MacDonald, McGee, and Big Data

The holiday weekend found me up to Free Fall in Crimson (1981) in my ongoing slow re-reading of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels, which I last read in high school. At that point, I took all of MacDonald's pronouncements about life and society--divided almost equally between McGee and his friend Meyer--as truths, bordering on revelation. Newly encountered, at midlife, they are, not surprisingly, less convincing. Some observations give off a rancid whiff of blowhardism; others seem to protest too much--primarily those in which MacDonald opposes his thoughts on sex and women to Hefner's, while forty years later we can barely distinguish daylight between them; and some simply offer thoughts about society and its direction that weren't borne out.

It's nearly all forgivable. MacDonald was trying to do something more than just write about a tough guy; the attempt is admirable in itself, and it succeeds almost as often as it fails. Where those reflections do still work is in McGee's frequent sessions of self-lacerating doubt about his life and persona, reflections. As the series wears on, I find myself more and more drawn to those, seeing them as MacDonald's own voice, and a more honest assessment of the trap of the series writer than any I've encountered elsewhere.

What I find most interesting about the McGee novels, ultimately, is the snapshot they offer of a certain strain of postwar American social life and culture. Florida is MacDonald's primary subject, of course, and in the years he was writing it was undergoing an irreversible transformation into the all-concrete, all-tourist landscape that it is now. He shows us a world of small towns where people are worried about their place in the social fabric. We see suburbanites willing to risk all to maintain their status, a status that is clearly communicated by the size and style of their houses and cars. We see modest downtowns still alive with local shops, restaurants, and hotels, yacht clubs with available waitresses, tennis clubs with randy pros, the whirlwind drunken world of the postwar suburban boom, fierce and feckless. MacDonald loathes it--or, more properly, its refusal to ask any questions other than "How much?"--so we get it at its worst, but its seductions, or compulsions, nonetheless peek through now and again. By the time McGee had his last adventure in the early 1980s, that world would be mostly gone, already malled, fully corporatized, and, within another generation, about to be Internetted, but I doubt MacDonald would find its replacement any more tolerable.

Another preoccupation is with the standardization and record-keeping of modern life, and how its perpetual creep impinges ever more on individual choice, liberty, and anonymity. McGee, whose occupation and income wouldn't bear much scrutiny, objects on both practical and philosophical grounds, and it's reasonable to assume that MacDonald felt the same. Which makes the following passage from Free Fall in Crimson fascinating: Meyer is explaining to McGee that the profusion of computers and data will actually be good for someone like him, its overwhelming scale guaranteeing that any single person can learn to hide in it:

If you try to hide, you are easy to find. You are leaving only one trail in the jungle, and the hounds can follow that one. Leave forty trails, crossing and re-crossing. The computers are strangling on data. The courts are strangling on caseload. Billions of pieces of paper are floating around each month, clogging the inputs, confusing the outputs. . . . Think of it this way, Travis. With each new computer that goes into service, your identity becomes more and more diffuse and unreal. Right now today, if every man, woman, and child were put to work ten hours a day reading computer printouts, just scanning the alphabetical and numerical output of the printers, they could cover about one third of what it is being produced. Recycling of computer printout paper is a giant industry. We're all sinking into the oblivion of profusion, and one day soon we will all be gone, with no way to trace us.

It's easy to understand why MacDonald got this one so wrong: who among laymen would have predicted the incredible improvements in our ability to sort and store data? But I will admit to surprise along a slightly different axis: Surely anyone as cynical as MacDonald about the motives of his fellow man in pursuit of power or money could have predicted that people wouldn't stop until they found a way to put all that information to use?

Thanks to Random House's reissues, I (relatively) suddenly find myself with thirty John D. MacDonalds on my shelves

Random House started reissuing John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee mysteries a year and a half ago, and I've enjoyed having an excuse to revisit a series that was really important to me when I was in high school. Along with Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, the McGees were key to my transition from the coziness of Agatha Christie to a more hardboiled American school of crime.

