.
The MacDonalds moved again. For Jack MacDonald, who was only four years old, the best thing about the new house was a crystal radio set with earphones on which he used to listen to KDKA in Pittsburgh, the first commercial radio station in the United States. Jack’s early childhood was the common one of a middle-class kid. He enjoyed the outdoors and sports—except for swimming. Three times he had to be hauled unconscious out of a pool or a lake. After the third time, he abandoned aquatic pleasures.
The family spent summers in a house they bought in Orangeville, Ohio, on the Pymatuning River, about twelve miles from Sharon. There Jack collected and mounted butterflies. I sent away for a butterfly manual, a killing bottle, a proper net, instructions for mounting and identifying.
The one he had called the Zebra
was properly the yellow-barred Heliconian. The Ghost
was Claudius pernicius, and the little lavender job was called the great purple hairstreak. In a speech to a group of Florida educators years later, MacDonald remembered that he acquired and with great care cut up the colored plates of rare butterflies and pinned the paper images next to the dead ones. The paper images were never as detailed as the ones which had been alive.
MacDonald was at the family’s Ohio home when he celebrated his ninth birthday.
On the July evening, [Pa Dann, his grandfather] asked me if I would like to go down to Orangeville with him in the rowboat. I was very pleased whenever he asked me to go along. He was going into town to buy a new pocket knife. He always carried a pocket knife and he always kept it razorsharp. We tied up at the lower dock and walked to the general store. My grandfather spent a long time studying the pocket knives, called pen knives then because, I suspect, they had been owned in a previous age to recut and renotch the nibs on quill pens.
He finally bought one exactly like his old one. My recall is precise and exact. It had two blades. The handle was slender and graceful, and made of a streaky graygreen substance, slightly translucent. The blades clicked into place with oily precision when opened. Set into that greenish stone-like substance of the handle, on one side, was a tiny shield-shape of silver metal. The knife came with a soft gray chamois case which had a brass snap and a black button on the snap.
Then he rowed us back up the river. It was hard work in the summer heat. The sounds were the creak and thunk of oarlocks, a bubbling of water around the blunt bow, an infrequent grunt of effort.
Halfway home there was a place where the river widened for a short distance, and there was a place near the bank where the current circled, where one could pull in and rest for a time, turning slowly, before contesting the current again.
As Pa Dann rested, he took the old knife out of his pocket. My heart jumped into my throat. My birthday was coming soon. He was going to give me his old knife. I knew he was going to give it to me. Why else had he asked me to come along with him?
He opened the blades of the old knife and closed them. They had been sharpened and sharpened again until they were narrow slivers of steel perhaps half their original length. I would treasure it. I would keep it as sharp as he had. I would learn how to keep it that sharp. He would teach me.
He said it had been a good old knife. He said he hoped the steel in the new one would be as good, but he doubted it. He looked at it and sighed, and I was ready to reach out from the broad seat in the stern so he could put the knife in my hand.
He flipped it over the side into the muddy river and picked up the oars and rowed the rest of the way back to the cottage dock.
He had no way of knowing. He was not an unkind man. I can still see that knife glint in the summer air and hear the little plop it made as it fell into the Pymatuning River.
I dreamed of it. I dreamed that a big hole had opened up and the river had disappeared, leaving black mud where I walked and walked, looking for the knife … . The knife is still there, forever turning and twinkling in the light of a lost July, falling, falling toward the greenbrown river.
In 1925, Eugene’s employer, the Standard Tank Car Company, fell on hard times. The majority of stock was sold, and Eugene was elected a director and officer of the new company, but a year later, he was asked to come back to Savage Arms, where he had worked before. His present company was about to be taken over, and he could be without a job. The family moved once more, to Utica, New York.
As he packed for the move, Jack MacDonald began going though his various collections. There were ship models, balsa-wood gliders, crystal sets, bits of old clocks and watches, and all the stamp-collecting paraphernalia that was part of his current hobby. He came upon his butterfly collection. The paper insects had curled their wings and faded to grays and pastels,
he remembered later. They had faded just as my trays of moths had faded. The butterflies were still vivid … . The pins had rusted. The wing scales had flaked off them.
Jack threw the butterflies away. He was a stamp collector now. The family finished packing, climbed in the car, and drove out of town.
Utica was typical of upstate New York towns. If Ronald Reagan’s nostalgia politics of the 1980s had any basis in reality, it was probably in Syracuse, or Rochester, or Utica. These were towns where almost everyone—certainly everyone of consequence—was white, Protestant, and Republican. Anything at all exotic was kept at bay—Negroes were in Harlem or Alabama, Italians were in Philadelphia, the Irish were in Boston, Democrats were in Chicago. This was the America of Norman Rockwell, a nation where young men who followed Horatio Alger would feel at home. It was the America that Hollywood used when it began its fabrication of the land Frank Capra would celebrate in his sentimental movies.
Jack attended John F. Hughes Public School. He was pressured by his parents into going to Sunday school and got medals for attendance. He was indifferent about summer camp. I didn’t especially like it or dislike it. It made me feel impatient, as though there were other things I would rather be doing, but I couldn’t put a name to them,
he remembered later. He fought with his sister, Doris, and was punished for tying her to the living-room drapes. [We] could always trust [our] mother’s understanding, but somehow Father just didn’t seem to see things [our] way,
Doris MacDonald wrote of her father’s sternness.
When he was twelve, Jack developed severe headaches accompanied by a high fever. His tongue turned white and there were red splotches on it. He developed a body rash. It was scarlet fever, and in this case it was accompanied by mastoiditis, an inflammation of bones in the head. Today, scarlet fever would be treated with penicillin. But this was 1928, nine years before that antibiotic was discovered and another six or seven before it was used. Jack was put to bed. He stayed there for a year. Today, medical experts believe it was mastoiditis that kept him in bed for so long. Scarlet fever, even in those pre-antibiotic days, seldom lasted more than a few weeks. It was the complications—in this case, mastoiditis—that caused the long recovery.
During the year of convalescence, Jack MacDonald read. He read everything—Flaubert, Hemingway, Faulkner, Galsworthy, Upton Sinclair, B. Traven, Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He read the classics. He read the pulps. And when he was not reading, his mother, Margie, read to him. That year was an immersion into the world of letters that would change his life—a baptism of literature. It was also a year of solitary confinement. I entertained myself by exercise of imagination,
he wrote later. After his recovery, he devoured the books in the Utica library. I read my way through library shelves, one book after another, going at the rate of a couple a day for years, making myself astigmatic and myopic.
He also became more of a loner. He is a prolific reader and a deep thinker,
Eugene wrote in a letter about his