The Beach Girls

Nineteen Fifty-Nine was another banner year for John D MacDonald, a banner year that capped a banner decade. He began the Fifties with a seemingly effortless shift from pulp writer to paperback author, and in only ten short years he had produced 23 paperback originals, 7 hardcover works of fiction, an anthology of his own work and an anthology of works by other authors. Plus, he continued writing short fiction, producing a mere 160 novellas and short stories for the magazines of the day. Not bad for a guy who didn’t start writing until he was 29.

By the end of the decade he showed little evidence of slowing down. While working steadily on the Mystery Writers of America anthology The Lethal Sex -- a project he once claimed “cost me a novel of my own” -- he knocked off four book length works of fiction: Please Write for Details and Deadly Welcome in March, The Crossroads in July, and finally, The Beach Girls in September. (The Lethal Sex would be published in December.) All four of these books are good examples of MacDonald’s breadth of talent: the great range of subject matter he could effortlessly master, the backgrounds and characters he could magically bring to life, and the amazing skill at storytelling that still holds up today as a masterclass in writing fiction. But there’s something unique in this collection of novels, something MacDonald had never attempted before. Two of these books were so similar in plot, tone and character as to be flip sides of the same coin. There’s even a character crossover, the only one I’m aware of outside the McGee series. It is almost as if the author wrote these works simultaneously (a practice he employed throughout his writing career), with each playing off the other. Or perhaps he was working on the same idea, trying two different tacks on the same plan, only to end up with two separate but very similar novels. In any event, his readers were (and are) blessed to have both of these works: Please Write for Details and The Beach Girls.

The novels were handled very differently. Please Write for Details was published in hardcover by Simon and Shuster, while The Beach Girls was a paperback original put out by Fawcett Gold Medal. The hardback was given publicity and a book tour, while The Beach Girls seems to have come and gone like a thief in the night. Please Write for Details utilized MacDonald’s favorite narrative perspective, the multi-character third person pov, while The Beach Girls utilized a method he used all the way back in 1954 with All These Condemned, where each chapter is told in first person singular by a different character. But even there MacDonald gave up on that toward the end of the book and switched to third person. Finally, the characters are from different worlds. The people of Please Write for Details are middle-class gentlefolk, spending a few weeks in an art camp in Mexico, while those of The Beach Girls are tough, hard-living, boat people, living (for the most part) on their seagoing crafts.

But the plots evolve pretty much in the same way, with MacDonald’s focus on several would-be couples in various states of difficulty, and each novel has its climax build around a great get-together: a wedding in Please Write for Details, a birthday party in The Beach Girls.

Curiously, there is no beach in The Beach Girls, and it’s never certain who the girls are that the title is referring to. MacDonald’s working titles for the novel -- Six Girls Have I; The Ketch, The Gaff and the Girl; The Girls on the Beach -- don’t give much of a clue either. The action takes place in the Stebbins Marina, a fictional locale in the fictional resort town of Elihu Beach, on the Atlantic coast of Florida, somewhere between Palm Beach and Ft Lauderdale, on the western side of the Intracoastal Waterway. What beach there is is on the far side of State Route A1A, which runs north-south along the outer barrier island, but it is barely referred to in the novel. The Stebbins Marina is an old establishment and it has seen better days. Started in 1919 by Jess Stebbins, “it grew like a mushroom patch,” and now “nothing matches, everything needs paint, everything is about to fall down.” Jess has been dead for seven years when the The Beach Girls opens, and the marina is run by his widow, Alice, a “big horse” who is sturdily built and who is now 50 years old. She operates out of a small, rickety office and lives in a small apartment up on the second floor. She’s tough, crusty and profane, and she makes just enough money off the enterprise to keep afloat, both financially and literally.

There are several docks at Stebbins Marina, and most are identified by letter and number, but the focus of the book is on the residents of Dock D, where there are fifteen slips housing ten permanent residents, plus one corporate-owned boat captained by one of the residents, 35 year old Orbie Derr, and it is he who kicks off the novel with “his” first-person chapter. He gives us the lay of the land, briefly introduces the various characters that reside on D Dock, and establishes what will become the main plot with his first sentence:

It was a right pretty night when Leo Rice arrived at the Stebbins Marina. Friday, it was. the first day of August. It was later on the same month that everything went to hell for just about everybody. Maybe he was, like Joe Rykler explained to me, a catalyst. But I've got the general opinion everything was due to go to hell anyway. things had been working up to it.

The residents of D Dock are a tight, insular and protective group, and they resent it when Alice tells Rice to tie up on the end of “their” dock. They consist of Christy Yale, Helen Hass, Anne Browder and Amy Penworthy, four “girls” who live on two houseboats: Christy and Helen in the Shiftless and Anne and Amy in the Alrightee. All four women have day jobs in Elihu Beach and all four are unmarried. There’s Joe Rykler, a twice-divorced freelance writer who lives aboard his Ampersand, Gus Andorian, a big, aging, widowed grandfather who lives on a motorless scow, and Bud and Ginny Linder, a young married couple who were in the process of sailing around the world in their Fancy Free when it was storm damaged six mile offshore and the couple were forced to come to Stubbins, tie up and get day jobs in order to pay for the repairs. Other residents of D Dock, but not present for the arrival of Rice, include Syd Stark, a playboy with possible mob connections, living aboard the relatively luxurious Pieces of Seven with a young starlet named Francesca Portoni; Sim Gallowell and Marty Urban, friends and joint owners of the Sea Gal, a charter boat; and finally Rex Rigsby, owner of a Bahamian ketch called the Angel. Rex also makes a living taking charters, but he is not considered a member of the D Dock gang, for reasons that will eventually reveal themselves.

Leo Rice arrives, motoring down the Waterway and into the Stubbins basin in an old Higgins Sedan, and it’s clear he is a novice boatman. After asking to tie up he is instructed to back into Slip 13, but he bangs into the pilings twice before Orbie jumps aboard and takes the controls from him. Orbie’s first impression of Rice is neatly written and keenly observed:

He was about forty, a big lean guy, deeply tanned, with one of those pleasant ugly faces. He wore khaki shorts and he looked as if he was in fine shape. But he didn’t look sure of himself—I mean in more ways than not being able to handle thirty-four feet of boat. Like he’d been gutted. Like some of the running parts had been taken out of him and put back in with string.

Rice explains that he just purchased the boat -- the Ruthless -- two weeks ago up in Jacksonville and he received a brief lesson on how to pilot it. He keeps to himself that first night, not bothering the other D Dockers who are sitting around drinking beer and eating hamburgers. But the plot is set in motion.

There are many characters in The Beach Girls, but MacDonald wisely chooses to focus on a select few in telling the tale.

Orbie Derr has lived all his life on or near the water and is an expert seaman. Divorced, he is currently employed as charter captain for the Lullaby, a 40-foot diesel Matthews, owned by a Pennsylvania company that makes baby furniture. During the summer months the company sends "batches of women from the office" down to vacation at a nearby hotel and they have free run of the Lullaby. It is Orbie's job to accommodate them. The reader is tempted to suspect that these may be the "beach girls" referred to in the title, but MacDonald doesn't follow this thread very closely. And lest one think this is a dream job, piloting unchaperoned women around the Caribbean, Orbie states otherwise.

It’s a mess. I got four batches last summer, and this summer it will be five. Six to eight females in each batch. Maybe they’re just fine up there, but they go crazy down here in the summer. They get drunk and they get seasick and they get sunburned so bad they get chills and fever. They run from twenty-five to fifty-five, and they aren’t hired for looks. You should hear them all squeal at once when somebody hooks a fish. The better-looking ones sometimes seem willing enough, but I know damn well that if word ever got back to Pennsylvania that Captain Derr messed around with one of them, good-by job.

It’s not uncommon for MacDonald to begin one of his multi-perspective novels with one of the secondary characters, and that’s pretty much what Orbie is. His initial chapter is his only chapter and he mainly sets the scene in the marina.

Joe Rykler has been married twice and has vowed to never do it again. A writer of how-to books, he lives on his aptly-named boat the Ampersand. At 31 he is still young enough to be playing the field and has gone on several cruises with various women.

I am big, dark-haired and look slightly unkempt at all times. This awakens the mother in them. They want to sew on buttons and cook for me. I have brown eyes and I can look very hurt. I have various lines of patter and chatter that have proved out well. Also, I am a romantic figure. I am a writer who lives and works on his boat. They are inclined to sympathize with my creative urge to write a big novel. They are saddened that I must waste my substance by writing do-it-yourself books in order to support myself and my two ex-wives.

Joe’s real objective is Anne Browder, one of the two residents of the Alrightee, but that has been, so far, unsuccessful. “It wasn’t a case of not getting to first base. I couldn’t even catch a ride to the ball park.”

