Ballroom of the Skies

“My favorite novelist of all time.”

—D
EAN
K
OONTZ

“For my money, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction—not crime fiction; fiction,
period
—and millions of readers surely agree.”

—
The Washington Post

“MacDonald isn’t simply popular; he’s also good.”

—R
OGER
E
BERT

“MacDonald’s books are narcotic and, once hooked, a reader can’t kick the habit until the supply runs out.”

—
Chicago Tribune Book World

“Travis McGee is one of the most enduring and unusual heroes in detective fiction.”

—
The Baltimore Sun

“Remains one of my idols.”

—D
ONALD
W
ESTLAKE

“A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”

—S
UE
G
RAFTON

“The Dickens of mid-century America—popular, prolific and … conscience-ridden about his environment … a thoroughly American author.”

—
The Boston Globe

“It will be for his crisply written, smoothly plotted mysteries that MacDonald will be remembered.”

—
USA Today

“MacDonald had the marvelous ability to create attention-getting characters who doubled as social critics. In MacDonald novels, it is the rule rather than the exception to find, in the midst of violence and mayhem, a sentence, a paragraph, or several pages of rumination on love, morality, religion, architecture, politics, business, the general state of the world or of Florida.”

—
Sarasota Herald-Tribune

The Brass Cupcake

Murder for the Bride

Judge Me Not

Wine for the Dreamers

Ballroom of the Skies

The Damned

Dead Low Tide

The Neon Jungle

Cancel All Our Vows

All These Condemned

Area of Suspicion

Contrary Pleasure

A Bullet for Cinderella

Cry Hard, Cry Fast

You Live Once

April Evil

Border Town Girl

Murder in the Wind

Death Trap

The Price of Murder

The Empty Trap

A Man of Affairs

The Deceivers

Clemmie

Cape Fear (The Executioners)

Soft Touch

Deadly Welcome

Please Write for Details

The Crossroads

The Beach Girls

Slam the Big Door

The End of the Night

The Only Girl in the Game

Where Is Janice Gantry?

One Monday We Killed Them All

A Key to the Suite

A Flash of Green

The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

On the Run

The Drowner

The House Guest

End of the Tiger and Other Stories

The Last One Left

S*E*V*E*N

Condominium

Other Times, Other Worlds

Nothing Can Go Wrong

The Good Old Stuff

One More Sunday

More Good Old Stuff

Barrier Island

A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974

The Travis McGee Series

The Deep Blue Good-by

Nightmare in Pink

A Purple Place for Dying

The Quick Red Fox

A Deadly Shade of Gold

Bright Orange for the Shroud

Darker Than Amber

One Fearful Yellow Eye

Pale Gray for Guilt

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

Dress Her in Indigo

The Long Lavender Look

A Tan and Sandy Silence

The Scarlet Ruse

The Turquoise Lament

The Dreadful Lemon Sky

The Empty Copper Sea

The Green Ripper

Free Fall in Crimson

Cinnamon Skin

The Lonely Silver Rain

The Official Travis McGee Quizbook

When I was in college, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned
. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of
Strangers
to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that, as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

The world, Branson thought, is like that circus act of
long ago, back in the sweet-colored days of childhood, when the big top was as high as the sky, and gigantic horses marched the earth.

He remembered the act. The ragged clown teetering on the high wire, clutching his misshapen hat, reeling toward destruction, catching himself in that last throat-thickening instant to flounder some more. You believed in him then. That poor dazed clown, petrified by height, yet trying with pathetic and humble courage to please the crowd, taking from the baggy clothes the white dinner plates and, fighting his fear and his constant losses of balance, managing somehow to juggle the plates. Oh, how white they had shined in the spotlights!