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
Praise for the Travis McGee series
“There’s only one thing as good as reading a John D. MacDonald novel: reading it again. A writer way ahead of his time, his Travis McGee books are as entertaining, insightful, and suspenseful today as the moment I first read them. He is the all-time master of the American mystery novel.”
—JOHN SAUL
“One of the great sagas in American fiction.”
—ROBERT B. PARKER
“In McGee mysteries and other novels as well, MacDonald’s voice was one of a social historian.”
—Los Angeles Times
Cinnamon Skin is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1982 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Lee Child
Excerpt from The Lonely Silver Rain copyright © 1985 by
John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.
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., New York, in 1964.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82681-7
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
Cover photograph: © Image Source/Dreampictures
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Dedication
Excerpt from The Lonely Silver Rain
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Introduction
Lee Child
Suspense Fiction trades on surprising and unexpected twists. Like this one: A boy named John Dann MacDonald was born in 1916 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, into the kind of quiet and comfortable middle-class prosperity that became common in America forty or fifty years later but which was still relatively rare early in the century. Sharon was a satellite town near Pittsburgh, dominated by precision metalworking, and John’s father was a mild-mannered and upstanding citizen with secure and prestigious salaried employment as a senior financial executive with a local manufacturer. Young John was called Jack as a child, and wore sailor suits, and grew up in a substantial suburban house on a tree-lined block. He read books, played with his dog, and teased his little sister and his cousin. When he was eighteen, his father funded a long European grand tour for him, advising him by letter “to make the best of it … to eat and function regularly … to be sure and attend a religious service at least once on each Sunday … to keep a record of your expenditures as a training for your college days.”
Safely returned, young Jack went on to two decent East Coast schools, and married a fellow student, and went to Harvard for an MBA, and volunteered for the army in 1940, and finished World War II as a lieutenant colonel, after thoroughly satisfactory service as a serious, earnest, bespectacled, rear-echelon staff officer.
So what does such a fellow do next? Does he join General Motors? IBM? Work for the Pentagon?
In John D. MacDonald’s case, he becomes an impoverished writer of pulp fiction.
During his first four postwar months, he lost twenty pounds by sitting at a table and hammering out 800,000 unsold words. Then in his fifth month he sold a story for twenty-five bucks. Then another for forty bucks, and eventually more than five hundred. Sometimes entire issues of pulp magazines were all his own work, disguised under dozens of different pen names. Then in 1950 he watched the contemporary boom in paperback novels and jumped in with his first full-length work, which was followed by sixty-six more, including some really seminal crime fiction and one of history’s greatest suspense series.
Why? Why did a middle-class Harvard MBA with extensive corporate connections and a gold-plated recommendation from the army turn his back on everything apparently predestined, to sit at a battered table and type, with an anxious wife at his side? No one knows. He never explained. It’s a mystery.
But we can speculate. Perhaps he never wanted a quiet and comfortable middle-class life. Perhaps, after finding himself amid the chaos of war, he felt able to liberate himself from the crushing filial expectations he had previously followed so obediently. As an eighteen-year-old, it’s hard to say no to the father who just paid for a trip to Europe. Eleven years later, as a lieutenant colonel, it’s easier.
And we know from what he wrote that he felt he had something to say to the world. His early stuff was whatever put food on that battered table—detective stories, westerns, adventure stories, sports stories, and even some science fiction—but soon enough his long-form fiction began to develop some enduring and intertwined themes. From A Deadly Shade of Gold, a Travis McGee title: “The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic,
awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.” From the stand-alone thriller Where Is Janice Gantry?: “Somebody has to be tireless, or the fast-buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay, and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet.”
These two angles show up everywhere in his novels: the need to—maybe reluctantly, possibly even grumpily—stand up and be counted on behalf of the weak, helpless, and downtrodden, which included people, animals, and what we now call the environment—which was in itself a very early and very prescient concern: Janice Gantry, for instance, predated Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring by a whole year.
But the good knight’s armor was always tarnished and rusted. The fight was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. This strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion. Where did it come from? Not, presumably, the leafy block where he was raised in quiet and comfort. The war must have changed him, like it changed a generation and the world.
Probably the best of his nonseries novels is The Executioners, which became Cape Fear as a movie (twice.) It’s an acute psychological study of base instinct, terror, mistakes, and raw emotion. It’s about a man—possibly a man like MacDonald’s father, or like MacDonald himself—who moves out of his quiet and comfort into more primeval terrain. And those twin poles are the theme of the sensationally good Travis McGee series, which is a canon equaled for enduring quality and maturity by very little else. McGee is a quiet man, internally bewildered by and raging at what passes for modern progress, externally happy merely to be varnishing the decks of his houseboat and polishing its brass, but always ready to saddle up and ride off in the service of those who need and deserve his help. Again, not the product of the privileged youth enjoyed by the salaried executive’s son.
So where did McGee and MacDonald’s other heroes come from? Why Florida? Why the jaundiced concerns? We will never know. But maybe we can work it out, by mining the millions of words written with such haste and urgency and passion between 1945 and 1986.
LEE CHILD
New York
2012
A man’s life is dyed the color of his imagination.
—Marcus Aurelius
One
There are no hundred percent heroes.
Every man can be broken when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like an unbearably shrill sound.
I was trying to explain this to Annie Renzetti, the trim, tidy, and loving person who had been an essential part of my life for many months. It was late June, summer season at the resort she manages, the Eden Beach near Naples, Florida. We were down on the beach, at the quiet end, beyond her personal cabaña, sprawled on huge beach towels. It was difficult for me to carry on any kind of complex discussion and keep looking at her at the same time, especially when she was using a tiny white bikini to set off her golden-dark tan. I had never before been seriously involved with a short, slender, dark-haired woman. My taste had run to tall blondes with long long legs and good shoulders. Maybe in my ignorance I had thought the little ones too fragile. Found out they are not. At least this one wasn’t.
