Contrary Pleasure
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
Contrary Pleasure 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
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz
Copyright © 1954 by John D. MacDonald
Copyright renewed 1982 by John D. MacDonald
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 hardcover by Appleton Century Crofts in 1954.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82692-3
www.atrandom.com
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
v3.1
For Margie and Dad
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
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, o
h, 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.
“There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either. This is often the fate of long consideration; he does nothing who endeavours to do more than is allowed to humanity. Flatter not yourself with contrarieties of pleasure. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring; no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.”
—The Princess Nakayah
Rasselas by Dr. Samuel Johnson
Chapter One
This was a time of day he was most apt to like. A June evening, and a silence along the office halls after the twittering departures of the secretaries, young tamping of heels on the steel stair treads worn to silver, the last typewriter tilted back into its desk with decisive thump, the whirl and rattle and subsonic resonances of the mill itself stilled, the last cars leaving the lot.
He sat quite still at his desk, breathing the silence. He heard the sounds of the girl in the outer office, a stealthy sliding of desk drawer and the small, bright snap of purse, then her steps on the rug as she came to the doorway.
“Will there be anything else, Mr. Delevan?”
“No. You can go now, Miss Daley.”
“Good night, sir.”
He treated this one with controlled patience and was amused at himself because the net, to her, was perhaps an impression of kindliness. Whereas the bitterly efficient Miss Meyer, now on her annual vacation, was often target for unwarranted irritation. Meyer was his right hand, comrade in many battles, she of stone routines, of razored loyalties. The only one who seemed even less than he to have a life outside the worn and ugly walls. Together now in this place for twenty-five years. And this was the year that it was half his life. He had thought about that a great deal lately. As though the very figures had some symbolic meaning. Last year more of his life had been spent outside the Stockton Knitting Company, Incorporated, than in it. And next year the outside life would become the minor fraction. It added a haunting significance to this year, like the echo of a sound that cannot be identified. When, he thought, had he passed the midpoint of the years he would be here? A prisoner can compute his term. One who will be pensioned can estimate retirement. But a man who works to keep a thing alive cannot guess how long he will be successful.
He wondered if Meyer ever thought in this way. You could not get close to her, ever. They had come here at almost the same time. It was difficult to think of her outside the offices and more difficult to imagine her on vacation. Once, on a Saturday, he had been walking along one of the downtown streets and had seen her in a shoe store, salesman talking earnestly up at her, her lips pursed as she studied the shoe she was considering. It was strange to think of her as a person who must buy shoes, wash her face, think of the future, talk with friends. If she bought the wrong size, her feet would hurt. That was a shocking concept. And oddly heartbreaking.
This was the time of silence. It was a healing time of transition from the life inside to the life outside. On those days when his younger brother, Quinn Delevan, waited to ride home with him, the healing process was flawed. He was then too aware of Quinn down the hall, glancing at his watch, aimlessly handling papers.
Benjamin Delevan stood up and pushed his chair forward again, socketing it neatly into the kneehole of the desk. He closed his windows and closed his office door behind him. There was nothing at all on top of the secretarial desk in the outer office. Perhaps Meyer had explained, in her cool voice, “Mr. Delevan likes it that way.”
He stood for a moment. The corner in its airlessness seemed faintly perfumed by the girl who had sat there these past few days. He shut the outer door of the office behind him and walked down the corridor, walked stolidly down the steps of steel and rubber to the tile of the ground floor. The watchman gave him his nightly surly nod and performed the ritual of leaning in over the switchboard and pulling the night plug from his phone. He always yanked it free with more emphasis than necessary. Benjamin Delevan suspected that it was an evening routine which obscurely comforted them both.
His car was in the small ell of the parking lot reserved for the executive personnel, nosed against the brick on which was affixed the small wooden signs of reservation. B. DELEVAN. The car had been shaded from the late sun, but the steering wheel was still warmer than his hands. He drove out of the lot and down the narrowness of Hickman Street with its sidings and warehouses on either side, caught the green light at the end and turned out onto the six-lane asphalt of Vaunt Boulevard, into the tapering flow of the evening rush, up over the sleek hump of City Bridge, and out the long glossy blue river of the boulevard with its bright new yellow traffic-lane markings, its synchronized lights, past showroom
s and used-car lots, angular new shopping centers and, further out, the drive-ins, the outdoor movies, an anachronistic and spanking new miniature golf course. For many years he had had to fight and inch his way through the narrow old streets of the city of Stockton, cursing the delivery trucks, the suicidal pedestrians, the uncoordinated lights. All the cities of the Mohawk Valley had been like that. Strangled spasms of evening traffic. Rome and Troy, Syracuse and Albany, Utica and Rochester. But now Mr. Dewey’s Thruway was taking away the congestion of the cross-state traffic, and the cities themselves were building these hushed black rivers to drain the twisted stone swamps of the old parts of the cities.
Though now it was much easier to commute—he could make the trip from the plant to Clayton Village in twenty minutes of restful driving rather than fifty minutes of nerve fray—he often had the feeling that something had been lost. The cars had jammed up where carriages had once rolled. Some elms survived there, and stone quarried long ago, and scrollwork on the Victorian cornices. There were curbs dished by many years, and ornate iron on the lamp standards, and the prehistoric bulge of old trolley tracks under the skin of patched asphalt. When the main street made an entirely unnecessary turn, you could think of some stolid farmer of long ago who made his neighbors go the long way around his property and perhaps stood in the evening and leaned on the fence rail and gave them uncompromising stares, sound in his belief in ownership.
But now the sleek highway, through condemnation proceedings, implemented by bond issue, symbol of sterile union of slide rule and high-compression ratio, had flattened a swath through the most ancient slums, riding smoothly on rough fill that had once been buildings of old stone, bursting out into the flatlands beside the river where once there had been only marsh and discarded bedsprings and snaky adventures for small boys. It had simplified flow, enriched the farsighted, and spawned those bordering strips of plastic and glass brick, fluorescence and floodlight, where the Deal of the Day turned slowly under candy-striped canopy, where every orange was precisely the same size, and sapphire from Ceylon tipped the juke needles.
Sometimes on the drive home he would imagine a civilization where this delicately engineered river of asphalt had become too cramped, too slow, too dangerous. Then it would become secondary and the bright plastic would fade and the light tubes fail and fabrics with catchy chemical names would flap in the night wind off the marsh. It would die then, but without grace. Not the way the old city had died. The old city died in the way a forgotten doll is found up there behind trunks with rounded tops, wooden legs carved with care. And this would die like a tin toy, stamped into the ground and rusting.