The McGees hold up remarkably well. Having spent so much time with Donald Westlake's relative reticence over the past few years, MacDonald's use of McGee and Meyer as his dual-persona mouthpieces took some getting used to, but while the natural staling of politics means that MacDonald once in a while strikes a wrong note, overall his sociopolitical asides remain effective--and, most important, consistent with his tarnished knight-errant. Florida is, was (since at least Andrew Jackson, and probably the Spanish), and always will be an absolute destructive mess, it seems, as unfathomable to outsiders as it is confounding to natives.

One thing that remains particularly interesting is how MacDonald uses McGee to acknowledge the frustration and weariness of the series writer. Through the middle of the series--three or four books leading up to 1978's The Green Ripper--McGee is explicitly weary with himself, frustrated by the role he's cast himself in, doubting its truth and value both, but unsure about how he might either rejuvenate himself or break out of it. That, dramatized, is the problem of the series author--and one of the reasons that I remain astonished by (and incredibly respectful of) Westlake's twenty-four years of letting Parker lie fallow: mechanically putting a character through recognizable paces is a creative risk, one that can kill character and creator both. Yet rather than deny the problems he faced continuing to write stories about his meal ticket, and thereby letting his books curdle into cynicism, MacDonald took them out and looked at them, and let us see them, too.

For McGee, the answer is lasting love, which instantly reenergizes him--and its inevitable loss, which sets him dangerously aflame. For MacDonald, presumably, rejuvenation came from allowing McGee a possibility previously denied--the possibility of lasting change--and seeing where that led.

I've been skirting the one substantial flaw in MacDonald's books: sex. McGee is at his most dated when it comes to women--not because he is a midcentury sexist, but because the feminism he believes in and practices is, much as he scoffs at Hefner, fundamentally a Playboy feminism. It's a feminism of difference, one that allows self-determination regardless of gender but nonetheless falls back too often (for our contemporary tastes) on men being men, women being women, and freely given, heartfelt, passionate sex being the cure-all. Even McGee sees the occasional excess, lacerating himself here and there for his fuck-a-wounded-bird-to-health technique--but that doesn't stop him from maintaining the approach.

Worst of all, McDonald fails to heed my sole rule of writing: Always describe hangovers; never describe sex. Oh, does he describe sex. It's well-meaning, inexplicit, but nonetheless cringe-inducing, like when you hear someone say "make love" in seriousness. A passage from The Brass Cupcake will suffice as evidence:

I rose with her on the wave crest of a thing long denied, only vaguely conscious of reaching between us and thumbing open the buttons of the jeans, then sliding my hand around her and peeling the jeans down over the twin concavities of alive plum-tautness, dimly conscious of the thud as the moccasin fell at the end of the couch, of her breath that was like the beating of a wing against my throat, of the infuriating intricacies of robe belt, of the twin alivenesses hard under the blue T shirt, of the whole urgent mounting need of her, as vivid as a scream.

"Twin concavities of alive plum-tautness"? Jesus. (And that moccasin--in 1950, that's surely borderline Bohemian?)

That passage aside, The Brass Cupcake is a fine crime novel, and, as MacDonald's first, surely gave his editor a sense that here was a rare talent ready to cut loose. Bad sex aside, I'm grateful to Random House for reissuing it and a slew of other MacDonald standalones. Those are the books that a young Westlake read as he was starting out, and about which he wrote:

Gold Medal originals, with their yellow spines, were my education in popular fiction. At first I devoured them all indiscriminately, but gradually I began to go past the yellow spine to the brand name, to differentiate Vin Packer from Harry Whittington, Edward S. Aarons from Peter Rabe, and to accept some new titles more eagerly than others. There were the writers to skip, there were the old reliables, there were the few really good writers with surprises and felicities somewhere within every book, and there was John D. MacDonald. Almost from the beginning, he was in a class by himself, and I think the secret was that he never wrote a scene, not a scene of any kind, as though he were writing for the pulps. There was never overstatement, never sleaze, no wallowing in the mire. He accepted my, the reader's, intelligence as a given, and not many did that.