Ann Browder is the newest resident of D Dock, moving onto the Alrightee with Amy Penworthy eight months prior to the action of the novel, having relocated to Elihu Beach from New York City. She is a pretty blonde with a fabulous set of legs, but she’s reserved and controlled. She doesn’t smile much, she doesn’t date and she’s politely rebuffed every advance Joe Rykler has made. When she finally agrees to go out to dinner with Joe she reveals that she came down to Florida after a horrible ending to a three-year affair with a married man. When she decided to get pregnant in order to prod him into leaving his wife, he freaked and broke it up, sending Anne to an abortionist in Philadelphia. (A remarkably frank passage for MacDonald at this point in his writing.) She can’t get over it and is resigned to the fact that she is incapable of loving anyone else.

Forty year old Leo Rice is at Stubbins Marina for a reason, and it’s not because he just happened to stop by on his way down from Jacksonville. He’s a high-ranking corporate executive from Syracuse on a mission that has nothing to do with his job. A year ago his wife, tired of being ignored by his constant focus on work, confronted him with the news that she wanted a trial separation. She and a girlfriend were going to head down to the Bahamas and she was going to try and find herself. This was a bolt from the blue for workaholic Leo, and he protested but she was adamant. They put their two boys in boarding school and she left. And in only a few weeks later she was dead.

She had committed suicide after spending several weeks on a yacht with a man who wooed her, took her money, then dumped her. After much investigation Leo was able to discover that the man was named Rex Rigsby.

Rex Rigsby is the “bad guy” of the novel and Leo Rice hunting him down in order to exact some sort of revenge is the primary plot of The Beach Girls. Rigsby is remarkably similar to Paul Klauss, the villain of Please Write for Details: a sociopathic playboy who hunts, woos and ruins woman for sport. But while Klauss was a man who played this game in order to destroy the women, Rigsby mainly does it for the money he is able to extract from them. That they are emotionally destroyed is merely a nice dividend. And of course Rigsby is moored on D Dock, in the very slip next to Leo.

While Leo’s revenge is the main thread of the novel, there is another: the end of the Stubbins Marina. For years Alice Stubbins has been holding off would-be buyers who want to tear down the place and rebuild it into a pretty, expensive showplace, “like down in Lauderdale.” One particular real estate agent, the oily George Haley, calls often, and his entreaties begin to sound more like threats, in words familiar to any reader of MacDonald’s works:

“I’ve wasted time talking sweet to you. Now I’m going to put the cards right out where you can see them. This is a crummy, run-down place. It’s a damn eyesore. It’s hampering the development of the land around it. Important people own some of the land around it. They want to see that land value go up. You haven’t got the capital to improve this place. And so, sooner or later, in one way or another, they’re going to squeeze you out of it. Right?”

And then there are various side characters who take up more or less space depending on MacDonald’s interest. All are exceptionally well drawn and humorously portrayed. There’s Captain Jimmy Meirs and his new wife Jannifer Jean, a “swamp pussy” (MacDonald’s term, not mine!) who is twenty years his junior and whose hobby is sleeping around behind his back. There are Stan and Beezie Hooper, rich, lazy owners of the big Fleetermouse. Beezie is a MacDonald “type,” scrawny, leathery from the sun and mostly drunk. And Jack and Judy Engly, owners of the charter boat Judy’s Luck. Judy’s claim to fame are her loud ululations during sex, sounds that can be heard every night throughout the entire marina. It is introduced in the first chapter and will become a major plot point toward the end.

But as in Please Write for Details, it’s the couples MacDonald is most interested in writing about in The Beach Girls, and as in that earlier novel he focuses on three.

Ann Browder agrees to have dinner with Joe Rykler that first night when Leo Rice arrives at Stebbins Marina. This is a bolt from the blue for Joe. It is over dinner where Joe finally learns Anne’s story: her love affair, her abortion, her relocation to Florida. But Ann seems to have an ulterior motive for the date. After Joe admits that he is only after sex, that after two failed marriages he doesn’t believe in love anymore, Ann brazenly suggests that they repair to the Ampersand to sleep together.

“I wouldn’t want it to mean anything to you, Joe. That wouldn’t be fair, because it wouldn’t mean anything to me. You understand it wouldn’t mean anything to me. It would be like pretend. But I wouldn’t want it to be messy. I couldn’t stand that. Or a stranger. It has to be somebody I like. I want it to . . . change what I am, just a little.”

The couple’s lovemaking, however, is a failure, at least as far as Anne is concerned. In a passage as frank as anything MacDonald had written up to this point, Joe relates the “ordeal”:

We were there together possibly two hours. I tried. God knows I tried. And she did too. I am sure of that. But when she shuddered in my arms I knew it was neither excitement nor passion, but rather the reflexive tremor of the sacrificial animal. Though she tried to pretend, I could sense the regret, the remorse, the quiet despair—and the consciousness of shame. And when her breathing was rapid, it was merely the result of effort. Her rhythms had that erratic imbalance of contrivance rather than need. And when finally, in an admission of defeat, I went on to my own completion, it was but a sour spasm, lonely, meaningless and unshared. We lay deadened in the empty darkness until she gave a great sigh and climbed over me and found her robe and put it on. I got up and pulled my Bermuda walking shorts on, and turned on the light. Even muted, it was far too bright. We avoided each other’s eyes.

The failed cure, however, does have a very real effect on Joe, one that will provide his thread of the plot for the remainder of the novel. As he watches Ann walk away, down the dock toward the Allrightee, he is transformed:

And my heart burst. The tired old Rykler heart. Burst and sprayed acid into my eyes, misting the stars. I wanted to spend the next thousand years with her. So I tried to cope with the unexpected, unwanted invasion of Cupid. The little winged bastard had given up his bow and arrow and snuck up on me with a bazooka… You are a very cynical fellow, Rykler. You bear the wounds of two horrible marriages. That is a nice leggy blondie and you had the acquisitive urge to roll her over in the clover, and you did. Mission accomplished. End of incident. Love is a word on greeting cards. Love is not for you, Joseph. Eternity is a dirty word. She probably leaves hair in the sink, burns the toast and has a loose filling. She is glorious. She is what it is all about.

Alice Stubbins, at age 50, would seem an unlikely candidate for MacDonald’s love interests, but here he departs from his usual practice of focusing on twenty-somethings and writes about romance between people older than he was (43) when he wrote this. Alice has a fairly typical MacDonald backstory: married young and happily to a construction worker, blessed with a child, but it all went to hell somewhat suddenly. The child died at age 11 (reasons not divulged) and, after 22 “good years” of marriage, her husband Mike was killed in a construction accident. So at age 39 she found herself alone and in Florida, fishing off a dock at the Stubbins Marina, where she met Jess, who was nearly 25 years older than she was. He eventually proposed and, out of sheer loneliness, she accepted. The sexual part of the relationship is humorously recounted by Alice:

About the physical part of it, I didn’t know what to expect. After the ceremony he kissed me quick and timid. I knew I didn’t feel any more response to him than I would to your granddaddy, but if he figured that was part of the bargain, I wasn’t going to hold out on him. I needn’t have worried about him. By the end of the first week I had some pretty strong suspicions of what had killed off his first two wives. And my responses were all in order. I wasn’t complaining a bit. After twenty-two years with a man like Mike, you build up fires that never go out. Jess loved to have me joke him about his virility, expressing awe and alarm. He’d stick his chest out and swagger up and down. After our first couple of weeks he slowed down to the pace of a sailor on leave.

The marriage lasts only three years before Jess becomes ill and dies, and he leaves the marina to Alice. At first she had great plans to fix the place up, but she never gets around to it and now she just gets by, only fixing things that must be fixed and barely surviving financially. But she has grown attached to the residents of the Stubbins Marina, and is especially friendly with those of D Dock. And more than just friendly with Gus Andorian.

Gus is a retired steelworker, a widower approaching 70, who lives alone on a scow called the Queen Bee. Alice describes him as “big and thick and solid as a tree.” He moved to Florida after his wife died, much to the consternation of his six married daughters, who periodically come to visit him and attempt to convince him to come back and live with them. But Gus is having the time of his life, free from the control his wife had over him. As Orbie recalls in the first chapter, “she was a little bit of a thing, and she had strong ideas about drinking, swearing, spitting and gambling. She kept the lid on Gus.” The lid is now off, and Gus and Alice are having a relationship.

It began one evening when Alice twisted her ankle and Gus, passing by, rescued her and carried her up to her apartment over the marina office. After a clumsy attempt at first aid, something magical (and, in 2018, very politically incorrect) happens:

He knelt, admiring his handiwork, and then looked up at me. There was a sort of a click you could almost hear. And in the next second he sprang like a lion. I fought for maybe two whole seconds. Afterwards he wept, bashed his deep chest with his fist, demanding I call the police and have him locked up forever. He shouldn’t be free to assault innocent ladies. Finally I got it through his thick skull that the lady didn’t mind a bit. His whole craggy face turned into one vast mask of surprise. “Yah?” he said. “Yah.” So he came back to bed.

Once Alice has made the decision to sell the marina, her ongoing relationship with Gus is left is great doubt.

The most interesting relationship, and the one that MacDonald himself is obviously most interested in exploring, is that between Leo Rice and Christy Yale.

