BooksFirst - July 2008

Books Bought

See the Special Vacation Edition post

Books Read

Armageddon In Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut, introduction by Mark Vonnegut
The Quick Red Fox by John D. MacDonald

Comments

For rock stars, death has always been a good career move. For writers, not so much. Often before the corpse is cold, the vultures are rifling through the file cabinet and the trash can for anything that can be sold as “undiscovered” to the core fanbase. In the case of Armageddon In Retrospect, that seems to be several similarly themed short stories that Vonnegut wrote in the fifties for the magazines but never got published, probably for good reason.

Most of the stories have prisoners of war as major characters. Some are in Dresden after the fire bombing that was the centerpiece of Slaughterhouse Five, some take place in recently liberated POW camps. An awful lot of the stories have to do with looting the bodies of the dead or terrorizing the citizenry fleeing the oncoming Russian conquerors. These stories are really only interesting in context as very rough drafts of his later work.

Most of Vonnegut’s very early work was re-published in Bagombo Snuff Box where there was a greater variety of topics. While I hate to cast aspersions on son Mark’s motivations, most of this was better kept lost. He supplies a brief preface and there are some non-fiction sections at the beginning that are like warmed-over out-takes from Palm Sunday. If we are going to just go through the pocket lint, I would have preferred more context and connecting material. But, alas, we are never going to get that from Kurt and have to settle for the scraps we can scrounge.

The book itself is just gorgeous with thick creamy paper and colorful illustrations before each chapter. But that doesn't make up for the rather thin content inside.

The fourth Travis McGee novel picks up slightly from the second and third. The titular Quick Red Fox is a big star actress that between husbands got talked into an orgy that ended up captured on camera by a blackmailing proto-paparazzi. Lyssa Dean pays the extortion, but when a second round of blackmail requests comes around she turns to salvage expert Travis McGee to protect her reputation. Trav really could care less but he needs the money and Lyssa’s assistant is a gorgeous if emotionally repressed gal Friday. And we all know where that is going to lead.

The real fun of this book is watching McGee go around the country and squeezing the real story of the lost weekend out of all the participants. At least the ones that are still alive. The plot is a little convoluted and there are a few too many red herrings, but it keeps the pace up. If anything, the book ends a little too quickly with too much of the denouement happening off-screen. The only really good fight sequence is when Travis takes on a pair of ultra-butch lesbians in a scene that is played for laughs. It’s a little squirm inducing given modern sensibilities, but comes off with a some naïve sociology thrown in.

The first four Travis McGee books are all short quick reads and show some growing pains. By the time of Red, MacDonald is getting his sea-legs and rounding out the character nicely. I'm really enjoying this trip down memory lane and can't wait to get into some of the longer meatier books.

BooksFirst - June 2008

Books Bought
Fodor's Cape Cod, Nantucket & Martha's Vineyard 2008

Books Read
A Purple Place For Dying by John D. MacDonald

Comments

Months ago I began a resolution to re-read in order the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald. I read The Deep Blue Good Bye way back in 2006 and then never followed through. I had hit a roadblock when I realized that I did not have a reading copy of the third book in the series, A Purple Place For Dying.

I have copies of all the first printings (as shown on left) and I have multiple copies of later printings for many JDM books. This is because the first printings are often indistinguishable from later printings except by looking for subtle clues in book numbers and price. I'll often pick up an older book that is a good price and then check to see if it is collectible later.

A good rule of thumb is that any JDM book with a real ISBN number is a reprint. I finally broke down and bought a vintage reprint from an internet dealer for a few bucks, still cheaper than a new copy would have cost.

