Books to Die For

  He stood for a moment or two, savoring the early-day sights and sounds of the city, and then he lit a cigarette and waved to a cruising cab. Something had ended this morning, he knew. Now he was starting over, not with hatred but only sadness.

  That wasn’t too bad, he thought.

  It’s fitting that McGivern’s breakthrough book ends with its morally upright hero victorious, but suffering a precipitous fall from grace. Fallen heroes would be the author’s specialty. Barney Nolan, protagonist of 1951’s Shield for Murder, is a self-righteous cop who kills a bookie and steals the $25,000 in cash the guy is carrying to fund his puny dreams of suburban leisure. He’s eventually brought down (not surprisingly) by a tenacious newspaper reporter and a ballsy B-girl. In Rogue Cop, corrupt police detective Mike Carmody spends the first half of the novel protecting his naïve younger brother Eddie, also a cop, from the gangsters whose payoffs fund Carmody’s lavish lifestyle. He spends the rest of the book seeking vengeance on those gangsters after honest Eddie is murdered. Steve Retnick is the disgraced cop in The Darkest Hour (reissued as Waterfront Cop), released from prison after serving time for manslaughter and seeking to square up with the mobster who framed him. In Odds Against Tomorrow the disgraced cop is Dave Burke, so embittered by his paltry retirement pension that he masterminds—with fatal results for all—the robbery of a small-town bank.

  McGivern described this thread running through his work as “tempting indulgence,” saying in one of the few interviews he gave that “the frustration of our society forms a powerful thrust for people to take the law into their own hands and, while this is a tempting indulgence, I have tried to make it plain in my books that it never really works.”

  The only temptation McGivern indulged was writing for television, which he did a lot of in the 1960s and 1970s, for such series as The Virginian, Ben Casey, O’Hara: U.S. Treasury, and Kojak. In 1975 he wrote the original screenplay (with Dalton Trumbo’s son, Christopher) for Brannigan, a John Wayne vehicle in which the actor played an Irish American cop dispatched to England to haul a mobster back for trial. It was one of a score of violent 1970s vigilante-cop movies spawned by the huge success of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. McGivern had officially come full circle, since Harry Callahan was a direct descendant of The Big Heat’s Dave Bannion, the first cop in American crime fiction to throw away his badge and go hell-bent for vigilante justice.

  It’s a shame William P. McGivern hasn’t achieved a legacy like that of his 1950s colleagues such as David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Lionel White. He may not have been in their class as a prose stylist, but his stories were always rock-solid and totally satisfying. The Big Heat, as well as all of McGivern’s other hard-hitting novels, deserves to be remembered just as much as the film it spawned.

  Eddie Muller’s 2002 fiction debut, The Distance, earned the Best First Novel Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. His books on film noir, including Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, as well as dozens of DVD commentaries, have earned him the mantle “The Czar of Noir.” Muller produces and hosts Noir City: The San Francisco Film Noir Festival, the largest noir retrospective in the United States, and he is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, which raises funds to restore and preserve films representative of “America’s noir heritage.” Visit him online at www.eddiemuller.com.

  The Executioners (aka Cape Fear)

  by John D. MacDonald (1958)

  JEFFERY DEAVER

  * * *

  A Harvard graduate, John D. MacDonald (1916–86) served with the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA) during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. The author of more than five hundred short stories, MacDonald published his full-length debut The Brass Cupcake in 1950. MacDonald also published sci-fi novels, but it was titles such as The Executioners (1958) and One Monday We Killed Them All (1961) that established his credentials as a superior crime novelist. His first Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-by, appeared in 1964; the last in the twenty-one-book series, The Lonely Silver Rain, was published in 1985. MacDonald received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972.

  * * *

  Colors.

  In the 1960s my passion for hard-boiled crime fiction was in full swing. And like many readers, I was particularly enamored of books with continuing characters.

  One of my absolute favorite series could easily be spotted on the shelves of the book-and-stationery shop where I spent most of my allowance and lawn-mowing income; you couldn’t miss them, thanks to the colors, both on the jackets themselves and in the titles.