My complaints about the sex scenes aside, I can't disagree.

Delving into book pricing, or, This is probably mostly of interest to people who work in publishing, but y'all buy books, too, right? So maybe you'll find something here worth your time?

As someone who works in the marketing department of a publisher, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about book prices. (Oddly, as a consumer, I spend almost zero time thinking about them: if I did, I wouldn't have ponied up $#%#@&@&# for the absolutely glorious Thomas Hardy Remembered a few years back, would I? Either you need a book or you don't, I figures.) And recently I've encountered a handful of pricing decisions that I think are unusual enough that they may be of interest even to the non-professionals among you.

1 First up is Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, which came out in June as a hardcover at $20. What's interesting about that is:

a $20 is very cheap these days for a 288-page hardcover. I would have expected a price more like $25 or $26.
b Gran's first Claire DeWitt novel, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, was published in hardcover in 2011 at $24.00.
3 They're both really good, stylized and deliberately fractured mystery novels. (And the latter makes a nice pairing with David Gordon's new Mystery Girl. They're very different books--Gordon's is funny and allusive where Gran's is cryptic and louche, even decadent--but they both approach the crime novel pleasantly aslant, with rewarding results.)

Gran's first novel sold just okay in hardcover, and from what I can tell really started to build a following only after it became a paperback. So I think it's reasonable to assume that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, not wanting to abandon the idea of publishing Gran first in hardcover, decided to drop the price--and cut into their margin--in hopes of bringing price-sensitive readers on board earlier. Are you a price-sensitive reader? It's only $20--that's like 2 lattes these days, folks! Buy a Sara Gran novel!

2 Next we turn to the opposite end of the spectrum: Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I dither about Gaiman: I admire him as a literary presence, as someone who seems almost wholly determined to do good within the world of books. And I'm impressed by his inventiveness . . . yet time and again I find myself thinking that his actual books feel a tad undercooked. That's unfair, I realize: I have no idea how much time and effort Gaiman puts into his writing. But aside from the wonderful Graveyard Book, which is creative enough to honor its inspiration, Kipling, I often find that Gaiman's ideas are more compelling than their execution--that, intentionally or not, he slides by a bit on shared tastes.

But The Ocean at the End of the Lane may have made me a believer. A story of childhood and ancient magic, it calls to mind classics of the genre like Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series in its creativity and its convincing fidelity to a conception of a world rife with powers that are older and stranger than we can understand. It's taut and creepy and melancholy and, in a wonderful way, aged. It feels more personal, more important, than anything I've read from Gaiman before.

And, at 192 pages, it's priced at $25.99. Given how many copies William Morrow and Co. could be confident of selling, there's no question that they could have priced it at $19 or $20 and covered their costs. Instead, they seem to have looked around, noted Gaiman's absolutely rabid fan base, and said, essentially, "Fuck it: we can charge whatever we want, and these folks will buy it." I'm not really judging, mind you: I'm someone with a day-to-day stake in the survival of the publishing enterprise, and their decision seems entirely rational to me. But $6 more than Sarah Gran's book, for a novel that's nearly 100 pages shorter and that will sell ten times what hers will sell? It's impressive.

3 Finally, we turn to the recent trade paperback reissues of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels by Random House. I should say up front that I'm grateful to Random House for these: in recent decades they've only been available, spottily, as mass market paperbacks, and the only authors I can bear to read in mass market are Rex Stout (It's easier to make shelf space for 70+ mass markets than for that many trade paperbacks) and Joseph Conrad (Good god, those old Anchor editions with cover illustrations by Edward Gorey!). I've re-read the first ten now, for the first time since high school, and while they're dated in many of the ways I expected (primarily in their gender politics, as I've discussed before), they're also still well worth a crime fiction fan's time. On the plane returning from vacation Saturday I read the ninth, Pale Gray for Guilt, and I barely noticed the nintey-minute delay before we took off.

