Dead Low Tide

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.

I WORKED PRETTY LATE
on the estimate. The lady wanted to know how much the ten-unit motel was going to cost her, and John Long, my boss, had worked on her, so of course nobody else in the world could possibly put it up except John Long, Contractors. She already had her piece of land fronting on the Tamiami Trail, and it was September, and she wanted the motel up before the season began and the tourists started wandering around with money falling out of their pockets.

It was September, like I said, and hotter than hell’s hinges, so my fingers left smudges on the paper and sweat rolled down my bare chest, and all I wanted in the world was to get finished and put the top down on the car and drive thirty miles to Sarasota and sit in a booth in line with the air conditioning and have Red bring me a Mule, which I would drink with my hand around the chilled copper, while Charlie
Davies played “Body and Soul” for me. I was fed up with John Long, and tired of making estimates without either the proper knowledge or experience, and weary with chasing around after cement here and cinder blocks there and cull cypress the next place. John Long had given me the big talk about opportunity, so rich it left my eyes glazed, so I’d started in the office, answering the phone and typing on two fingers. A year of it and I still answered the phone, typed on four fingers, and made estimates and chased materials and got twenty bucks more a week than a year ago.

Gordy Brogan and Big Dake were the foremen and one of them would handle this job, this motel, for the lady, while John Long went ahead with his Key Estates. And if the lady got restless, somebody would tell John and he’d come down in the Cadillac and bellow at the crew for twenty minutes, and give the lady that big ripe boyish grin and that would keep her happy for a couple of weeks, because he could do that with just the grin, and knowing when and how to use it. And I knew that if any profit came out of the motel it would go right into Key Estates, because that was where John Long had decided he would make the killing he’d waited for.

Anyway, my eyes had slowly got unglazed, and I had got lately into the habit of talking to myself in a most formal fashion. “Andrew Hale McClintock, exactly what in hell are you doing here?”

For the kind of building she wanted, it was a case of multiplying out the square footage and multiplying that by a cost factor which John Long had decided would give him a decent profit margin, then figuring the extras, and then rounding the total off to the next highest round number. Then there was a kid John knew who was working in a grocery store and
taking a correspondence course in architecture. Given the working drawings, he would whip up a drawing of a front elevation that would look pretty, professional, and very impressive. John gave him ten bucks apiece for those drawings.

It got so dark I had to turn on the fluorescent desk lamp, and it seemed to make the room hotter. When the door clacked shut behind me I lifted about six inches off the chair, since I hadn’t heard it open. I turned but I couldn’t see well into the darkness because of the white glare of lamp on the paper I had been working on.

She came closer and I saw that it was Mrs. John Long. I jumped up and grabbed for my shirt, and she said, “No, don’t bother. It’s too hot in here for a shirt, Andy.”

John had introduced me to her after I had gone to work for him. I would see her in the office once in a while, and we would nod and show our teeth, and I had seen her around town at sundry civic functions and those places of entertainment where the common people mingled with the gentry. I kept seeing her picture in the paper, for charity drives and things going on at the Beach Club and all that sort of thing. She is one of those dark-haired Alabama girls, a kind of a stringy little girl, dark, and, if you look closely, feature by feature, you can see that she is not pretty. But her face is so alive all the time that afterward you would swear she is pretty. There are no kids, and I would say she is thirty, to John’s forty.