Purple takes Travis McGee, the freelance "salvage consultant", to the Southwest to help some bitchy ditz get back her inheritance. A sniper's bullet kills her and he is left with a quandry: Should he stick around and get to the bottom of this murder even if there is no longer any money to be made? Of course he does. And since, like James Bond, Trav beds at LEAST one girl per book, the death of the heiress and main female character leaves a plot quandary. When half-way through the book he meets the frigid sister of his dead client's lover, you can practically hear the porn soundtrack bass guitarist tuning up. Travis finds the murderer and takes said sister to her conveniently desolate Caribbean beach house for some sexual healing.

This is one of the lesser McGee novels, mostly because it takes Travis too far from the water while MacDonald is still getting his sea-legs with the character. It does have some glimmers of foreshadowed greatness to come. The story involves a crooked land deal, which would become a plot staple in books to come, and it introduces (off-screen) McGee's future sidekick noted economist Meyer.

The MacDonald Collection

(click on image to read titles)

I’ve mentioned before that I collect Kurt Vonnegut books, but I also collect vintage paperbacks from the 50s and 60s, mostly by John D. MacDonald. Like old wine these are very fragile commodities and too delicate to actually read. That means I have to buy reading copies of the books if I want to actually see the words.



In some cases this presents problems. JDM did a novelization of the Judy Garland movie I Could Go On Singing and despised it so much that he banned the publisher from ever reprinting it. A request the publisher has unfortunately honored, even posthumously. On the internet copies of this book go for between $50 and $100. Since old paperbacks are notoriously fragile, I dare not take this book out of the wrapper to ever read. I take solace in the knowledge that the author would want it that way.

Book collecting, like many hobbies, is full of rules that are arbitrary, silly, and inexplicable. Only first editions with dust jackets are of any value. In paperbacks, the difference between a fine condition and good can be subtle and hard to describe. Keeping track of the printings can also be difficult. There are often dozens of printings of any given MacDonald novel.

I have a reference book called A MacDonald Potpourri by Walter and Jean Shine. It is the bible for JDM fans. It lists every version of every edition of each MacDonald book. For example, the only difference between the true first edition of The Long Lavender Look and the second printing is that the back cover uses a slightly different photo of JDM on the back and the ads for other Travis McGee books in the back has a slightly different list.

Like all collecting, rarity and interest (supply and demand) dictate pricing. Deciding what is going to be popular in advance is a fool’s game. There is rarely any chance of figuring out what will become popular. If you had the foresight to buy Eragon when it was a self-published novel by a teenager. Richard Bachman paperbacks, written by Stephen King under a pseudonym are also rare and valuable. On the other hand, it's unlikely that a full set of Babysitter Club books, even if first printings in near new condition, will ever be worth more than a quarter each at a yard sale.

Books, as opposed to other collectibles, have a utility that other forms of tulipmania type of knick-knacks don’t. If the bottom falls out of the commemorative plate market, they aren’t really suitable as tableware, but a book can always be read.

That said, since my son is off to college soon, it's time to liquidate his Beanie Baby collection to pay the tuition. How's that secondary market going?

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What makes something collectible?

BooksFirst - April 2008

Books Bought

A Purple Place For Dying by John D. MacDonald
Ballroom Of The Skies by John D. MacDonald

Books Read

The Big U by Neal Stephenson
Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

Comments

Having read the middle section of Quicksilver last month but not ready to start the final third, I added to my Neal Stephenson checklist by digging out a long buried copy of his first novel, The Big U. The titular U is American Megaversity, a troubled major university where the entire campus is a series of high rise dorms sitting on top of a single large labyrinthine classroom complex. The story follows a half dozen different misfits (in the ‘geeks are good’ sort of way) as the campus slowly descends into chaos. About half way through the book, Rodents Of Unusual Size show up and then it gets really weird.

Stephenson has downplayed The Big U saying that he would prefer that readers focus on his better, later works. Still, this book shows off many of the themes and motifs he would later use to better effect in Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. While it has a first person narrator, the storyline shifts around to the several characters that will later all interact, just like pretty much everything else he writes. We have the disillusioned student body president, the misunderstood genius, the proto-computer hacker, and one of the first ever Live Action Role Playing groups described in print. Despite being written in 1984, a lot of the technology and social matrix stuff about campus life still works and applies.