Random House has priced them at $16.00. The McGee books tend to be 240-300 pages, a size of book that in this genre these days would tend to carry a price of $13–$15 or so--but what Random House seems to have thought is:

a Right now sales of crime novels tend to run 40-70% e-books.
b Therefore, and especially for a reprint/revival series like this, people who are buying the print edition are really committed to buying the print edition.
c So we can charge essentially whatever we want.

That "essentiall" means that they risk coming up against market-based sticker shock around $16 or so, but nonetheless: that's an addition $2–$3 per book, over the course of a twenty-book series. Even so, it's worth it for a reader--seriously, if you enjoy MacDonald, will you ever think later about that extra dollar or two you spent? That's the thing about book pricing: it can be a barrier initially, but any good book will erase the memory of its price within an hour of your cracking its spine.

And that concludes today's publishing seminar. Tune in Wednesday when we discuss binding inks, or matte finishes, or how to write an e-mail to a disappointed author in the face of one of those absolutely gutting English reviews . . .

John D. MacDonald's lighter side

After taking issue with John D. MacDonald's dismissal of Chicago in One Fearful Yellow Eye last week, I feel like I should point out two passages from the book that I particularly enjoyed, if for no other reason than that they're atypical for the McGee novels. They don't quite qualify as comedy, but there's a lightness, even playfulness to them that is a welcome leavening to the usual McGee mix.

The first is a litany of personal disasters retailed by the story's heroine, for whom McGee is trying to recover a late husband's missing estate. It's not so much light as excessive, giving an air of a writer having fun spinning ideas:

Why in the world should my life be some sort of continuous soap opera? I think I had six uneventful years. The first six. Gloria Anne Ridgen. Then all hell broke loose. Is there such a thing as drama-prone? You know, you go hunting for the action. My daddy bought me a ride on a merry-go-round, and that was the time the man running it had to be drunk and decided he wasn't going to stop it. When they died I had to live with my nutty old aunt, and if my astrology tables were wrong any given day, she wouldn't let me go to school. The boy I went with in high school was walking by a building and somebody dropped a can of paint, and when he woke up from the coma a year later, he had the mind of a two-year-old. In college my roommate was a secret klepto and hid the loot in my luggage and when they began to narrow it down, she turned me in, and six months later she got caught and they apologized and asked me to come back to school, and the day I was due to leave I got infectious mononucleosis and my dog was run over. All I want is a plain, neat, ordinary, unexciting life. But what happens? In Buffalo one day I got off the bus downtown on a hot afternoon and the bus door closed on my wraparound skirt and drove off and left me spinning like a top in my little yellow briefs on the busiest corner in town. You know, I dream about that. There I am, and everybody is applauding and I can't stop twirling.

More deliberately comic is a passage that comes later, which shows a mocking awareness of how overly apocalyptic McGee's pronouncements about the decline of society can get. Like a lot of good comedy, it takes place in the bathroom:

I shed coat and jacket and rolled up my shirt sleeves and drew a lavatory bowl of cold water. I wallowed and scrubbed and made seal sounds, and then found out that the management had thoughtfully provided one of those warm air tubes for the drying bit, the special kind that leave you feeling coated with grease rather than water. Small children think they are fun. Every adult in the land hates them. They are part of the international communist conspiracy. A nation forced to dry itself off in a machined huff of sickly warm air is going to be too irritable, listless, and disheartened to fight. Americans unite! Carry your own towels. Carry little sticks with which you can wedge those turn-off faucets open so you can get two hands under the water at the same time. Carry your own soap so you need not wash your paws in that sickly green punch-button goo that leaves you smelling like an East Indian bordello. Carry your own toilet paper, men. The psychic trauma created by a supply of the same paper stock used for four-color ads in Life magazine cannot be measured

McGee will occasionally remind himself not to take himself too seriously, but most of the time that's in the midst of a monologue where he's very much taking himself seriously, and with good reason. It's nice to see MacDonald letting him acknowledge the ridiculousness that, like the bad guy with the sap, is always a risk for a noir hero.