“Did it ever happen to you?” she asked.
“Not really, but I have been so close I know that somewhere, sometime, it could happen. We have a lot of myths in our society, Annie.”
“Please remember you are the only person in the world who is allowed to call me Annie.”
“I will never forget. I think the myth that has humbled Meyer is one of the worst: the myth of the unbreakable hero. I told him some stories. I thought one would make the right impression on him.
“A long time ago, in one of the wars we didn’t win, I had a company commander who was the best I ever saw. Quiet and competent and humane and tough. When bad orders came down, he’d find ways to sidestep them without getting himself or any of us jammed up. He took all the risks we took, and he tried to keep the risk factor down. He took damned good care of us, and when we lost people, it really hurt him.
“One day we had to go through a patch of Asian jungle which had a leech out at the tip end of almost every leaf and twig, swaying, waiting for something full of blood to walk underneath. The captain hadn’t been in leech country before, but the company had. There are two good ways to get them off: touch them with a lighted end of a cigarette or slide a sliver of bamboo under one up to the head end and give a little flip and he’ll come off. After you’ve flipped about ten of them off, you begin to get the hang of it. The thing I hated most about them was the way they would crawl through the eyelets on your boots and fasten onto you through your socks, swell up huge, and then get mashed by the pressure of the boot as you walked.”
“Hey, look!” she said, and showed me the goose bumps on her upper arm.
“Where was I?”
“I won’t even tell you.”
“Oh. Anyway, it was really a heavy fall in there, and they were coming down faster than you could get them off. And if you tried pulling them off, of course you left the jaws embedded and they would fester. So we broke out of the column and looked up and ran to where there were open places in the trees overhead, where they couldn’t fall down and you’d have time to get rid of the ones already on you. But the captain didn’t know the routine. He stood there, pulling them off, faster and faster, thrashing around, and finally he began screaming and running, falling down and jumping up, screaming and running. He was a good brave man, but this little thing came at just the wrong time and place; maybe it resonated with something in his childhood. It broke him. Also, it destroyed his authority over the company. He began to make mistakes. And one of them got him killed about three weeks later.”
“How awful!”
“A couple of days after the leech business, one of the company clowns did an imitation of the captain fighting off the leeches. I decked him.”
“I’m glad.”
“Strange thing, the clown got killed in the same weird skirmish that got the captain killed. The captain read the map wrong, and we went down the wrong trail.”
“But you couldn’t make Meyer understand what you were telling him.”
“I told you how it was. We knew Grizzel was a dangerous psychopath with nothing to lose and that he was probably on his way to see us. Meyer had never seen me bring in outside help before. So when Grizzel came up behind Meyer, spun him around, jammed that derringer into his gut and announced that they were both going to come over to the Busted Flush and visit me—and it would be the last visit Meyer would ever make and I would ever get—Meyer said he looked back into that man’s crazy eyes and saw something moving back in there, something without soul or mercy. He read his own death. He saw there was no hope. He turned into a robot, doing only what Grizzel ordered. He was broken and he knew it.”
“But he saw Grizzel fall dead, Travis! Didn’t that …?”
“Maybe it helped, but not much. It’s been a year. We all miss the old Meyer. That’s why we cooked up this Toronto lecture thing. We had to be careful. If he’d suspected it was a put-up job, he’d have refused the invitation to lecture up there. His old friend Aggie Sloane helped us arrange it, after she flew down and saw Meyer looking so dwindled and withdrawn. She has a lot of clout. She talked to one of Meyer’s friends, a man named Price-water, into backing out of a speaking engagement up there in Canada and asking Meyer as a special favor to fill in for him. The man pled illness.”
“Then I don’t understand about the niece.”
“That was another plot to get Meyer out of his shell. We phoned her. I told her about Meyer. She was hurt that he hadn’t come to her wedding in April and had just sent regrets and a check and the usual best wishes for happiness. And so she said she and her new husband would fly over as soon as she could take some time off. So of course Evan and Norma Lawrence arrived the day before
Meyer had to fly up to Toronto for the two-week lecture series. So he insisted they live aboard his cruiser while he was in Canada. One of the captains from Charterboat Row is taking them out on day trips aboard the Keynes. We had two great schemes, and they just happened to overlap. Anyway, he’ll be back here July sixth and they don’t have to leave until the tenth. After that Aggie is going to send him off to cover something or other for her newspapers. She told me that any kind of depression can be cured if you move a person around enough.”
“Let me see, I keep moving you back and forth between Lauderdale and Naples. Feel depressed?”
“Let’s move up to your place and see if there is anything wrong with me that needs fixing.”
“Oh, no, you don’t! I’m a career woman, and there is my career sitting right over there, all two hundred rooms of it, dying for lack of attention.”
“Annie, we’ve been out here in the blazing sun, and we’re going to have to take showers anyway. Florida has a serious water shortage. Why waste a good shower?”
“I have got to learn to start saying no to you.”
“Why?”
She rolled onto her elbows and looked down into my eyes. She pursed her lips and raised her thick dark brows and said, “Now that is a very good question. A very good question indeed. Why should I start that?”
So we picked up our gear and climbed the steps to the shallow porch of the manager’s cabaña, up on pilings six feet tall. We had half a bottle of red wine left from the previous evening, and I mixed it half and half with club soda and lots of ice, for tall spritzers. She dimmed the daylight in the bedroom by pulling the draperies almost across. We sat on the bed and sipped the spritzers and grinned at each other. Finally we set them aside, and I took all of her out of her scraps of bikini, admired her every inch at close and loving range, and in due time, with knowing effort, set her to hooting and whimpering and finally sighing deeply and long.
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