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
“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
Cancel All Our Vows 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 © 1953 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.
Cover design: Joe Montgomery
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82689-3
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
To Dorothy
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 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 s
o 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.
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if though wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.
–Michael Drayton, Poems, 1619
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
About the Author
Chapter One
The early afternoon edition of the Minidoka Herald had a red-bordered box on page one titled WHEW! It stated to the suffering citizenry that this Friday was the hottest June twenty-seventh on record. An exceptionally dry spring had shrunk the Glass River. It curved meagerly under the new Jefferson Boulevard bridge, under the old Town Street span, under the railroad bridge and, four miles south of the city, under futuristic concrete of the new Throughway bypass bridge. It was dwindled in its channel, and on the steep mud-cracked banks bottles glinted, half buried.
The city spread from the riverbanks up the slight slope of two hills, one on either side of the river. The city sizzled in the gentle valley. North of the city the hills steepened. South of the city they finally flattened into a plain. The paper said that the temperature at the airport, five miles to the south, was a hundred and three. The unofficial temperature in the city was a hundred and four, but it felt hotter. The hills seemed to constrict the heat, and prevent any vagrant breeze from reaching the city. With school out, both municipal swimming pools were jammed with children. Their elders—those not tied to a job—sought the air-conditioned theaters and bars.
All talk seemed to be about the weather. The sky was a white misty blaze. All asphalt streets extended into a wet shimmering mirage. The siren sounds of the ambulances were smothered by the humid blanket of heat as they took the heat prostration cases to Municipal Hospital, and to St. Joseph’s on the other side of the river.
At precisely twelve minutes of three the big air-conditioning plant which kept the office building of the Forman Furnace Corporation cool, burned out. For a time the low, flat-roofed, modern building retained its electrical chill. Outside sprinklers turned slowly, keeping the surrounding landscaping green. By three o’clock, however, when the factory let out, the dainty blouses of the office girls had begun to stick to them.
Marcia Trevin, secretary to Mr. Fletcher Wyant, the treasurer of the Forman Furnace Corporation, sighed and patted her forehead with a damp Kleenex. The door to Mr. Wyant’s office was open. By leaning forward a bit she could look in and see him at his desk. He had taken his coat off and he was working in his shirt sleeves, making out one of his interminable comparative balance sheets, making those tiny and scrupulously neat figures which always seemed to Marcia so very strange when you thought of the bulk of the man who wrote them.
She watched him for a moment or two, watched the expressionless remoteness on his big, strong-featured face, the heavy wrist and hand moving the hard pencil. One lock of the hair, so rank and black that it always made her think of Indians and horses, had fallen across his forehead She would have given her soul for the courage to walk in and smooth it back in place. She was silently convulsed as she imagined the look of pure horror that would spread across the big face. Or maybe it wouldn’t be that way at all. Maybe he would …
She leaned back for a moment and indulged herself in a daydream of six years’ standing. He would take her hands and look right into her eyes with those funny pale grey eyes of his. He would say, “Marcia, my darling, forgive me for being so stupid. Forgive me for not seeing, until now, what has been right in front of my nose for six long years.” And then he would kiss her, of course. That was the way it always happened in the stories. I know I’m too heavy, but my ankles are good, and I know my eyes are pretty.
A drop of perspiration trickled down between her breasts and brought her out of her daydream. The top edge of her girdle was soaked. She was suddenly irritable. It was all right for him to sit in there and play around with the figures, figures that she would eventually have to type in quadruplicate and then cut stencils of. She got up with determination, plucking her shirt away from herself, and walked into Mr. Wyant’s office. With each step her resolve grew more dim and indeterminate, and finally she stood looking across the desk at him, wondering how in the world she was going to state it.
Fletcher Wyant slowly became aware of someone standing silently on the other side of the desk. He finished his problem in simple subtraction and wrote the new figure on hi
s work sheet before he glanced up.
Miss Trevin stood there, her wide face flushed, her pocked cheeks damp with perspiration. Poor gal. The heat was rough on her. And the flush meant she had something personal to communicate. Seeing the steamy condition of Miss Trevin made Fletcher Wyant conscious again of his own discomfort. He tossed the pencil on top of the half-finished work sheet, and leaned back, stretching, then pulled the shirt sleeves free where they had stuck to his arms.
“They going to get that thing fixed, Miss Trevin?”
“No sir. I got through to Maintenance a little while ago. Everybody has been calling. They have to get a new part or something.”
He got up and went over to the window, opened it and stuck his hands out. “Now it’s about the same inside as out. Might as well leave it open. A breeze might come along.”
“Mr. Wyant, sir, I was wondering … I mean the heat being so brutal and all. And Miss Coward is letting the girls go from the stenographic pool … if …”
“You mean you want to go home? God, there’s no objection to that. I just didn’t think of it. And it must be hotter out in that little box of yours than it is in here, even. What’s lined up?”
She couldn’t help a sigh of relief. “Well, the only thing is that call you placed, about the tax refund case, and Mr. Corban dropped in while you were out and said he’d come back later.”
“Cancel that call, then. I want you taking notes when it does come in. Get Mr. Corban on the line for me, and then you can take off.”
“Thanks loads, Mr. Wyant. All I want to do is get home and get these clothes off before I …” She flushed violently and fled, saying good night in a muted voice as she went through the door.
Fletcher grinned at the empty doorway. Marcia Trevin was good luck in the secretarial department. Quick and smart and loyal. And the greatest of these is loyal. She always let him know who had their knife out. Little spinster, built on the same general lines as a fireplug, and almost embarrassingly adoring. Due for another bump, if Personnel will stand still for it.
The communication box on his desk said, “Mr. Corban on the line, sir. Good night.”
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