Christy is another MacDonald “type,” a woman who, wracked by doubts about her own physical appearance, masks her unhappiness behind the makeup of a clown. She has a clear antecedent in the character of Judy Jonah in All These Condemned and the similarly-named Christy Hallowell in Dead Low Tide, the “compulsive clown” who jokes her way through life with wisecracks and buffoonery. For while her body from the neck down is incomparable -- a “jim-dandy,” as she herself readily admits -- her face is something else:

This too-round face, devoid of any suggestion of a romantic gauntness. An afterthought of a nose, so inconsequential as to look embryonic. Mouth enough for a girl and a half. Eyes of a funny shade of green under furry black brows set into a face so asymmetrical that the left one is noticeably higher than the right… like Mickey Rooney, from the neck up.

A lifelong resident of Elihu Beach, Christy has her own tragic past, a fiance who died while serving in the military, “over there, on a hill with a number instead of a name, and when they’re dead you can’t tell whether it was a police action or a war.” She is resigned to a life of spinsterhood, with the occasional dalliance, until she meets Leo Rice.

It follows a fist fight between Leo and a marina tough over a bumped boat, where Leo is handily beaten to the ground. Christy takes him back to his own boat and tries to take care of his wounds. She has an ulterior motive, in that she wants to find out what Rice -- an obvious landlubber -- is doing piloting a boat and tying up at the Stubbins Marian. Leo is cagey, and turns the tables on Christy, asking her why she is perpetually clowning and telling her she is prettier than she thinks she is. This leads to a night of heavy tears and soul searching once Christy is back on her own houseboat, and the reader is now clear on whose romantic relationship will steer the balance of the novel. Leo eventually spills the beans on why he is there, telling Christy that he started out thinking that he would kill Rex Rigsby but is now uncertain of what exactly he will do. Christy, for her part, is worried about any confrontation between a 40-year old Leo and the very fit Rigsby. It all leads up to a birthday bash for Alice, the turning point in the novel, where Alice reveals to everyone that she has decided to sell the marina, and where Leo plans to finish what he came here to do.

Despite its obvious contrivances and dated morality, The Beach Girls is a lovely novel, beautifully plotted and imaginatively written and structured. MacDonald clearly has real affection for his characters here, especially the women, who he treats with respect and dignity, even though many are idealized. The motivations seem realistic and the setting, despite its rundown condition and precarious survivability, is presented as a kind of poor-man’s paradise. The writing is nearly without flaw and the novel contains some really transcendental passages. Here’s one from late in the book that gives none of the plot away:

The breeze died. The high white sun leaned its tropic weight on the gaudy vacation strip of Florida’s East Coast, so that it lay sunstruck, lazy and humid and garish, like a long brown sweaty woman stretched out in sequins and costume jewelry. The sun baked the sand too hot for tourist feet. Slow swells clumped onto the listless Atlantic beach. The sun turned road tar to goo, overheated the filtered water in the big swimming pools of the rich and the algaed pools of the do-it-yourself clan, blazed on white roofs, strained air conditioners, turned parked cars into tin ovens, and blistered the unwary. A million empty roadside beer cans twinkled in the bright glare. The burning heat dropped a predictable number of people onto stone sidewalks, of which a predictable number died, drove the unstable further into the jungly wastes of their madness, exposed the pink tongues of all the dogs in the area, redoubled the insect songs in every vacant lot, set the weather-bureau boys to checking the statistics of past performance, and sent a billion billion salty trickles to flowing on sin-darkened skins.

If I have one reservation about the novel it would be MacDonald’s near-cartoonish handling of the violence depicted. These are rough-and-tumble characters, especially the men, and they are strong, determined, and quick to fight when angered. But when they do, the damage done is so inconsequential as to seem to have come from a television western. Leo’s early fight on D Dock is brutal, and given his physical disadvantages, the beating he takes would have landed him in the hospital emergency room rather than back in his bunk sipping a highball mixed by Christy Yale. Still, that’s a small complaint for an otherwise immensely enjoyable reading experience.

There’s an interesting pattern in MacDonald’s structuring of the book, one that would seem to be sporadic and was, perhaps, due to outside influence. The first nine chapters of the novel are all written in first person singular, with the chapter title identifying the name of the speaker. But in chapters ten through twelve, he switches to third person -- these are the chapters describing the events of the big birthday bash. The chapter titles are “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Birthday to You,” and “Happy Something.” Did the author come to a point in the writing where he felt unable to continue with his original idea, or was that the plan all along? It’s not really that abrupt and it doesn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of the book, but it is curious and unique in the MacDonald canon.

The final chapter -- titled simply “Chapter Thirteen” -- is an epistolary wrap-up of the events and characters of the novel, written by Joe Ryker several years after the great birthday bash. Joe is writing to an editor of his who stayed with him two weeks after the party. He begins the letter:

I can understand your feverish concern about what happened to all the people you met down here. It is because you are a very neat man, and you have to have everything tied up. It is the same reason you over-edit my copy.

If this isn’t MacDonald poking fun at an editor who may have sent The Beach Girls back to the author demanding a tidy ending to the book, I’ll eat my hat.

For most John D MacDonald fans, it is the setting of The Beach Girls that will draw the most interest. A marina featuring permanent residents situated on the Atlantic coast of Florida obviously has resonance with the Travis McGee series, and many go searching for similarities. Hugh Merrill, in his JDM biography The Red Hot Typewriter tried to make a big deal out of this, claiming the the author “cannibalized” his early works in the creation of his famous series character. Cannibalization is a term coined by author Raymond Chandler, used to describe his process for writing several of his novels (like The Lady in the Lake and Farewell, My Lovely) by taking the plots of earlier short stories he had written for the pulps, combining them and turning them into longer works. MacDonald did nothing like this, even when he reused plot points and character traits. He never had trouble in plotting any of his books and was quick to discard any number of pages or even chapters if something wasn’t going right. Outside of the fact that The Beach Girls takes place in a marina, there are few, if any, similarities to the McGee series.

The first edition of The Beach Girls was published by Fawcett Gold Medal and featured a cover illustration by Milton Charles, his first of a John D MacDonald novel. He would go on to illustrate the covers for Slam the Big Door and the 1960 reissue of Murder for the Bride. It features two swimsuit-clad young ladies (one only partially depicted) presumably sunning on a beach, while in the background are boats and a building that bears not the slightest resemblance to the Stubbins Marina. This cover went through five printings, all the way up to May 1970.

The blurb on this cover is rather curious. It reads “Under the bright Florida sun, six willing girls would find love, one sinister man would find death.” Outside of spoiling the end of the novel, I’m scratching my head over the number of “girls” who found love. There are only two of the main characters who do so; Alice has already found love when the novel opens, and one minor character is mentioned in Joe’s final chapter letter. Being generous and including these four, who are the other two? Readers are encouraged to let me know...

The book’s sixth printing took place in August of 1972 and featured the peerless artwork of Robert McGinnis, the illustrator whose work eventually graced 48 John D MacDonald books with 63 unique illustrations. There are six girls depicted on the cover, no one is obviously any specific character (certainly none of them are Alice) and there is a big schooner hovering in the background. The only sailboat in working condition on D Dock is Rex Rigbsy’s Angel, so I’ll have to assume it’s that. This cover lasted a total of six printings, through December 1978.

Finally there’s William Schmidt’s effort, first appearing on the December 1981 printing, the book’s twelfth. Like all of Schmidt’s other JDM covers, it features a detail of the plot imaginatively conveyed, this time in the reflection of a pair of broken sunglasses. It appeared on four separate printings, up through August 1987, after which the book, along with nearly all of JDM’s stand-alone novels, went out of print.

Since MacDonald decided to have The Beach Girls published in paperback (unlike Please Write for Details) it was barely noticed by the critical press of the time. In fact, the only contemporary review I was able to find of the novel was by JDM stalwart Anthony Boucher in his New York Times column. He liked it, writing “Another of fiction’s observant anthropologists visits one wild party… a curious social microcosm which MacDonald analyzes with insight and affection… primarily this is a novel of character and interplay, and a good one.”

Still, MacDonald had made such a name for himself by this point in his career that he really didn’t need reviews -- good or otherwise -- to sell books. By 1988 Fawcett had printed over a million copies of The Beach Girls. But three months before the novel was even published -- in June 1959 -- MacDonald signed a long term exclusivity contract with Fawcett, agreeing to publish all his paperback originals through the publisher, and any paperback version of a hardcover through Fawcett’s reprint arm, Crest. Fawcett had already characterized the author as “the most consistent bestseller in paperback history,” and the fact that his longtime friend Knox Burger was back with the publisher probably sealed the deal. As MacDonald explained to columnist Witney Bolton in July of that year, “I set up this exclusive arrangement with Fawcett because I have become convinced that they, through packaging, promotion, distribution and a carefully planned reissue program can best serve the relationship I have tried to establish between myself as an author and the ever-increasing number of readers who buy paperback books. I feel that the man who pays 35 cents for your book is worthy of as much bitter effort as the man who pays $3.50 -- and he is much more numerous."

