John D. MacDonald believed one of the more difficult aspects of writing fiction was not allowing the reader to be distracted by the writing.

I always came back.

Over the years, I would leave John D. MacDonald from time to time and wander down between the pages of books written by someone else.

But when I grew weary of formulas and wanted to read the beauty and emotion of a great story, I turned again to MacDonald.

He didn’t write classics.

But his prose was as good as and better than most of the so-called masters. Who but MacDonald could have written: When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own. Or, The world was all tied together in some mysterious tangle of invisible web, single strands that reach impossible distances, glimpsed but rarely when the light caught them just right.

He wrote pulp fiction.

At least he did in the beginning.

And MacDonald – along with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett – brought the seamy, hard-boiled image of pulp fiction to a whole new level of appreciation and respect.

He wrote dozens of novels, including the Travis McGee series that made him both famous and rich. Stephen King said MacDonald was “the great entertainer of our age and a mesmerizing storyteller.” Kingsley Amis believed that MacDonald was, “by any standard, 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?”

I have always believed that the mark of a good writer and a good book is the opening line.

Take a look at John MacDonald.

No one is better.

When I first picked up a copy of his Darker Than Amber, I read: “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.”

Who could put the book down then?

I was hooked.

So much unknown and so many mysteries had been buried in nineteen words.

When Geoffrey O’Brien published his study of mid-century pulp fiction, he wrote of the Travis McGee novels: They all seem to spring out of some long, hot American afternoon, an unfamiliar Cadillac gliding through the streets of a small town, a hundred tiny dramas of loyalty and betrayal, small lusts, quiet madness, interior dramas of regeneration, all set spinning about each other, meeting and meshing

Elmore Leonard wrote of John D. MacDonald: “He was quoted as saying that you had to write at least a million words before you knew what you were doing. This was not encouraging when you’ve written only a few hundred thousand, in your spare time, and face the prospect of more years of learning. But John did not pull punches. Write a million words and see if you’re any good. That’s the fact of it.

“What makes his work consistently superior – besides his ability to move the plot and keep you turning pages – is the fact that it shows a definite attitude about people and what’s going on in the world. He expresses a point of view through his characters, all the while keeping the author “ever more invisible“ – which is one of the more difficult aspects of writing fiction: not allowing the reader to be distracted by the writing. At this, John was a master. I would vote him, also, the best first-person writer I’ve ever read. Travis McGee’s “I“ was never intrusive.”

John D. MacDonald always said: “I enjoy the hell of out of writing because of the rare times when it really works good. It’s like an Easter Egg hunt. Here’s fifty pages, and you say, ‘Oh, Christ, where is it? Then on the fifty-first page, it’ll work. Just the way you wanted it to, a little better than anything in that same area ever worked before You said, ‘Wow.” This is worth the price of admission.”

MacDonald wrote as though his life depended on it.

It did.

And how did he want to be remembered.

John D. MacDonald wrote his own epitaph, saying: “He hung around quite a while, entertained the folk, and was stopped quick and clean with the right time came.”

It came when he was seventy.

Bad heart.

John D. MacDonald wrote his final sentence, typed in his final period, and left us  with a deep blue goodbye.

My latest historical mystery is Lost Side of an Orphan’s Moon. Please click HERE to find the book on Amazon.