Do you know of John D. MacDonald? He was a highly prolific 20th Century writer with amazing talents. He usually is classified as a mystery writer, or a writer of crime and suspense novels, genres I’m not a fan of, but MacDonald was a master storyteller. His characters cleverly untangle themselves from the page and leap out to perform right in front of you, and they reveal what’s making them move. MacDonald’s most famous character is Travis McGee, the protagonist in a series of 21 novels, each of which I’ve read at least twice. Travis is suitably strong, with weaknesses of course, and, good or bad, he’s easy to admire. Here’s a bit of description as Travis drives to the campus of a fictional, and recently constructed State Western University in Arizona, where he will meet one of the principal characters in A Purple Place for Dying. (Each book in the series has a color in its title.). Check out Travis’s musing as he moves along.
“Hundreds of cars winked in the mid-morning sun on huge parking lots. The university buildings were giant brown shoeboxes in random pattern over substantial acreage. It was ten o’clock and kids were hurrying on their long treks from building to building. Off to the right was the housing complex of dormitories and a big garden apartment layout which I imagined housed faculty and administrative personnel. A sign at the entrance drive to the campus buildings read, No Student Cars. The blind sides of the big buildings held big bright murals made of ceramic tile, in a stodgy treatment of such verities as Industry, Freedom, Peace, etc.
“The paths crisscrossed the baked earth. There were some tiny areas of green, lovingly nurtured, but it would be years before it all looked like the architect’s renderings. The kids hustled to their ten-o’clocks, lithe and young, intent on their obscure purposes. Khakis and jeans, cottons and colors. Vague glances, empty as camera lenses, moved across me as I drove slowly by. I was on the other side of the fence of years. They could relate and react to adults with whom they had a forced personal contact. But strangers were as meaningless to them as were the rocks and scrubby trees. They were in the vivid tug and flex of life, and we were faded pictures on the corridor walls–drab, ended and slightly spooky. I noticed a goodly sprinkling of Latin blood among them, the tawny cushiony girls and the bullfighter boys. They all seemed to have an urgency about them, that strained harried trimester look. It would cram them through sooner, and feed them out into the corporations and the tract houses, breeding and hurrying, organized for all the time and money budgets, binary systems, recreation funds, taxi transports group adjustments, tenure, constructive hobbies. They were being structured to life on the run, and by the time they would become what is now known as senior citizens, they could fit nicely into planned communities where recreation is scheduled on such a tight and competitive basis that they could continue to run, plan, organize, until, falling at last into silence, the grief-therapists would gather them in, rosy their cheeks, close the box and lower them into the only rest they had ever known.
“It is all functional, of course, But it is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. the most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say Now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out and earn a living rather than wasting four years of college.
“Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and paradox of existence than does one of those chickens fattening itself for the mechanical plucking, freezing and packaging.”
Perhaps it was thoughtful passages like this that helped MacDonald sell over 70 million books.
Admittedly, after all of those years hearing you talk of John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee, I’ve never read him. But from this short description, I just may have to pick up a book. Great writing!
Glad you liked the sample. Most writers at a similar point in the story, I think, would have tossed off a few sentences to create the campus scene before rushing the story along and introducing the next major character. Not so with MacDonald. He often threw in little pearls, having little to do with his plot, but joyful to savor. And, as I said, he was a master story teller, a superb creator of characters. Following the section I quoted, McGee meets Isobel Webb, a young woman as complex as anyone you’ve ever known, a woman who spices the book as she plays her part in moving it along.
Years ago, upon the recommendation of a scholarly uncle, I read and thoroughly enjoyed two of MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels (Deep Blue, Lonely Silver). Yet McGee does not appear my favorite MacDonald book, All These Condemned. Therein, a wealthy socialite, while hosting a weekend party at her lakeside mansion, winds up dead. The story is told through before and after perspectives of various party guests, each of whom has some motive to kill the hostess. It’s an absolute masterpiece.
You mention a great book, Jeff. MacDonald was amazingly skilled at using before and after perspectives from various characters. He used it fairly often, even in short stories. One that pops quickly to mind is Seven, a collection of short stories that could serve as a textbook on character development. But don’t pass on the other 19 Travis McGee books. The more you know, the more you like the guy.