The book is wildly uneven. Stephenson has never successfully managed the end-game chaos that he sets off early in his books, and this is no exception. Although I must say I came out less confused than I did with Zodiac. Pretty much from the first page I was reminded of a J. G. Ballard minor classic called High Rise that also documents a descent into madness among a group of buildings residents. And bad, early Stephenson is still better that a lot of other books.

About the time I started doing BooksFirst posts, I had an ambition to re-read my John D. MacDonald collection, especially the Travis McGee novels, and write about them. I’m a collector of the first editions of his paperback originals and I tend to have multiple printings of each title. For the BooksFirst posts, I like to add a picture of each book I read. Usually for the accompanying cover picture I just Google the appropriate image and appropriate it (for review and comment, I consider this reasonable fair use). From now on, for the JDM novels, I am scanning the cover of the true first edition and using that even though I probably actually read a later reprint. These yellowed paperbacks from the fifties and sixties are often too fragile to physically open any more.

Nightmare in Pink was the second of the Travis McGee novels and I have always considered it one of the weaker ones. Nothing in the rereading has made me change that opinion. Travis is a beach bum with cynical shell but a core of idealism. He finances his leisurely lifestyle by righting injustices for a split of the profit. In Nightmare, his war buddy (McGee is a Korean war vet, which became increasingly anachronistic as the series dragged well into the 80s) has a sister whose fiancé got killed after discovering a secret at his high-finance office.

Travis, despite his sense of obligation to his buddy, beds the sister and has some of the best sex anybody has ever had anywhere in print. The actual descriptions are delightfully coy, but the superlatives just roll off the page. James Bond could only dream of being the stud that Travis is. Of course, the conspiracy goes deeper than anybody knows. Where the book gets a little dated is when Travis is kidnapped and kept under an LSD haze (hence the pink nightmare) until he can escape and save the day. The book predates the hippie era and the descriptions of the hallucinations are delightfully trippy but whiff of Reefer Madness.

The action all takes place in New York and there are plenty of dishy society and finance type characters. In one set-piece, Travis sets up an undercover meeting with a escort service. With these old books, I like to add a zero to any price mentioned to adjust for inflation. In the book, the call girl costs $250, which would put her in Eliot Spitzer territory today. And MacDonald’s little asides about the mechanics and logistics of high class hookers is amazingly detailed. Travis McGee never wears on me and I need to redouble my effort to reread these books.

I never did get around to posting a real review of The Deep Blue Good-By back then, so I'm including it now. John D. MacDonald had been writing for about a decade before he embarked on the serial hero stories of Travis McGee for which he would become famous. The Deep Blue Good-By is the first of the colorfully titled books in that series.

The story takes place in and around Travis McGee's Fort Lauderdale stomping grounds. A dancer (legitimate, not exotic) friend introduces him to Cathy Kerr, a troubled girl whose husband died in prison before he could tell her where he hid the stash of precious stones he smuggled out of Burma in World War II (JDM had served in that theater as well). He did tell his bunkmate Junior Allen who stalks and befriends and eventually terrorizes Cathy to get to the loot. Junior Allen is one of the great sadistic sociopaths of pulp fiction. He should have been played by Robert Mitchum, who was in Cape Fear (based on a non-McGee JDM novel). It's not giving away too much to say that Travis nearly meets his match.

Despite being the first in the series, this is one of the best Travis McGee books. It has a lot of the elements that would become the cornerstones of the series: a setting near the sea, a sociopath, a troubled vulnerable girl or two, a bone crunching fight sequence, and sardonic sociological commentary. All it is missing is an overly complicate real estate deal to be unraveled by the yet to be introduced Meyer.

I can't recommend this book enough and despite being written over forty years ago, the insights and asides are as acerbically true today if not more so.