The Beach Girls was one of the rare John D MacDonald novels of this period to be denied publication in a popular magazine. The Crossroads before it and Slam the Big Door afterward both appeared in Cosmopolitan, but Please Write for Details didn’t and neither did Clemmie the year before. I’m guessing that these particular novels were far too frank for a newsstand publication, especially ones that enjoyed a large readership through subscription, given the pornography laws of the day. As I’ve written, The Beach Girls was far franker in the areas of sex than anything MacDonald had ever written up to that point.

Like most of MacDonald’s standalones, the book was out of print for much of the past 25 years, but recently ebooks of nearly all of MacDonald's work have been “published” and are readily available through the normal channels. The last time I looked The Beach Girls was selling for only $4.99 on Amazon (for the Kindle). The few used copies of the various paperback editions available on Amazon are quite overpriced, and even the lower priced volumes one can find on eBay are more expensive than the average used paperback should be. Whatever way you like to read, however, I heartily recommend this book.

The Crossroads

Up until the publication of The Turquoise Lament in 1974 John D MacDonald was thought of primarily as a writer of paperback originals. Of the 61 books he had written and published up to that point, 49 were paperback, meaning that 12 of them were not. What began as a necessity -- it is doubtful a pulp writer could have jumped to the rarefied world of hardcover very easily in 1950 -- eventually became a choice. The reason: money. MacDonald had decided to make a living as a writer, he had a family and lifestyle to support, and softcover was where the money was. Why was this so?

Back in the day, the standard practice in the hardcover publishing world was to pay the author a percentage of actual sales of their book, with advances (if any) repaid from that amount. If the book sold, you were paid, if not, oh well… In addition, if and when the book came out in paperback -- usually about a year later -- fully half of the royalties from the sale of the softcover went directly back to the hardcover publisher. This “exercise in larceny” infuriated MacDonald and, as he recalled in 1986, “My MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration led me to believe that hardcover publishers who claimed they could not survive without tapping into fifty percent of my newsstand royalties, where either liars or incompetents.”

Compare that to the method used by the paperback houses, who paid royalties based on initial and subsequent print runs, and who took no slices from any of an author’s other sources. When one looks at the print runs of some of MacDonald’s paperback originals from the Fifties, it’s easy to understand how he prospered so well financially.

By the time he wrote The Turquoise Lament publishing practices were changing and MacDonald had, at long last, enough clout to negotiate better contracts with hardcover publishers. Beginning with Turquoise he was exclusively a hardcover author, with the only exceptions being his anthology of science fiction pulp stories (Other Times, Other Worlds) and the unauthorized collection Two.

But what about those 12 books MacDonald wrote and decided to bring to the public in hardcover? What was it about those titles that persuaded him that he could afford to take a hit in the wallet? With the exception of his two early science fiction novels (Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies), the novels all seem to be instances where MacDonald felt he had something important to say, or where he was trying to reach a different audience. Also, hardcovers were generally reviewed in most newspapers and magazines, whereas paperbacks were, for the most part, ignored. His first two hardcovers after the science fiction books were his first two mainstream novels of “morals and manners in a specific setting,” Cancel All Our Vows (adultery in suburbia) and Contrary Pleasure (drama inside a family-run business). Please Write for Details was his first comic novel and both The End of the Night and A Flash of Green dealt in weighty subject matter that he wanted to disseminate to a broader audience. The Executioners was supposedly done to win a bet, and The Last One Left was supposed to be a blockbuster bestseller, only it wasn’t. No Deadly Drug and The House Guests were non-fiction.

Let’s not forget vanity. MacDonald admitted this in that same 1986 recollection:

There is a general feeling that publication in hardcover is necessary if a book is to have any cachet of importance. It is the class act, mollifying the snob in every writer. I do not really know why this should be so. Perhaps long ago the artists’ works were chiseled in stone and the hacks had to make do with papyrus. Maybe in the not so distant future the important writings will be distributed on germanium chips and the entertainers will have to make do with silicon. I have always believed that the package does not make that much difference. The idea should be to get the work out to where people can buy it or borrow it and read it. If it is published on Kleenex or forty pound rag bond is not as important as its accessibility.

The one hardcover entry that doesn’t seem to fit in with the other eleven is MacDonald’s July 1959 novel The Crossroads. Published by Simon and Schuster as part of their Inner Sanctum Mystery imprint, it starts out as anything but a mystery. We’re in the world of “manners and mores” as well as the world of business. MacDonald borrows heavily from earlier works here, most notably Contrary Pleasure, which concerns itself with an entrepreneurial family and the business they run. But this setting and introduction gradually gives way to MacDonald the crime writer, and the main plotline of the novel is really about a heist -- its inception, its execution and its aftermath. In this respect MacDonald has mined a different early work, The Neon Jungle, and there are many parallels to that novel as well. Taken together The Crossroads reads like an amalgam of the two previous books: a family drama to justify its publication in hardcover and a crime story to earn the Inner Sanctum imprint.

But at heart it is a John D MacDonald thriller, one that -- despite its prior sources -- reads as a true original, another step in the author’s road to honing his craft. He returns to the multi-character, multi perspective writing form last used in Please Write for Details, and it serves him well as he maps out the lives and motivations of the novel’s various characters. Each is a true original with recognizable MacDonaldean characteristics and moralities, each created with the expert eye of a true observer of the world around him.

The setting for The Crossroads is along a major north-south thoroughfare known simply as Route 71, ten miles south of the fictional city of Walterburg in South Carolina, a major route for vacationers heading to and from Florida. (Although he never mentions the actual state, MacDonald once revealed that this was his “mental location” while writing the novel.) Crossing Route 71 is a new limited-access highway going east-west, connecting Route 71 via a cloverleaf. And on all four segments of this crossroads sits the various enterprises of the Crossroads Corporation, a family business owned by the Drovek family. Begun back in the 1920’s by Polish immigrant Anton “Papa” Drovek, the original business was a simple country story surrounded by ten acres of farmland, now grown to hundreds. On this land in 1959 sits a hotel, a motel, a truck stop, a restaurant and night club, a pantry, two gas stations, a shopping center, a drive-in, a bowladrome and, on a hill behind the hotel, the four houses that are the residences of the four adult Drovek children, all involved in the operation of the family business.

Right away the reader of John D MacDonald’s previous novels recognizes the similarities to the two other books cited. From The Neon Jungle we remember the Varaki Quality Market, run by various members of the family of the same name, headed by another immigrant entrepreneur, Gus Varaki, and aided by his sons and daughter. But the Varakis are an unhappy lot: a defeated eldest son married to a shrew, a dead second son and a tramp of a daughter, all struggling to run a store in a blighted, deteriorating section of a large city. The Droveks, on the other hand, are running a successful and growing empire, in an area far from any inner-city. The structures of both novels are also similar, in that both settings are set-ups (as we shall see) for a crime committed by an employee of the business.

From Contrary Pleasure a similarly successful (although barely) family business run by the Delevan family includes all the children of the founding parent, living side by side in houses up on a hill, each holding some responsible position in the corporation. The Delevan children are much more the antecedents for the Droveks, complete with an alpha-male eldest brother who basically runs the business, a sister married to an uninvolved “drone,” and a deadweight brother who is barely tolerated by the eldest son. Both earlier books deal with families trying to survive a world in where their businesses are becoming obsolete, whereas in The Crossroads, business continues to expand at a breakneck pace.

The brains and spirit behind the success of the Crossroads Corporation is eldest son Charles, or Chip, age 41, “a big-boned, driving man, sandy hair on hard skull, strong hard face, bright-blue skeptical eyes, deep chest and wide shoulders. A man of shrewdness and subtleties, of occasional wisdom and infrequent self-doubt and boundless energies.” It was Chip who took his father’s store and restaurant and grew it into the multi-phased enterprise it now is, built primarily on tourist traffic heading to and from Florida. He also runs the show, involving himself in every minute aspect of the business, and rarely from behind his desk. His energies are focused on the business mainly because he has little home life to occupy his time. His wife of 16 years, Clara, is a “hopeless case,” a victim of a strict religious upbringing who has assuaged her guilt and distaste of the duties of marriage by drinking herself into a stupor each and every day. They have one daughter, fifteen-year old Nancy, who is somehow as responsible as her father and older than her years. How someone like Chip became involved with someone like Clara is a bit of interesting MacDonald writing, only barely believable but convenient for the other relationship Chip carries on.

(MacDonald has rarely been kind to religion in general or to people of faith in particular, and Clara is no exception. All of her problems are heaped upon her upbringing, written to be as grim and as stern as possible. I can’t recall a single sympathetic character of faith in the JDM canon until Van Harder in 1978’s The Empty Copper Sea.)

Chip’s emotional outlet, outside of his love for his daughter, is with a divorcee named Jeana Louise Portoni, who runs a small gift shop in one of the Crossroads’ strip malls. Jeana is described lovingly by MacDonald (blonde, tall, slim, with the obligatory blue-gray eyes), who is quick to assure us that she is no tramp and not at all “promiscuous.” They enjoy an intensely physical and emotional relationship, evidenced by Jeana’s response to Chip when he pulls her into his arms (“Darling, Darling, Darling!”). They even speak the four-letter word to each other often, but are in, they acknowledge, “a trap,” for it’s 1959, this is a John D MacDonald novel, and Chip and Jeana are the quintessential JDM ideals for a male and female protagonist. Chip is no more able to abandon his invalid wife than he would be able to kill her, and Jeana’s morals could not permit herself to love a man who did such a thing. So they sneak around, trying to remain a secret, but it’s an affair that has become obvious to one other member of the Drovek family.

