Nostalgia, we have agreed, is embarrassing. Maybe even reactionary. The notion that some fading aspect of this or that material culture—usurped by the web—is lost, and that that is a loss is, well, not the sort of thing to mention in mixed company.
Some of my best friends are Kindles.
The other day, I was at a library book sale and some of the not-really-booksellers with their price-checking tricorders were raiding the stacks, unafraid to put their shoulders past the too-slow little old ladies. One dealer smelled so strongly of hipster Kools I couldn’t stop glancing for a current cigarette.
The three left with four boxes of books. Dead faces, mute, totally uninvolved. They were all about my age. I knew that the books they took would show up online, priced several dollars below the books listed by “bricks and mortar” booksellers with the result that the first page of almost any book you care to search for consists of dollar paperbacks disclaimed as possibly underlined, highlighted, spine-broken, dog-eared, or dog-stained.
As I watch the slow disappearance of the used bookstores whose walls once gave up some overwhelming portion of every book I’ve ever read, I fall into the rut of lament. I can only repeat that online you seldom find what you weren’t looking for—you only find a search engine’s best guess. Finding what you were not looking for, creating the possibility you would find out what you did not already know: this is what the word browse meant and while, with skill, you can browse online, most of us—whether we admit it or not—are led exactly where we were already going to go.
Who can resist the flattery of the search engine?
Part of what this means is that many, many books no longer have any value at all—and will disappear into recycling. A while back I found a few bushels of paperbacks in a library recycling bin. They were unmarked, donations, but were adjudged to be worthless. I found a few things of which I’d never heard and a great many more by pulp novelist John D. MacDonald. My dad likes MacDonald and I pulled about forty titles back from the brink. Before I mailed them, I wrote down the taglines and titles.
We all know about pulp cover art, but here, like rubbings off tombstones, a fossil record of casually unacceptable social mores, and as ephemeral as salty candy, are thirty-one John D. MacDonald titles and taglines:
The Price of Murder
She was so alive and he needed her so badly there was nothing to do but to kill her.
A young widow turns up missing, and a whole town asks—
Where is Janice Gantry?
Dead Low Tide
The Brass Cupcake
With a girl like Letty, a guy never knew whether he was getting the brass cupcake, the gold ring, the wooden nickel, or the lead slug… until it was too late.
Death Trap
The town was sitting on some ugly secrets… and it took the murder of a teenage tramp to blow off the lid.
Deadly Welcome
A tough man on a tough assignment in a town that knew how to handle strangers—and the local girls who took up with them.
All These Condemned
There was only one man she had ever made happy—the man who finally had the courage to murder her.
She was a sex kitten with the claws of a tigress. She was…
Clemmie
The Deceivers
They were two nice people who hated themselves for what they were doing—and tried to call it love.
Soft Touch
They said it would be like taking candy from a baby. Some candy. Some baby…
Judge Me Not
Everything they said about what she was and what she did was true.
The Beach Girls
Under the bright Florida sun, six willing girls would find love; one sinister man would find death.
A Flash of Green
Saga of a scandal-ridden town…
The Neon Jungle
Border Town Girl
There was no turning back for her.
Please Write for Details
The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything
One day with Bonny Lee was a like a three-year lease on a harem.
The Executioners
Cancel All Our Vows
A graphic, probing novel of desire, temptation, and infidelity.
The Empty Trap
Probes the steamy private lives behind the elegance of a resort hotel.
The Damned
The master story teller in his most famous book.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
A ruthless collision of passions.
Contrary Pleasure
Beautiful people—hiding an ugly secret.
The Crossroads
She knew all about men and very little about murder. But she was willing to learn—for a quarter of a million bucks…
End of the Tiger
Murder in the Wind
Area of Suspicion
She had been all things to two men…
You Live Once
…and somebody thought that was one time too many for a woman with a haunting suspicion—and no scruples at all.
April Evil
One by one the hold-up gang converged on the sleepy Southern town.
One Monday We Killed Them All
In just six days McAran tore apart the quiet world of Brook City, On the seventh he rested, waiting for the carnage that morning would bring.
A Man of Affairs
A book with a hero.
12 responses
I love the article, Drew! I can’t believe the taglines! It seemed like the start to an ordinary day — but it wasn’t.
I grew up reading everything in the house, including scads and scads of MacDonald books. He has a direct, flashy writing style that really moves along. I’m sure he influenced my writing in that direction. RIP, John!
Love the article, titles, taglines, and not least, the covers!
Cool stuff. I still can’t resist a good Edgar Rice Burroughs or Mickey Spillane cover. I’ve been pretty lucky finding great used book stores in small rural Texas towns, probably because net access is still limited and expensive. I think it’s mainly the big cities where people are in too big a hurry to browse or find what they aren’t looking for.
“One day with Bonny Lee was a like a three-year lease on a harem.”
Wow. Take me home, Bonny Lee.
Kayo Books
Browse away my friend.
They privilege unsubtle trouble. That’s an underrated pleasure. A three-month reading course in James M. Cain and Big Jim Thompson would be suitable companions, as well.
“The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything” works as science fiction, and it’s absolutely terrific. I have a short fuse for naive protagonists who gradually wise up but this one is well done: also has elements of puzzle story and sexy thriller. If you find a copy, grab it!
For something completely different, I’m also really fond of the eco-political rants (not to mention the realistic lesbians) in MacDonald’s CONDOMINIUM, a tribute to friends who died when their homes were washed away. Lots of good stuff in there about growing/being old and what’s wrong with America.
But of course my faves are the Travis McGee books, and I still hear Travis and his friend Meyer arguing in my head sometimes, and this is, as John D himself would say, “no bad thing”.
I read all the Travis McGee books in the order they were published over about three weeks when I was in my early twenties (I think there are 22 or 23 of them), really eating them up. I tried to read one again a few years ago, in my late thirties then, thinking I’d relive the experience, and found myself embarrassed that I’d once liked them. Male fantasy and casual misogyny and self-congratulatory out the wazoo.
Not one Travis McGee title in the whole bunch? I suppose that’s a measure of the man’s output. You can scoop up 31 random novels and still not include one of the 21-novel TM series.
@Aldo – I agree with your take but the author and the character are both products, to an extent, of their time. It’s interesting to note that TM was a crusader against the bunny-fication of women; in that sense, he was ahead of his time. Unfortunately for modern readers, that time was the early 1960s.
If anyone one reading this is curious about the McGee series but daunted by the prospect of reading 21 pulp novels in chronological order, may I suggest you simply start with “Pale Gray for Guilt” which is in many ways the quintessential Travis McGee novel. It possesses all the elements that TM fans love: wry social observations, the reverse con game, the tragic love interest, revenge, and of course, the wonderful Meyer, who shines in this novel more than in any other.
Titles, Taglines and more. If anyone wants all of JDM’s books and much, much more – let me know at gcralls@comcast.net
Here’s a quote about John D. Macdonald that I often see bouncing around the web (I hesitate to quote from Wikipeida, which we all know is generally stuff we can wipe our asses with, but this seems legit). “Macdonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only Macdonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human heart chap, so guess who wears the top grade laurels?†That’s from Kingsley Amis.
http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2015/01/john-d-macdonald-look-at-some-aspects.html#.VNHn89L
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