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
One Monday We Killed Them All 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 © 1961 by John D. MacDonald
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in paperback in the United States by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1961.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82694-7
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter i
Chapter ii
Chapter iii
Chapter iv
Chapter v
Chapter vi
Chapter vii
Chapter viii
Chapter ix
Chapter x
Chapter xi
Chapter xii
Chapter xiii
About the Author
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 thr
ee 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.
prologue
An excerpt from a statement in the Brook City Police file on the death of Mildred Hanaman, dictated and signed by Hans Dettermann, also known as Kraut Dettermann:
“You could say what she wanted was for McAran to notice her, and she was halfway drunk when she found us in a back room at the Holiday Lounge in the four-hand stud game for small money, just killing time. She called him all kinds of dirty names, then he topped her with some worse ones, and she cried and went out, but she came back in from the bar a little while later with a drink in her hand. She stood behind him, watching the way the cards were falling, and sudden-like she poured the drink on his head. He swung backhand at her and she dodged it, but fell down, sitting, because she wasn’t so steady, and laughed at him. McAran went and got a towel and came back, drying his head and face, and she was standing up then, trying to make a joke out of it. There was music from the bar, and she did little dance steps in front of him saying something like, ‘Remember me? I’m your girl. Dance with your girl. Be nice to your girl, please, please, darling.’ But he pushed right past her not even looking at her and sat down to bet the pair of eights he had showing. She got real white in the face and she was breathing hard, and suddenly she jumped at him from behind, yelling and digging at his face. That was when he jumped up and she tried to run, but he grabbed her and backed her against the wall next to the door, and held her there and started hitting her. Pretty soon we knew somebody better stop him, so we stopped him. She slid down the wall and sat in a bent-over way. He came back to the table, and I remember it was his deal. After maybe three or four hands, she got up real slow. She held onto the doorframe. She didn’t look at us, but I could see her face was messed up. She walked out. I’d say it was about quarter to one in the morning. I never saw her again. She was a real pretty girl, but I guess McAran got tired of her, the way she kept chasing him after he’d called the whole thing off.”
i
When you can count the time you have left in big numbers, count it in years; whole weeks can go by when you never think of it. But it dwindles down, and as the time gets shorter it seems to go faster. It came down to months, and then weeks, and suddenly it was time for me to go up to Harpersburg, up to the big maximum security prison and get my wife’s half-brother and bring him home.
As the time got shorter I could see Meg tightening up. She’d look beyond me when I was talking to her, and I’d have to repeat what I’d said. She was short with the kids, impatient and abrupt.
“Five years out of the prettiest part of his life,” she would say. “From twenty-five to thirty, all that good time lost and gone.”
“It could have been more,” I told her.
“What’s he going to be like, honey? What’s he going to act like?”
“You’ve seen him once a month for five years, Meg. You tell me.”
She turned away. “We talk through the wire. I do most of the talking. He listens and sometimes he smiles. I don’t know how he’ll be. I’m—I’m scared of how he’ll be.”
I told her he would be fine, but I didn’t believe it. I went with her to visit him the first time. He told me not to come back. He meant it. So I’d drive her up there when I could, and wait in the car across the road from the big wall and try to pretend to myself they were never going to let Dwight McAran out of the cage. She would always come out looking as if they’d whipped her, walking heavy, her face dull, and half the eighty miles home would go by before she’d begin to act like herself.
“I should go with you to bring him back,” Meg told me.
“He made it plain in the letter. If we want to get him started right, we better do it the way he wants, honey. Maybe—maybe he just doesn’t want to see you anywhere near those walls again.”
“Maybe that’s it.” But her voice was dubious, her eyes uncertain.
And I wouldn’t know why he made that request until he told me. With men like Dwight McAran it’s little use trying to guess why they do things. We judge others by our own patterns. When a man doesn’t fit anywhere into the pattern of most people, you might as well try guessing how high a bird will fly on Tuesday.
Down at the station they knew I was going to drive up and get him. There’s more gossip in a place like that than any bridge club you ever saw. They’d even found out Meg wasn’t going with me. It isn’t very often a cop has a brother-in-law to bring on home from state prison. It would have been a rougher ride if I hadn’t made Detective Lieutenant, but the rank kept most of the boys off my neck.
The bad situation, the one I knew was going to be bad, was with Alfie Peters. He marched through the squad room and into my office the afternoon of the day before I had to go get Dwight. We started rookie the same year and he’d thought of every reason in the world why he got a little bit left behind, except the right reason, he’s too quick with his hands and his mouth. But he was the one who made the collar on Dwight all by himself, which is more
than any one man should have tried or could have gotten away with, unhurt. All Alfie got was a dislocated thumb and a torn ear. Peters is a big man, quick and meaty.
He came in and stared at me and said, “The best thing you can do, Fenn, is drive him the other direction and leave him off some place.”
“If you got to yell, Alfie, go down in the park and holler up at my window.”
“You heard what McAran yelled at me in court.”
“I was there.”
“You give him a message from me. If I come across him any place at all in Brook City, and I don’t like the look on his face, I’m going to hammer on it until I get a look I do like. He doesn’t scare me a damn bit.”
I stared at Alfie until he began to look uneasy. “If you have reason to arrest him, bring him in. If he resists arrest, you can take the necessary steps to subdue him. If it’s a false arrest, I’ll do everything I can to make the charge against you stick. He’s not on parole, Peters. He served full time. There will be no arrests for loitering, for acting suspicious, for overtime parking. I’ve cleared that with the Chief. You’re not putting the roust on McAran, and you’re not working him over. And pickup order on him has to be cleared with the Chief.”
“Nice,” he said. “Real nice. Who gives him the keys to the city? The Chief or the mayor, or maybe we should invite the governor down?”
“Just handle yourself with a lot of care, Alfie.”
“The picture is clear. That son of a bitch gets the special deal. The brother-in-law of Lieutenant Fenn Hillyer gets every break in the book. Is it on account he’s a college man? He killed Mildred Hanaman and everybody knows it. You must be nuts to let him come back here.”
I leaned back in the chair. I smiled at him, even. “I don’t make the laws. He was arrested and charged and he stood trial and got five years for manslaughter. Now get out of here, Alfie.”
He hesitated, turned on his heel and walked out. It certainly wasn’t my idea Dwight should come back to Brook City. It was his, and Meg backed him up. She had some glamorized idea of Dwight becoming such a solid and dependable citizen everybody would realize they’d misjudged him. Personally, it had always astonished me he had gotten to the age of twenty-five without killing anybody. But what can you do when the woman you love is just using that natural warmth and heart which make you love her? She’s two years older than Dwight. They had a miserable childhood. She did her best to protect him. She’s never stopped trying. He’s the only blood relation she has, and she has enough love left over for forty.
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