Leo, 39, is the second oldest Drovek, lives in the second house up on the hill, and is second in command of the Crossroads Corporation. Similar in build to his older brother Chip, he is otherwise different in every other way. Conservative, cautious and sober, he considers himself a balance to Chip’s constant and reckless expansion. Punctual and punctilious, he is a man of habits, schedules, figures and reports -- reports he takes very seriously, although few others -- least of all Chip -- do. He is married to Betty, an obedient, “small, somewhat scrawny woman with slightly graying hair.” who has given him three children.

Next in line is Joan, the only female in the family, married to Jack Paris and co-owner of Paris Realty, which manages all leases, collects all rentals, arranges for all necessary repairs and maintenance on leased properties and then remits the balance to the Crossroads Corporation. Joan is another MacDonald “type” and is meticulously described by the author in a singular paragraph:

She was, on a scale so majestic as to make the average man uncomfortable in her presence, a truly beautiful woman. She had an oval face with a hint of oriental in its structuring, pale shining hair, a flawless complexion. She was big. Big bones, big shoulders, high firm hips. She stood five-eleven in her stocking feet, only an inch shorter than her two elder brothers. She weighed one sixty, and she was completely firm, gracefully built. She wore tailored clothes. On her, frills and flounces would have been grotesque. She could not make an ungraceful, unwomanly movement. Behind a mask of sleepy and almost sensuous amiability, her mind was as quick and sharp as Charles's. They were the close ones. At ease with each other, aware of the same problems, the same triumphs.

Too bad Joan is not featured more prominently in the novel. She is the polar opposite of Alice Furman, the only Delevan female sibling in Contrary Pleasure.

As adept and as business savvy as Joan is, she is married to a less than admirable man, at least in JDM’s eyes. Jack Paris is “a forty-year-old kid, in love with games, proud of his reflexes,” and as unimportant to the daily operations of Paris Realty as anyone could be. If he’s not away playing in a golf tournament he’s gone playing tennis, or fishing, or playing handball, or hunting, playing bridge or poker, all in the fiction of making valuable contacts for the firm. Chip considers him (privately) to be a lazy bum, but Joan worships him and he in turn adores his wife.

The youngest Drovek, at age 28, is Pete, an un-serious party animal with a good disposition but a low tolerance for boredom or routine. His early years were spent in college and the service, where he met and hung around with others of his temperament, drinking and carousing. When he wakes up in Mexico one morning married to a shallow New York model named Sylvia, he returns to the fold, has his own house built next to his siblings, and begins working for the Corporation. But he can’t focus on routine and is constantly leaving town for long periods of time on "business" trips, looking up old friends and army buddies, while the areas of the business he is responsible for begin to decay. He is endured by Chip, who feels that there is something within his younger brother that will eventually get him serious about life.

But far more interesting than Pete is his his young wife Sylvia. Similar in many respects to Sally Leon in April Evil, Sylvia is a pretty girl with limited smarts or self-awareness, who comes from humble beginnings. Things went sour after her brief success in fashion modeling and she devolved into working for a photographer of true crime magazines, the soft porn of its day, where she was forced to posed in the nude. After a relationship with the photographer ended she attended a party where she met Pete, who, along with another couple, whisked her off to Mexico, where days of heaving drinking led to marriage and a new Drovek family. But Sylvia is soon left alone by Pete as he traipses all over the country, and her boredom and idleness don’t fit in well with the other members of the hard working Drovek family. The opening of Chapter Three, where MacDonald introduces the reader to Sylvia, is absolutely masterful as he recounts her childhood and slide into a seedy underworld.

She had been born and brought up -- to the age of sixteen -- in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of five children of a little, wiry, sour, savage, sallow tool-and-die-maker, and a fat, dim defeated woman who always looked as if she had just finished weeping or was just about to begin. Her childhood was marked by the hard little unpredictable hands of [her father], by squalls of rage and pain and terror.

The relationship with the photographer is equally well done, vividly painting a hopeless world in a single perfectly worded paragraph.

[After her first job with him] Clyde wanted to use her again. Five days later. After the second session, she quit her regular job. And a month later she was living in a Village apartment with Clyde Denglert. His physical demands on her were slight and infrequent. He was not a well man. He wanted to do art photography. He submitted pictures to exhibitions, and sometimes received an honorable mention. Through him she found other modelling jobs of the same caliber. Her money and his went for survival, plus the expensive equipment he felt he needed in his art photography work. It was a living arrangement, not emotional. A few times, out of frustration and irritability and hopelessness, he beat her. But he was always contrite. He was forty-two years old and nothing had come true for him. One day, when she was twenty, walking with Clyde through a slushy dusk to the corner bar, his heart stumbled. He went down onto his hands and knees. As she tried to help him up, his heart stopped, and he folded onto his face in the dirty March slush.

Few authors can write a paragraph as vivid and with such expressive economy as MacDonald.

Later in the novel Joan ruminates on Sylvia’s character, her lack of friends and inability at social intercourse. Here MacDonald could be describing any number of his wayward women.

Eventually [Joan] came to the unhappy conclusion that the young girl actually had little to contribute or communicate. Hers was an utterly circumscribed mind, concerned with the trivia of clothes, hairdos, television and hit tunes. In time she had also come to detect in Sylvia that little unavoidable coarseness of outlook, that hardening of the texture of the emotions which is the inescapable fate of every woman who has known too many men, too intimately and too casually.

Sylvia, mostly alone and bored, is bound to get into trouble one day, and that day has already arrived, although the reader doesn’t know it yet.

The last member of the Drovek family to play a part in the plot of The Crossroads is the patriarch of the clan, Papa, still alive but no longer active in the daily activities of the corporation. Like his children, he lives on land owned by by the company, but off by himself on the other side of Route 71 and up on a high hill, where he can take in a vista that includes the entire Crossroads Corporation empire. Widowed since Charles was 17, he lives alone, tending his garden, visiting with his children and grandchildren, and collecting his share of the corporate profits. It is this final activity that provides The Crossroads with its macguffin.

The profits from the Crossroads Corporation are distributed monthly, and Papa’s portion is remitted in the form of a check. There is a ritual involved with his distribution: Chip picks up his check from Leo and drives up to the house on the hill to hand it over to Papa. They agree on a time when Chip will drive Papa to the bank to deposit the proceeds, but Papa’s idea of “deposit” is a more archaic.

[Chip] knew what the old man would do. Dress up in his good dark suit with the shiny seat and elbows, place his hat squarely on top of his head and ride into the city with him. There he would cash the check, put far too small an amount of money into his pocket, and take the balance into the safety deposit vaults and put it in his box.

He’s been doing this forever, and no one -- except Papa himself -- has any idea as to the amount of cash that has accumulated in that metal box. (It is later revealed to be over $270,000 -- quite a bit of change in 1959.) And in the insular community of the corporation, over time almost everyone is aware of this practice and have gossiped and speculated about how much money is collected there. It’s only a matter of time before that speculation would gestate in the mind of a less-than-honest member of the staff, who would then wonder about how to get his hands on it. That person turns out to be the head bartender of the Starlight Club, Mark Brodey.

Brody had been behind the bar since the Starlight Club opened five years ago, and for the past two years he ruled as the head bartender. But when the novel opens he is out of work, fired for “cheating the register,” using faked bills to charge customers too much and pocketing the difference. It’s an ingenious plan that MacDonald details, as only he can, in a meticulous fashion. But he’s eventually caught and fired personally by Chip. Unable to get another bar tending job locally, he’s forced to work at a greasy spoon several miles south of the crossroads and takes up residence in a nearby dilapidated motel. It gives him plenty of time to stew in his own resentment and plot a way to get his revenge on the Droveks.

Sylvia is a regular patron of the Starlight Club, frequenting it nightly on those occasions when Pete is out of town (which is often) and she’d struck up an acquaintance with Brody. Nothing serious or even provocative -- she’s usually pretending to herself that she’s “a woman of mystery on a long trip” -- but with enough casual conversation for Brody to size up the lonely, idle young housewife for who she is and who she used to be. And once he starts fantasizing about getting his hands on the contents of Papa Drovek’s safe deposit box, he realizes that tricking Sylvia into helping him is the perfect way to accomplish that goal. He blackmails her into agreeing to help with the plan, with the promise of running away together and living the good life on all that money as the bait. But Brody has other things in mind for Sylvia after the caper is complete, things that he dare not tell her. The plan is put into place and it propels the balance of the novel into a world of thrilling violence as expertly written as anything MacDonald had executed to date.

