I Could Go on Singing
Page 1
Praise for John D. MacDonald
“My favorite novelist of all time.”
—Dean Koontz
“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.”
—Roger Ebert
“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
“John D. MacDonald remains one of my idols.”
—Donald Westlake
“A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”
—Sue Grafton
“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
BY JOHN D. MACDONALD
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
I Could Go on Singing is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
2013 Random House eBook Edition
Copyright © 1963 by John D. MacDonald
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in paperback by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1963.
eISBN: 978-0-8129-8493-4
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
v3.1
The Singular John D. MacDonald
Dean Koontz
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 s
oon 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.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
About the Author
one
Through the window at his elbow he saw the last misty halo, a small pink-white radiance of metropolitan millions, inconsequential as swamp fire, sliding away and behind as the jet tilted, climbing to authorized altitude for the eastward flight across the Atlantic, rushing toward the sun at half the speed of light, a sun which by now, he estimated, was dawning over Moscow and would meet him on this March morning in Paris.
With a wryness of self-knowledge, he knew this was one of his small devices, one of his attempts to bring order into a world which became increasingly erratic, insensible and forlorn. And this mission, he knew, would require of him every balancing and restoring device he could muster, although his sure instinct for his own breaking point was telling him that maybe it would not be enough. Not this time. Not when your own past is such a merciless part of the equation.
His name was Jason Brown, and he was in his thirties, a limber and indolent-looking man, concealing ulcerous tensions behind a lazy-eyed equanimity, a knuckle-jointed man with a used, pebbled, furrowed face, each fresh suit irreparably wrinkled the moment he put it on, shock of brown hair springing to disorder as soon as the comb was put down, pipe spewing ashes.
The stewardess brought his drink, and he sipped it and looked toward the night and saw his reflection in the glass and marveled that the face, as familiar as old shoes and jackets, should look the same as always.
He lifted his glass and said to himself, “Down with this revolting, idiotic mess. Down with Jason Brown. Down with traps, subterfuge, conspiracy, and especially down with Sid Wegler.”
The trouble with people like Wegler, he reflected, they always detected your vulnerabilities, then used them against you. But that was very probably one of the essential skills of the head of a large movie studio, the ability to get the maximum use out of the Jason Browns of this world.
And the basic vulnerability was money, as always. And his own incomparable credulity. He had walked right up to stand on the trap door, and Wegler had pulled the string. Smiling.
If, three weeks ago, anyone had tried to tell Jason Brown that he was going to become involved again in any way with Jenny Bowman, he would have said firmly that it could not possibly happen. Yet here he was, hurtling toward Sunday morning, toward the ancient dignified grubbiness of London, toward the London Palladium where Jenny was doing a charity concert this coming evening prior to her London opening.
In retrospect he knew he should have been wary when Wegler had phoned him directly in Santa Barbara, where he was living and working in his sister’s house, and said affably, “Jase, you’re the one can work the bugs out of this cruddy script we got so much money in already, I got to salvage it or look very bad, that is if you can pull loose from whatever you’re working on. Just checking to make sure before I send one of my smart boys to dicker with your smart agent, fella.”
Creative man is forever gullible. He feigned reluctance. Sandy, the agent, worked the studio for a sixteen-week contract at enough a week to make Jason Brown feel as if he had suddenly walked out of a damp cave into refreshing sunlight. When, on his first day, Wegler made him wait only twenty minutes, then greeted him with effusive cordiality in his big office and gave him a copy of a Headly Jamison script, an original, Jason should have felt the first tickle of wariness. Not that his creative record was entirely meager. There was one fair play, and one reasonably solid novel, and the listed credits in radio, television and moving pictures. But there were also the plays that never worked, the novels that died quietly, and the numerous credits that emitted a small sharp odor of hack. When you chop and change and rework the original efforts of others, that flavor is almost inescapable.
There had been the years when the money came in very nicely, and he had spent too much of it. And, of late, he had committed a few tactical errors. He had become too confident of the book he was working on, and had side-stepped a few too many television assignments in order to work on it, and then had seen the book slowly going sour, had gotten too anxious about it, and had lost his sense of certainty about what was needed to retrieve it. And four-year-old Bonny was his hostage to fortune.
And so Wegler’s offer had been such a timely windfall, he had not stopped to think that in the normal course of events one does not hire a Jason Brown to salvage a Jamison script. They gave him a pleasant office, efficient equipment, ample supplies and access to a secretary.
And he went to work on the script, looking for the flaws he expected to find. He read it over and over. He made notes. He marked passages. He told himself this scene could be tightened, and that motivation could be strengthened, and these stretches of dialogue could be smoothed out. But after three days of it, he knew he was kidding himself. As far as he could see, it was the best thing Jamison had ever done. It had originality and power. It had scope and persuasion and great dramatic impact. He knew he was enough of a craftsman to be able to tinker with it in minor ways and effect a few minor improvements. But if the studio heads thought it needed a major salvage job, they were out of their minds.
The Jamison script was called The Longest Dawn. As is, solidly cast, produced and directed, it could bring down a golden rain of Oscars, and he had too much respect for decent work to chop into it, knowing he would only diminish it. And so, on his fourth working day he tried to make an appointment with Sid Wegler. He tried for a week without success, and finally composed a long memorandum to Sid, stating his views. He cut the memo down to three paragraphs and sent it along, appending the few changes he had made in the script. He visited Sandy’s office and told him what he had done and showed Sandy a copy of the memo. As he had expected, Sandy called him a damned fool.
There was no response from Sid Wegler. The day before yesterday Wegler had called him in. Sid was a lean, bald, bland man. He could look thirty-five or sixty-five, depending on his mood. He used long silences as a weapon of discomfiture.
“Jase, sit down and let’s thrash this thing out. I was heartened by your memo. Truly heartened. It is the kind of integrity I would expect from you.”
“Who had the idea anything was wrong with the script?”
“My boy, in this business if we could be sure of anything, we would all be stinking rich. Little doubts creep in. Is there an audience for a mature, adult, significant story like The Longest Dawn? Should it be hypoed a little? You are on contract to work on this script, Jase, and you are going to live with it.”
“But there’s nothing I can do to it, Sid.”
“Have you examined it from all angles? I say no. I say you have not. Because there is a factor, a very important factor, which must be fitted into this equation, Jason. And that is the factor of the star. Am I right?”
“Any actress worth beans would give up eternal salvation to get her teeth into this.”
“But some ways of doing a scene play right for one and should be changed for another. There is a fitness about these things. And though we have provisional script approval, I want you to work this whole thing out very very carefully with the star. Are you willing?”
“Of course, Sid, but isn’t that the director’s business?”