Birthday: "The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit."

John Dann MacDonald (1916-1986)

Author

Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award recipient, 1972

Today is MacDonald's hundredth birthday. Admired by “serious” novelists for his tight plotting and vivid, versatile style, he didn’t publish a thing until he was 29. He grew up comfortably- his father was an executive in a firearms company- and entered the Wharton School of Business for undergraduate study.

Wharton was a bad fit. MacDonald dropped out and tried Syracuse University, from which he left with a degree and a wife.

He took his next degree from Harvard Business School and worked, in quick succession, for several financial services companies. “I thought they actually wanted me to think,” he later said.

His New York Times obituary says MacDonald passed up a third-rate job to become a second lieutenant, joining the Army in 1940. He was assigned to the non-cloak-and-dagger side of the Office of Strategic Services (later, the CIA), and spent the war in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Weary of Army censors practicing their scissoring skills on his letters to his wife, MacDonald wrote and mailed her a short story in early 1945. She liked it so well she shopped it to Esquire, which didn’t like it so well. Story Magazine, on the other hand, did, and sent her a check for $25: good money in those days.

Mustered out a lieutenant colonel, MacDonald went home, bought a typewriter, and started churning through reams of paper. For four months, he wrote fourteen hours a day, seven days a week- eight hundred thousand words. He soon had a pile of rejection slips almost as high as his pile of stories, but Dime Detective sent him $40 for one, and he was sure he was a writer.

It took MacDonald five more years to produce his first detective novel, a noir potboiler called The Brass Cupcake. Like so many of his contemporaries he paid the bills writing for the pulps, turning out over five hundred stories in the next four decades. He wrote so many that more than once magazines filled entire issues with MacDonald stories, each under a different pen name.

MacDonald tried different genres: crime thrillers, sci-fi, nonfiction; medical thrillers. His books sold well; if not brilliantly. His breakthrough came with 1957’s The Executioners, which was filmed, twice, as Cape Fear- in 1962 and 1991.

MacDonald was also noodling an idea, around that time, of a non-detective detective called McGee, trying him out in a short story he then tossed. He was to be called Dallas McGee, but the assassination of President Kennedy put him off that track. It would probably cause marketing problems. Reading an article about Travis Air Force Base, MacDonald found his man.

The first of the Travis McGee novels- The Deep Blue Goodbye- appeared in 1964. His publisher urged the idea of a color in each title. It would help business travelers in airport bookshop remember which ones of the planned series they’d read. Three more followed in as many months- another novel marketing strategy- called Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place For Dying, and The Quick Red Fox. The ploy paved the way for the Sue Grafton alphabet series, Harry Kimmelman's day of the week books featuring Rabbi David Small, and Janet Evanovich's numbered Stephanie Plum thrillers.

Neither cop nor PI, Travis McGee is (all accounts of MacDonald’s work- including a long Wikipedia bio for McGee- use the present tense to denote him as a real man, still among us) a "salvage consultant". He lives on a 52-foot houseboat called The Busted Flush. Whether the name comes from his winning it at poker, or its plumbing, readers disagree.  

The houseboat floats at Slip F-18 at a marina in Fort Lauderdale. MacDonald put the marina on the opposite side of the state’s panhandle from where he lived. He worried the series might do well and people would show up to interrupt his work.

McGee recovers things, mostly stolen and of value, for half the value. He covers his own expenses, and says his fee is just to fund his “retirement account”. While fifty percent may seem high, half of your valuables back is usually better than owning a hundred percent of nothing, he tells clients.

Although McGee was in his thirties when series began, the retirement account ran low with regularity, necessitating another client to show up via word of mouth.

MacDonald drew on his business experience to bring McGee complicated financial capers to solve, though he also found several missing people and recovered one man’s reputation.

Sandy-haired, gray-eyed and world-weary, McGee describes himself as a knight-errant, trying, like Don Quixote, to tackle the world and rarely doing more than recovering a valuable stamp collection. He goes through women with some regularity; his only close friend is another marina resident, Meyer, an economist who, after his cabin cruiser John Maynard Keynes was blown up, replaced it with the Thorstein Veblen.  McGee drives a 1936 Rolls-Royce a previous owner converted to a pickup. He calls it Miss Agnes.

McGee has an ambivalent view of American Exceptionalism:

I am wary of a lot of things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.

For the early 1960s, McGee also displayed an unusual sense of environmentalism. In 1965’s Bright Orange For The Shroud, McGee says of the latest wave of real estate development sweeping Florida,

Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him "waterfront" lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.

McGee appears in 21 MacDonald novels, the last in 1984. MacDonald’s 1977 novel, Condominium, was a non-McGee bestseller, taking aim- again- at corner-cutting contractors and their friends in Tallahassee who knew for a fact that the solution to every public policy issue was a bulldozer and a generous scattering of walking-around money.

Besides the 21 McGee novels, John D. MacDonald published 45 others; one anthology; five collections of short stories; five science fiction novels, and five nonfiction books. He was ever a disciplined writer, putting in seven to nine hours a day, with breaks for lunch and the cocktail hour. He used top-end bond paper; he said it helped him take the work seriously.

At seventy, he entered hospital for bypass surgery in September 1986. Complications followed; on December 10 he fell into a coma, and he died on December 29.  

By the most accepted reckoning, Travis McGee is 86 this year, and, hopefully, was able to top up the retirement account before actually hitting retirement age. His boat slip is now a literary historic site.