  The Turquoise Lament, Nightmare in Pink, Bright Orange for the Shroud, The Deep Blue Good-by . . . more than twenty in total.

  I’m speaking, of course, of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald.

  Set largely in a Florida made both appealing and creepy more by the author’s skill than by the reality of the Hanging Chad State, the McGee novels were a pure pleasure: quirky, exotic, insightful, fast-paced, and filled with those details in genre fiction that win and keep readers from Book 1 (I situated one of my own characters on a houseboat in the Hudson River, no less, as an homage to McGee’s own floating home, The Busted Flush).

  Now, I certainly acknowledge the quality and importance of the McGee novels, but I’m not going to talk about them here (except to urge that you start with blue and go all the way to silver; you won’t be disappointed). Nor will I do more than mention, in passing, MacDonald’s astonishingly prolific output across many genres: novels and short stories in all types of crime fields, science fiction, and nonfiction.

  What I’m going to focus on is one of his nonseries books, which, by the way, outnumbered the Travis McGee series.

  I’m an author who has written both series and stand-alones, and, truth be told, I probably prefer the stand-alones, and for this reason: while I’m always true to my premise that I write for my readers, the nonseries books allow me to push the boundaries of writing for my own enjoyment. For instance, I really wanted to write a novel in the first person. I thought it would be a great challenge, keeping that point of view and yet incorporating the twists and turns I so dearly love. Since my Lincoln Rhyme and Kathryn Dance novels have always been written in the third person, I couldn’t shift to the first for one of the books featuring them; it had to be a stand-alone.

  Among the authors I admire who have done both, I think of Barbara Vine, who has produced some great psychological thrillers in stand-alone form, books that are very different from the Inspector Wexford procedurals written as Ruth Rendell. Or consider Evan Hunter’s brilliant Blackboard Jungle, a stand-alone that I feel transcends the Ed McBain 87th Precinct series, as delightful as those books are.

  My favorite stand-alone of John D. MacDonald’s is The Executioners, published in 1957, and republished as Cape Fear, which was the title of the two screen adaptations of the book. I’ll refer to it by the author’s title in these comments.

  The story is quite straightforward. Some years before the book opens, our protagonist, Sam Bowden, stopped drunken serviceman Max Cady from raping a young woman while on leave. Sam also testified at the trial. Though sentenced to life, Cady was released after fourteen years, and he has come to the small town where the Bowdens live, seeking his revenge. His mission is to kill Bowden, his wife, Carol, and their three children—any or all of them, in no particular order. No elaborate plots or schemes for him, no sadistic talking mannequins or complicated gadgets. He’ll rely on guns, poison, or his bare hands if he needs to. He’s utterly amoral, smug, and physically dangerous.

  MacDonald gives us one harrowing scene after another, which include both confrontations between Cady, the family, and other characters, and crimes that an unseen Cady has pulled off: a poisoned animal, a sniper’s bullet aimed at a child, a tampered-with car . . . The times when we don’t witness Cady, but know that he’s lurking, are perhaps the most nerve-racking.

  As
their life falls apart under the madman’s repeated assaults, Sam, Carol, and the police wrestle with how to prevent looming tragedy. Cady, though, proves brilliantly resourceful, outmaneuvering all efforts to arrest or otherwise stop him. At first the aid of the law and the courts is enlisted, with varying degrees of failure. The Bowdens then try to hide from Cady, and finally—as the assaults become bolder and more outrageous—they explore less legal solutions to ridding themselves of the menace.

  The lean book (about 210 pages in paperback) charts the inevitable collision between the family, the police, and Cady.

  Now, what’s so appealing to me about The Executioners?