Lawrence Block

I was sixteen when I read my first Lawrence Block novel, A Ticket to the Boneyard (1990). I had been blazing through Robert Parker and John D. MacDonald, but Block was different, and I wasn't sure I liked that. The book seemed a bit too real, from the violence to the corrupt cops to protagonist Matthew Scudder's constant battle to stay away from alcohol. Unlike Spenser and Travis McGee, who, for all their quirks and flaws, are presented as heroes through-and-through, never in danger of failing any true test of character, Matthew Scudder always seemed--at least to me at sixteen--like a man on the brink. Pressed on all sides by a difficult and dangerous world, he really might some day see it all fall apart.

I couldn't put the book down, though, and I kept reading Block, going back and reading all the Matthew Scudder novels. The more I read--and the further I got from sixteen--the more I understood what Block was trying to do with Scudder's mix of strength and frailty. But I then went nearly fifteen years without reading any Lawrence Block; following an English degree with a couple of years working in a bookstore that had no mystery section caused me to forget all about him, along with a lot of other mystery writers. So I was pleased to find last week, on reading his 1964 novel Lucky at Cards, that he is as good as I remembered. I don't know if the Matthew Scudder novels would hold up to my teenage memories, but Lucky at Cards is really satisfying. It features a lot of good crime novel virtues: a compromised protagonist, a glimpse into the techniques of an illicit profession (in this case, that of a card "mechanic," or sharp), and a deceptively simple but pleasantly surprising plot.

Lucky at Cards also provides--simply by virtue of its age--a fascinating view of the mid-century old boy network in action (and of the world of male camaraderie that accompanied it), as the card mechanic infiltrates a group of business and professional friends who spend their weekends playing poker, drinking, and talking about investment syndicates. Because he has reasonable clothes, a convincing manner, and can play poker and say all the right things, it seems only natural for him to be invited to join their game, then their circle, then be set up with a job and a potential girlfriend. The webs of interconnection, the long-term plans seemingly being laid in quick-drying concrete, and the obvious group expectations all conspire to make the con man's whipsawing between disdain for and attraction to the straight life convincing, investing his tough decisions with the real uncertainty that's essential to a good crime novel.

On top of all that, Lucky at Cards has the best cover painting Hard Case Crime has commissioned yet. Now I'll have to pick up the other two Block novels that Hard Case has reprinted, which appear to have pretty great covers themselves.

Characters reading books, part 1

Something that’s always struck me as strange is how rarely authors of novels spend any time telling us about what their characters are reading. Assuming that authors read a lot themselves, and therefore know how important books are to people, how what you’re reading can color you whole day, it surprises me that characters aren’t more often thinking or talking about what they’re reading. It’s also an easy way—though with a danger of becoming too obvious—to give some signals about a character’s inner life or about larger themes the author wants to develop.

I bring this up because the two most recent Hard Case Crime novels I’ve read both featured characters reading book. David Dodge’s Plunder of the Sun (1949) follows an adventurer, Al Colby, who reminds me a bit of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. He’s willing to work in the shadowier corners of the law, and he perpetually balances a definite tendency towards knight-errancy with a desire to get his share of whatever loot is legitimately on offer. In Plunder of the Sun, when a job couriering an unidentified parcel quickly gets him embroiled in a dangerous search for lost Incan treasure in Peru, Colby turns to William H. Prescott’s 1847 History of the Conquest of Peru to learn just what it is he’s fighting for. Prescott’s book, which, though of course quite dated, is still in print and regarded as a good introduction, and it plays a big part in Plunder of the Sun. From it, Colby learns not only of the treasure itself, but of the origins of Peru’s racial strife and exploitative class system; that knowledge ultimately leads him to stick his neck out on behalf of a couple of members of that exploited class.

Plunder of the Sun is exactly what I look for in a crime book: it pretty much skips the preamble and jumps right into the story, features vividly drawn locations and characters, and has good amounts of action and surprise. I mentioned that Colby reminds me of Travis McGee; he also reminds me a little of Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer. As with Archer, we don’t ever learn all that much about Colby or his background—the author gives us just enough to know, unquestioningly, that we want this man on our side.

I’ll write about the second Hard Case Crime novel tomorrow.