Live from Kansas City Library Cafe: Come to think of it, what will be the relative salience of Saul Bellow and John D. MacDonald in literary culture a hundred years from now? Any guesses?
: The Connoisseur of Crime, John D. MacDonald, Is Shadowing the E-Book World: "Most people who recognize [John D.] MacDonald’s name today know him as the creator of Travis McGee...
...the Ft. Lauderdale boat bum and all-around demigod who starred in 21 novels from 1964 through 1985 and was one of the last great tough-guy series characters to hit the scene before a certain self-consciousness overtook the genre.... Deservedly, the McGee novels have never gone out of print.... McGee needs no help from me....
MacDonald’s non-McGee novels have long been something of a cult taste--but it’s a cult that boasts some lofty names among its members. Sort through the old paperbacks and you will find blurbs from Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ian Fleming; meanwhile Kingsley Amis, evidently in a sportive mood, once called MacDonald ‘by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow’ What all of these admirers were responding to first and foremost was a command of storytelling so assured as to be almost invisible.... Beyond that, though he is nominally a mystery-suspense specialist MacDonald brings an almost panoptic eye to American society: he’s as comfortable with lowlifes as he is with corporate executives, and indeed will frequently delineate the traits that they have in common.... What distinguishes MacDonald from many of his fellow noir practitioners is that his brutality is always carefully calibrated: he knows just how much to dole out. He can train his basilisk stare on the darkest corners of human experience because he knows they are only corners.... The novels fascinate precisely because of this balance, the writerly discipline that ensures that no matter how rough the going gets--and revisiting these books, you’re reminded of just how vicious the old paperback originals could be--the steady hand at the wheel means that nothing will be allowed to jar the overall scheme.... Nowhere are all of these gifts displayed to better advantage than in The End of the Night (1960)...