  First, I like the fact that it’s a simple, linear story. Sam did something right years ago by stopping a crime. Now his good deed has come back to haunt him, literally with a vengeance, and he has to defend his beloved family. Though I love to fill my thrillers with contrapuntal subplots and unexpected twists, one has to be very careful not to overdo it. There was recently a series of crime novels involving—how should I put this?—a female character adorned with body art in the shape of a mythical, fire-breathing creature. (I won’t mention the title.) I cannot argue with the rampant popularity of these novels, but I have to admit that I found the plot of the first book, at least, unnecessarily weighty and complicated.

  Not so The Executioners. From the first hint of an ominous cloud on the horizon threatening to derail a sympathetic family, we move in a speedy and straightforward fashion to a conclusion that is factually unambiguous (though, to its credit, morally less so).

  But simple and linear are not, by themselves, laudable attributes in fiction. In the hands of a lesser writer, this unembellished approach could be superficial, if not boring. But MacDonald knows what he’s about. He understands that if you’re not going for pyrotechnics—whipsawing twists, duplicity, mistaken identity, interweaving subplots, and the like—you need something else to propel the readers through your story. You have to make them wonder, on virtually every page, What is going to happen next? I continually keep in mind Mickey Spillane’s dictum: people don’t read books to get to the middle; they read to get to the end. Meaning: our responsibility as authors is to grab the readers by the throat in the first scene and do whatever is necessary to get them to the last page, ideally in one sitting.

  There’s a distinction between surprises and reversals. A surprise occurs when an author intentionally sets up facts to misdirect the readers and ultimately reveals that the truth is very different from what they’d believed. A reversal is simply an unexpected occurrence or revelation that leads to a change in characters’ actions going forward; it can occur without any setup whatsoever.

  While The Executioners has few, if any, surprises as I define them, MacDonald was enough of a craftsman to propel the story forward using dozens of reversals. We’re always on edge, wondering what type of brick wall our characters will run into next.

  Next, in considering the novel’s appeal, I’d cite MacDonald’s skill as a stylist—that rare ability to net an idea and mount it with words that complement perfectly, without self-consciousness or confusion.

  I’ll give a few examples of his taut, bull’s-eye-accurate prose. Here is Sam Bowden after he has just hired somebody to beat up Max Cady.

  After Carol was asleep he got quietly out of bed and moved over to the chair by the bedroom window, pulled the blinds up with silent cautiousness, lighted a cigarette, and looked out toward the silver road and the stone wall. The night was empty. His four incredibly precious hostages to fortune were in deep sleep. The earth turned and the stars were high. All this, he told himself, was reality. Night, earth, stars and the slumber of his family . . . Two thousand years ago he could have sat in council with the elders and explained his peril and gained the support of the village, and the predator would be stoned to death. So this action was a supplement to the law. Thus it was right. Yet when he got back into bed, he still could not accept his rationalization.

  Here is the family returning home after Cady has been sentenced to a brief jail term; he’ll be released in nineteen days. Notice how the comic description of Bowden’s youngest boy waking after a long car drive and walking into the house morphs to a tone of some uneasiness, and then to despair.

  They were home by four. Bucky rose up in stuporous condition and drunk-walked to the house. The sky was dark and low and the clouds that hurried by seemed just above the tops of the elms. The wind was gusty and humid. It rattled the windows of the house. The house had a feeling of emptiness. When, at six, the heavy rains came, Sam backed the wagon out into the drive so the rain would wash the dust of the trip from it.

  July had come too quickly. And nineteen days could not be made to last.

  I think style is especially revealed in crafting those mundane passages that many authors churn out by rote. MacDonald brings his skills to bear on every page in the book. An example that I particularly enjoyed:

  He threw the empty beer can into the lake and watched it move away, glinting on the ripples, pushed by the wind. He watched Nancy eel up onto the stern of the Sweet Sioux and go off in a clean dive as lovely as music.

  And:

  One man looked properly violent and comfortably shrewd.

  And, as a final example, I can’t resist citing this passage, in which Sam joins his wife after he’s been practicing with a pistol to protect the family against Cady. The “gleam” in his hand is the reflection off the gun.