The Crossroads succeeds on nearly every level it aspires to (with the possible exception of Clara Drovek, whose ultimate fate is MacDonald-convenient and nearly over the top) and his melding of character, business detail, background and crime has now become a trademark of the author, who here pulls off something that seems effortless and natural. The writing is routinely engaging and expertly done, with the first chapter a standout. It is almost fugue-like in it complexity, bouncing from character to character -- some who are part of the plot, others who are not -- as the author introduces the reader to the world of the Crossroads Corporation. Another favorable comparison might be to the opening scene of Orson Welles’ 1958 film Touch of Evil: a single lengthy shot that takes in the whole world of the movie while providing its main plotpoint. How MacDonald does this is a mystery to a reader like me. And it is singular: just read the works of any of his contemporaries. They may write with more grace, with more literary sensibility, with more glancing observations, but I’ve never encountered one who can do what MacDonald does so well and so entertainingly.

Simon and Schuster printed only one edition of The Crossroads and the size of the print run is unknown. It was not a best seller. It appeared only four months after the publication of two other novels (Please Write for Details and Deadly Welcome) and only two months before his next paperback original, The Beach Girls. The dust jacket features a design by H Lawrence Hoffman, the artist who did the hardcover art for The Executioners the year before. It would be his last JDM effort. His design has caused much confusion in the book collection world over the years, due to his inclusion of the word MOTEL under the title, leading some less-than-careful catalogers to list the book as The Crossroads Motel. It features a simple cloverleaf imposed upon the scattered few lit windows of said motel. Due to the cheapness of the printing -- thin paper for the dust jacket, pages printed on highly acidic paper -- it is hard to find a collectable copy of this title any more. The publishers did fill the back of the jacket with a full-page biography of the author along with the headshot they used for their edition of The Executioners. It tells the standard story and is full of inaccuracies and exaggerations:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A graduate of the Harvard School of Business Administration, a lieutenant colonel in World War II who was in service with the OSS in Ceylon, John MacDonald's first piece of fiction was a letter written from overseas to his wife. This is not as scandalous as it sounds. "The only kind of letters that would pass through censorship in those days made pretty dull reading, so instead of a letter, I wrote my wife a short story. She promptly sold it to a magazine for $25. I decided that this looked like an easy way to earn a comfortable living. I was wrong on both counts -- at first. In my four months of terminal leave I worked seven days a week and wrote 800,000 words, sometimes having as many as fifty manuscripts in the mail at once. Sales: 0. I also lost twenty pounds. Most of this work was pretty bad, but it taught me my trade. Then, of course, as soon as I went out and got a job, the stories I wrote at night began to sell. I quit the job in 1945 and have been writing full time ever since."

These figures will be out of date by the time you read this, but as we go to press, Mac's published novels total 38, his short stories, novelettes and serials more than 500. And the censors wouldn't pass one of them, since they are anything but dull. His readers can testify to that: more than 14,000,000 copies of his books have been sold, and he is probably the world's only "daily author" -- he once had four paperback novels published on four successive days.

MacDonald's name on a book doesn't mean that you get the same mixture as before. One story will be a zany and uproarious farce like the recent best-selling Please Write for Details, which is now being made into a musical comedy, the next a taut story of suspense like The Executioners or The Crossroads.

MacDonald was decidedly unhappy with this write-up, despite the inclusion of his own words (which also contain an inaccuracy). A month after the book was published he wrote a correspondent:

I think it fairly handsome for a cheap book. I am quietly offended, however, by that portion of the blurb on the back which refers to me as Mac. I consider that a gratuitous familiarity, a jolly-boy backslap more suitable to the sales convention than the back of a book.

The first paperback edition of The Crossroads appeared in September of the following year under the Fawcett-Crest imprint (Crest being the non-paperback original line of Fawcett). It featured the artwork of Ron Lesser, his first for a John D MacDonald title, but not his last. He would go on to famously illustrate the original covers of the first ten Travis McGee novels, and The Crossroads is his only other JDM effort. It features a man in a suit firing a pistol pulled from a shoulder holster, with the head of a brunette (Sylvia) looming over him There’s no such scene in the novel. There was only one printing under this original full-cover version.

It would be 1968, eight years later before Fawcett reprinted the book. The Lesser artwork was retained, but shrunken and boxed within the larger cover. This version went through four separate printings. Then, in late 1974 Robert McGinnis was commissioned to do his own cover. It is a great improvement, illustrating a woman running through a grassy wooded area with a man standing by a car in the background. This is a scene from late in the novel, so I won’t describe its characters further. It was featured on five separate printings, from December 1974 to December 1983, with only a change in the lettering font appearing in the last edition.

Finally, in July 1986 William Schmidt, who did later-day covers for nearly all of John D MacDonald’s work, illustrated the covers of the last two printings of the era, Like all of his other JDM work, he depicts a scene from the novel, but this one also occurs late in the story and it would give too much away to discuss it here.

If MacDonald’s point it publishing The Crossroads in hardcover was to get it noticed, he certainly got his way. The book was widely reviewed in papers throughout the country, including in the New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Orleans Picayune and Saturday Review. Anthony Boucher in the Times called it “one of MacDonald’s suspense-that-approaches-straight novels,” and he liked it. James Sandoe of the Herald-Tribune also liked it, recognizing the similarities between it and MacDonald’s previous work, calling it “a retranslation of a formula he has used a half dozen times before, managed with the freshness of the first time. Taut, absorbing stuff.” The uncredited reviewer for the Boston Globe claimed it was “the best MacDonald for my taste, a smashing good novel by any standard.”

There were a few who had reservations, such as the reviewer for the Philadelphia Bulletin, who claimed that the book had “too many actors on the stage.” The Providence Journal called it “contrived,” and said “there’s a little too much coincidence” in the book. The one really bad review appeared in the New Orleans Picayune, where the reviewer -- identified only by the initials B.B.S. -- wrote the that the novel contains “an unsavory story about a large collection of unpleasant and oversexed people… There is a plot to murder grandpa (sic)... but by this time you don’t care.”

None of the later critical assessments of MacDonald’s work has much to say about The Crossroads. It is mentioned in passing in David Geherin’s John D MacDonald (1982), Edgar Hirshberg’s John D MacDonald (1985) and Lewis D Moore’s Meditations on America: John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee Series and Other Fiction (1994), each doing little more than describing the work as a “business novel.” Hugh Merrill ignores it completely in The Red Hot Typewriter (2000).

Gherin does write about the particular attraction of MacDonald’s prose in a general assessment of “the early novels,” and his insights are penetrating, illuminating many of the reasons this author’s works are so engaging. I find his insights true of all of MacDonald’s works in general and of The Crossroads in particular.

Each of the early novels is distinguished by MacDonald’s clear, clean prose. Recognizing the primacy of story and character, he conscientiously avoids a prose that is too ornate or too self-conscious. But eschewing an overly mannered style does not as a consequence result in a bland, lifeless prose. Far from being merely serviceable, MacDonald’s prose is colorful, his language expressive, his rhythms graceful. One would not expect a writer who turned out three or four books a year to be as exacting as, say, Flaubert. Nevertheless, MacDonald is a consummate craftsman and his descriptions, observations, and dialogue are the result of care, attention to telling detail, affection for the language, and control over its power to generate emotional responses in the reader.

Like many of MacDonald’s novels of this period in his writing career, a magazine version of The Crossroads appeared in one of the major slicks of the period, a month before the book was published. That it was published in Cosmopolitan (June 1959) was no surprise, since that particular periodical had printed shorter versions of six of his previous works and would go on to hold the record for magazines publishing JDM novels. Advertised as “The Crossroads” on the cover, the novel’s title somehow lost the opening article in both the table of contents and the cover page and became simply “Crossroads.” It features a couple of nice illustrations, typical of this glorious era, by Sarasota neighbor Al Buell, who had done the artwork for three of MacDonald’s previous Cosmopolitan novels (“April Evil”, “The Heat of Money” (The Price of Murder), and “Ultimate Surprise” (Deadly Welcome).

Most of the magazine versions of MacDonald’s novels are straight rewrites, reading as if the author typed up a new, shorter version while reading the original, excising what he considered extraneous material to bring the work in at an acceptable word count. Occasionally he added scenes that were nowhere hinted at in the novel (see The Deceivers) and on one occasion he rewrote the entire work, shifting the focus of the book entirely (Murder in the Wind’s appearance as “Hurricane” in Redbook). In “Crossroads” he has completely thrown out the character of Jeana Louise Portoni, and, of necessity, the adulterous love affair between her and Chip. With that gone, he was able to free Chip’s wife Clara from being an alcoholic automaton, turning her into a distracted housewife who fills her empty marriage with countless “clubs and drives and committees until they had become the most important part of her life.” While this is a definite improvement on the novel’s version of the character (Chip is now complicit in the marriage’s atrophy), I personally miss Jeana and the love affair. It was well done, despite the “darlings,” and generated more than an average amount of heat for a MadDonald coupling. It also made Chip less than perfect in carrying on behind his poor wife’s back, not that she -- as drawn in the novel -- would have cared. Otherwise, little else has changed and the crime is carried out exactly as in the book.

The January 2, 1967 issue of Publisher's Weekly reported that a "television project" based on the novel was "in the works," but nothing seems to have come of it and I can find no other reference to it.