  He kissed her and then stood holding her in his arms. He looked down over her shoulder and the dark gleam of the sun in his right hand looked incongruous. He was holding his wrist canted so that the weapon would not touch her pale-blue blouse. And beyond the gun he could see the white target and the penciled heart and five black holes.

  Finally, in listing the book’s appeal, I have to say that my ultimate pleasure in The Executioners is spending time with the people who populate it. The Everyfamily Bowdens are at its core, of course: the parents and their three children. Max Cady’s brilliance and evil captivate like a bad accident. But even the tangential characters are compelling: the myriad police, private eyes, law firm partners, family friends, and the locals—all variously appealing, irritating, and shady—who get our immediate attention because MacDonald not only raises them from the page so skillfully but never lets us forget that any one of them could be the next victim. There isn’t a clichéd character in the bunch. These folks change their minds; they do clever things and stupid things; they stumble and get outmaneuvered; they succeed accidentally; and they screw up bad, despite their best intentions.

  Whatever their role in the book, MacDonald wants us to know these people, to understand them, to get into their minds and hearts. He takes his time. For instance, he goes to some lengths to describe Carol and Sam’s meeting and courtship. There’s no dramatic development in the flashback, but it’s great to read. And not too long: MacDonald is very aware (as are we) that there’s a madman out there. But, damnit, we’re even more in love with Mr. and Mrs. Bowden after seeing them way back when, and all the more sweaty-palm uneasy the next time Cady gets close.

  It’s with these portrayals, however, that we see some false steps. I know of no married couples who banter quite so cleverly and relentlessly as Sam and Carol, thank goodness. The children are perhaps a bit advanced for their years at some points, and overly naïve at others.

  And one scene in particular with Carol grates. She collapses emotionally after a car crash engineered by Cady, having what amounts to a nervous breakdown, which the (male) doctor treats with tranquilizers and condescension. True, The Executioners came out of a different era, the Mad Men days, when misogyny went unchallenged, if not unnoticed. But my problem with this treatment (in both senses) of Carol in The Executioners is that MacDonald later reveals he knows better. Indeed, it’s she, not Sam, who gives voice to the theme of the book.

  In the final scene her husband awkwardly tries to express his feelings in the aftermath of Cady, and settles on the heartfel
t but lame “I feel enormously alive.” Carol, though, gives us the more articulate and insightful response to the cataclysmic events when she describes how she’s been fundamentally changed by what has happened.

  “There are black things loose in the world. Cady was one of them. A patch of ice on a curve can be one of them. A germ can be one of them. So just this little thing is what I learned. That all over the world, right now, this minute, people are dying, or their hearts are breaking, or their bodies are being broken, and while it is happening they have a feeling of complete incredulity. This can’t be happening to me. This isn’t what was meant to be . . . I think maybe I’m stronger and braver. I know I am. Because I know that everything we have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence.”

  You got it, Carol.

  I mean, John.

  Finally, I’d like to say a word about the film adaptations of the novel, because they illustrate something about MacDonald’s book itself. The first movie was released in 1962 (directed by J. Lee Thompson), the second in 1991 (with Martin Scorsese at the helm). Both movies feature superlative portrayals of the villain: Robert Mitchum in the 1962 version, followed by Robert De Niro in 1991. Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte, respectively, played Sam Bowden. Both films are suspenseful, well acted, and technically accomplished. They also feature certain variations you’d expect in adapting a book for the cinema (in the novel, for instance, the Bowdens have three children; in both films there’s only one daughter, to streamline the story).

  The 1962 version largely tracked the plotting of the book: Sam Bowden physically stopped Cady from rape under circumstances that were both ethically unchallenging and practically unremarkable. Cady was caught in the act while drunk and nearly unconscious. Sam testified at his trial and off the criminal went to jail.

  However, in the Scorsese film, the backstory is this: Public Defender Sam Bowden, representing Cady for the rape, intentionally misplaced evidence to ensure his conviction. Cady has learned what Bowden did and returned for vengeance. Scorsese also has Bowden, a faithful husband and loving father in the book, cheat on his wife with a woman who becomes one of Cady’s victims.