The Crossroads was the third JDM hardcover published by Simon and Schuster, following The Executioners in 1958 and Please Write for Details earlier in 1959. They would go on to publish two more, both “important” novels where MacDonald felt he had something important to say (The End of the Night in 1960 and A Flash of Green in 1962). By 1965 he had left them for Doubleday, no doubt for a better deal, but he didn’t stop putting out paperback originals -- his primary source of income -- until 1973 with the arrival of the fifteenth installment of the McGee saga. From that point forward he was a hardcover author who once slummed around in the paperback world.

Deadly Welcome

"I work long each day, and usually have at least three books in various stages of clumsiness, letting the subconscious mind untie the knots of the ones on the shelf while I work on the one in front of me. I revise by throwing out whole chapters, sections, even whole books, and starting again—a device which seems to enhance freshness.”

By the second half of the 1950’s John D MacDonald had set a pace for writing that was nothing short of astonishing. From 1955 thru 1959 he wrote 17 novels, 34 shorter works of fiction, a novella that became the second half of his first anthology (“Linda”) and, edited a short story anthology for the Mystery Writers of America, a task he claimed that took the time he could have used to write a full novel of his own. Of course, MacDonald was no stranger to producing large quantities of fiction in a short period of time. His output in 1949 was an amazing 72 short stories and novellas, but these were done mainly for the pulps and their quality was not always first rate. His novels, on the other hand, -- outside of a few early titles -- show a steadily increasing mastery of the written word, in plot, dialogue, characterization and story construction. These were not two-cents-a-word quickies written for an ephemeral periodical market, but works that have survived and influenced a generation of other writers because of their quality and originality.

In 1959 MacDonald had two novels published in the same month, both of them excellent works and both of them as different as two books could possibly be. In March Simon and Schuster published MacDonald’s sixth hardcover effort, the comedy-romance Please Write for Details. Also in March Dell published what would be their last JDM novel, a mystery of superior quality titled Deadly Welcome. It was JDM’s return to form in a couple of ways: he once again used the plot device of a (relatively) ordinary man travelling to a unfamiliar place in search of something (See A Bullet for Cinderella and Death Trap). And, for the first time since 1956’s Murder in the Wind -- ten novels back -- he set the action in Florida.

The “something” Tal Howard in A Bullet for Cinderella was searching for was, ostensibly, a hidden treasure, but his real quest was for some meaning and purpose to a life that had been undone by time spent in a brutal prisoner of war camp. Hugh MacReedy in Death Trap seeks to help an old girlfriend to whom he had done dirt to, but the real subtext of his search is atonement. In Deadly Welcome, Alex Doyle is sent to a small town on the west coast of Florida to do a job for the Pentagon, but this particular town forces him to face insecurities he has been running from all his adult life.

Doyle is State Department employee, an investigator of sorts, who is pulled off an assignment in South America and sent over to the Department of Defense for an odd and unique assignment.  A year and a half ago, Colonel Crawford M’Gann, a brilliant Air Force scientist who had been working on an important top secret project for the Pentagon, suffered a heart attack and was nursed back to health by his young wife, a “questionable” woman who had been a nightclub singer prior to their meeting. Jenna M’Gann moved her ailing husband to her hometown, Ramona Beach, Florida, an undeveloped small town on one of the keys south of Sarasota. A few months later Jenna was found murdered and the assailant was never identified. M’Gann’s sister Celia moved in with her brother and she strenuously guards access to him and the remote beach cottage where they live.

The Pentagon needs Colonel M’Gann back working on their project and has sent several of their people down to Florida in an attempt to convince him to return. None of them has gained access, thanks not only to Celia’s strong defenses but to the insular nature of the community, a throwback to a small southern town that was typical before Florida began turning into a statewide resort. Simply put, they don’t like strangers in Ramona Beach. And that’s where Alex Doyle figures into the equation.

Ramona Beach is Doyle’s home town, where he was born, raised and lived until he was eighteen, and he has strong reservations about returning.

"I... I was born there, Colonel. Right at the bottom. Swamp cracker, Colonel. My God, even talking about it, I can hear the accent coming back. Rickets and undernourishment and patched jeans. Side meat and black-eyed peas. A cracker shack on Chaney's Bayou two miles from town. There was me and my brother. Rafe was older. He and my pa drowned when I was ten. Out netting mackerel by moonlight and nobody knew what happened except they'd both drink when they were out netting. Then Ma and I moved into town, and we has a shed room out in back of the Ramona Hotel and she worked there. She died when I was thirteen, Colonel. In her sleep and I found her. She was just over forty and she was an old, old woman. The Ducklins were distant kin and they took me in and I worked in their store for them all the time I wasn't in school. I don't even think of Ramona any more. Sometimes I find myself remembering, and I make myself stop."

And there’s another reason he hasn’t been back in fifteen years. On his eighteenth birthday he celebrated and got drunk for the first time. He woke up later to find that the Ducklin’s store had been robbed, his key used to gain entry and some of the money stuffed in his pockets. He hadn’t committed the crime, but the evidence was clear.

“I knew what they were all saying. That the Ducklins had taken me in and been decent to me, and that was the way I'd paid them back. Like all the rest of the Doyles. Can't trust that trash.”

Doyle was arrested and a deal was struck: plead guilty, agree to enlist in the army and the sentence would be suspended. He did so and left for good, fighting in the world war, going to college, back to war in Korea, then on to the State Department. He has buried those first eighteen years deep into his psyche and does not want to revisit it.

"I can't go back. Maybe it's... too important in my mind, more important than it should be. But I was... proud of myself, I guess. I'd made a good record in Ramona High School. Scholarship and athletics. I was popular with... the better class of kids. And then... It all went wrong for me. What will they say to me if I go back?"

Eventually Doyle decides to face his demons and agrees to the assignment. There’s one thing he didn’t tell the Pentagon boys, a bit of his past that links him even more to this particular affair. Colonel M’Gann’s murdered wife, Jenna, was Jenna Larkin, a popular and notorious wild child, whose body turned “to perfection at thirteen,” and used it to her advantage. She was the eldest and favorite child of Spence Larkin, a “mean and stingy bastard” who all but ignored Jenna’s younger sister and brother, and it’s hinted that father and daughter’s relationship was not exactly a healthy one, although MacDonald never quite goes there. Alex lost his virginity to Jenna in an once-only tryst on a deserted island, weeks before she left Ramona Beach to seek her fortune.

Doyle’s cover story has him as a construction worker who has just returned from South America, where he earned enough money to start a little business of his own, and what better place than in his old hometown? He is greeted with the expected disdain from the townsfolk who remember him, and finds that Jenna’s siblings are still living in Ramona Beach, running their father’s old marina. The sister, Betty, is described in terms so familiar to the frequent reader of MacDonald that her place in the story is self-evident.

She was a girl of good size and considerable prettiness, and she came swinging toward him, moving well in her blue-jean shorts and a sleeveless red blouse with narrow white vertical stripes and battered blue canvas top-siders. She had been endowed with a hefty wilderness of coarse blonde-red hair, now sun-streaked. She was magnificently tanned, but it was the tan of unthinking habitual exposure rather than a pool-side contrivance of oils and careful estimates of basting time... a big, strong, vital-looking woman, and when she was on his level he knew that if she were to wear high heels, she would stand eye to eye with him.

She and Alex have a typically MacDonaldean meet-cute, and over a beer they discuss old times. Alex has no memory of Betty, but she, several years younger than he, nursed a strong crush on Alex when she was young and even kept a scrapbook of clippings of his high school sports exploits. Alex confesses his innocence of the burglary, and, in a later scene, Betty reveals the reason she’s in her late twenties and still unmarried: she’s frigid, a fact that the whole town is aware of. Her malady is not one of simple disinterest, but of atavistic repulsion, a state that was brought about by several factors including her father’s lack of love for her and an attempted rape back when she was in college. “She became actively, physically ill if any [man] attempted the most innocuous caress.”

Alex rents a beach cottage, away from town and fairly remote, but close enough to the M’Gann cottage for him to begin his work. It’s also very close to where the body of Jenna was discovered, and, as Alex eventually wheedles his way into the good graces of Celia M’Gann, he starts to question the circumstances of Jenna's murder, wondering why she brought her husband down to a small town she had abandoned years ago, her recent activities here, and the behavior of her father many years ago.

And then the inevitable: a visit from the Sheriff’s office in the person of Deputy Donnie Capp, a JDM bad-cop whose personality borders on the sociopathic. He awakens Alex from a nap and enters the cottage oozing menace.

He brought into the [cottage] the slow creak and jingle of petty authority, and a thinly acid edge of sweat, a back-swamp accent and an air of mocking silence. Doyle felt irritated by his own feeling of intense wariness. It was a legacy from the faraway years when there would be trouble and men like this one would come to the bayou and go to Bucket Bay. You let them swagger through the house and poke around as they pleased. You never told them anything. And you never made a fuss because they would put knots on your head. Yet on another level he sensed his kinship to this man. That light-eyed cracker sallowness, the generations of bad diet and inbreeding behind both of them that had resulted, curiously, in a dogged and enduring toughness, a fibrous talent for survival.  

This initial scene between Alex and Capp is uncomfortable in the extreme, and mirrors a similar encounter between protagonist and bad cop in an earlier JDM novel, The Price of Murder. In that book the violence between the two was verbal and psychological, but in Deadly Welcome a third element is added: physical, in the form of an expert, merciless beating by Capp with his black nightstick.

Capp is the law in remote Ramona Beach, fifteen miles from the county seat, and his introduction into the scene both complicates matters for Alex and brings new aspects of Jenna’s murder to light. It is Doyle’s “criminal” background that has aroused Capp’s interest and ire, and the deputy’s new presence proves to be both hindrance and opportunity.

As noted, Deadly Welcome’s structure and form is not new to MacDonald, nor are many of the character types and plot points, and anyone who is familiar with his previous novels will instantly recognize aspects of his style and the situations he creates. But outside of the neat story hooks  -- government agent on assignment, innocent man returning to the scene of the “crime,” an impossible romance between a man operating under false pretenses and a woman who cannot express love physically -- the real joys of this novel are the things that set MacDonald apart from his contemporaries: his characterizations, his dialogue, and the author’s ability to create scene, mood and atmosphere with only a handful of words. Alex Doyle’s journey from confident State Department agent to insecure cracker-returning-home, then to a man at peace with himself is not, of course, a unique one, and some might argue that this would have been a more interesting book had Alex actually committed the burglary he had been accused of and had to return home to face the music, but that would have been impossible in MacDonald’s moral universe, at least in 1959. Still, the character development here is done very nicely and Doyle is flawed in ways JDM was either unable or unwilling to experiment with in earlier protagonists.

For their last JDM novel, Dell produced a single printing of 176,000 copies, their lowest ever for a MacDonald novel and completely dwarfed by the 771,000 copies of their first book by the author, Area of Suspicion (another JDM tale of a man returning home). According to Hugh Merrill in his 2000 biography The Red Hot Typewriter, MacDonald had left Fawcett in 1954 over his unhappiness with his editor Dick Carroll and moved to Dell, where old friend Knox Burger was now working. In 1958 Burger left Dell and went to Fawcett, and MacDonald again followed him, returning to the publishing house where he began and would now forever stay. Dell was likely smarting over this defection and probably chafed over having to pay MacDonald for a second printing. It was the last book in his contract and the only other time his name appeared on a Dell First Edition was in December of 1959 when the Mystery Writers of America anthology The Lethal Sex was published, a project Burger had developed when he was still with Dell and one he had convinced MacDonald to edit.

When Fawcett purchased the rights to the MacDonald back catalogue in the early sixties, they didn’t get around to reprinting Deadly Welcome until May 1966. It eventually went through twelve printings, to May 1987, for a total of 596,000 copies.

The cover for that single Dell First Edition was an auspicious one, for they commissioned a young artist by the name of Robert McGinniss to produce the illustration. It was the beginning of a long and fruitful professional relationship between author and artist that would last throughout MacDonald’s remaining career. As I pointed out in my posting on the JDM short story “Kitten on a Trampoline” a few months back, McGinnis holds the record for illustrating the covers of more editions of MacDonald paperbacks than any other artist. And it all began here, with his depiction of Alex and Betty, in the beach cottage right after Alex’s beating at the hands of Donnie Capp. His depiction of Betty is quite accurate, even if her makeup is a bit heavy.

McGinnis was again chosen to illustrate the first Fawcett edition, an interesting composition that highlights the title and author’s name in favor of the rendering of the characters, this time a prone Betty at the feet of Donnie Capp. This cover went through four separate printings. Then, in October 1973, Fawcett issued a fifth edition with a new cover, again by McGinniss, this time depicting what must be a seated Jenna Karp M’Gann, feet propped up on a barrel and wearing a dress that covers very little. Here we have a very recognizable McGinnis female: thin, buxom and long-legged. This illustration was used for the last eight editions of the book.

In fact, if my records are correct, Deadly Welcome is the only JDM paperback where Robert McGinnis illustrated the covers for every edition printed in the United States. There was no William Schmidt version of this title.

Deadly Welcome and Please Write for Details were published for two completely different worlds back in that long ago March of 1959. While the hardcover Please Write for Details garnered much coverage, many reviews and its own publicity campaign (of sorts), Deadly Welcome pretty much received a deadly welcome in the press. Outside of Anthony Boucher’s brief comments in his New York Times column, MacDonald’s clipping service could find no other reviews of the novel at the time. I managed to find one in the Galveston Daily News, written by reporter Stanley E Babb, but it is little more than a plot synopsis, calling the book “worthy of more than just a casual glance,” and ending the plot summary -- and the piece -- with “"A lot of things happened to Alexander Doyle at Ramona Beach and they are recounted in a dramatic manner in Deadly Welcome.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Boucher was not exactly overwhelmed either, writing, “Deadly Welcome disappoints just a little, possibly because its calculations are too obtrusive. Certainly the story -- of an agent who can carry out his assignment only by returning to the small town he left in disgrace as a boy, and achieve his objective only by facing up to his own life -- is a strong and effective one; and my disappointment is probably only because I've come to expect so much of MacDonald.”

Deadly Welcome’s reputation -- where you can find evidence of a reputation -- is certainly a mixed one. Jared Shurin in his “Underground Reading” series on the Pornokitch blog, is quite hard on the novel, calling it “lifeless” and “uninteresting,” and dismisses the protagonist Alex Doyle as “so bland as to be invisible.” Author Ed Gorman, on the other hand, considers Deadly Welcome to be one of the ten best JDM stand alone novels, calling it a “violent and melancholy trip back in time.” I can certainly understand both opinions, and without revealing too much of the later portion of the plot, MacDonald does borrow heavily from earlier books, as well as presaging a major part of one of the early McGee novels. And the plot’s “calculations,” as Boucher terms them, are certainly there, perhaps more so than in some of MacDonald’s superior efforts, but as I have argued, it is Alex Doyle’s journey  toward redemption that makes this book come alive, and the book’s atmosphere, reflecting all of Doyle’s fears and insecurities, really does add up to an underlying sense of melancholia.

Two months before Deadly Welcome was published it was featured in condensed form under MacDonald’s original title “Ultimate Surprise” in the January 1959 issue of Cosmopolitan. As with all of JDM’s longer works that appeared in magazines, this was not simply the novel edited down to size, but an original rewrite by the author. There were no major changes, as in Murder in the Wind ("Hurricane"), or additional material like he added to The Deceivers, just a shorter, quicker version of the tale that is nowhere near as satisfying as the book. The ending, however, is written differently, changing the perspective of a scene from first person to third. It’s an interesting idea, and I think it's superior to the one in the novel. To reveal more would be to spoil the plot. If anyone is really interested in reading it just email me and I’ll send you a scan of the final page.

Cosmopolitan art editor Robert Atherton commissioned JDM’s Sarasota neighbor Al Buell to handle the illustrations, of which there were two. I won’t show you the second one because it is a depiction of the novel’s climax.

Deadly Welcome enjoyed a total of thirteen printings between its Dell and Fawcett editions, the final one in May 1987, and that is -- needless to say -- long out of print. Used copies, as with most of MacDonald’s novels, are very easy to find at reasonable prices. A digital version, struck from the Hale (UK) edition, was published in 2014 and is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever eBooks are available. It’s a clean edition with no obvious typos and costs only $5.99.

Finally, a glancing reference to the novel from Whitney Bolton’s syndicated Glancing Sideways column back in March of 1959:

Later, [I] get [myself] dressed and drive to New York and meet Randy MacDougall and John MacDonald, novelists and writers, introduce them to each other and mention to John that someone you know recently has bought a paperback edition of one of his novels but you can't think of its title.

"Deadly Welcome, probably," says John.

"Obviously an ardent love story," says Randy.

Whereupon John shakes hands with Randy and says: "I think I'm going to like you."

Later, you three fall into discussions of the sadistic novelist you mentioned in this column recently, though not by name, and Randy says:

"There is another one. He recently has published what is ostensibly a novel but pretty certainly is an autobiography. What is astonishing is that throughout the book he has, unwittingly, laced page after page with frightening evidence of his character, his depravities, his perilous nature.

"He doesn't even realize himself how he has betrayed himself, yet it is all there for anyone of discernment to see and recognize. Like puma-paw marks in the snow. When you finish his novel, you have an accurate, horrifying portrait of the author."

John laughs and says: "I know a novelist I see all the time, an outwardly amiable, blameless person, yet I think he must be harboring tensions and ambitions of a felonious nature. He so obviously adores his villains and so carefully makes it seem that he does not.

"He goes out of his way to say to you: 'This is a foul fellow I'm writing about,' and shouts it so long and often that you know in your heart that he secretly admires the lout and, probably, is much like him.

"I always think of something Diogenes once said and all novelists should learn it, lest they betray their true natures without knowing it. It goes something like this - that every man should treat his superiors as he treats his fire: never getting close enough to be burned nor so far away that he gets cold. No author should treat his characters as anything else but a superior or a fire."