More Good Old Stuff: Short Stories

by John D. MacDonald, Dean Koontz (Introduction)

Overview

More Good Old Stuff, a classic collection of short fiction from crime writer John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.
 
The companion to The Good Old Stuff, this anthology features fourteen more early stories by one of America’s premier authors of hard-boiled noir. Culled from the hundreds that John D. MacDonald published in the wildly popular pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, these are electrifying tales of murder, corruption, intrigue, and revenge: a serial widow making a fortune by murdering her husbands . . . an amnesiac being watched by the mob . . . an ex-cop trying to crack the case that nearly wrecked his life. All are told through MacDonald’s vivid language and taut storytelling—the hallmarks of a writer who holds a distinguished place in the popular canon.
 
This collection includes “Deadly Damsel,” “State Police Report That . . . ,” “Death for Sale,” “A Corpse in His Dreams,” “I Accuse Myself,” “A Place to Live,” “Neighborly Interest,” “The Night Is Over,” “Secret Stain,” “Even Up the Odds,” “Verdict,” “The High Gray Walls of Hate,” “Unmarried Widow,” and “You Remember Jeannie.”
 
Features a new Introduction by Dean Koontz
 
Praise for John D. MacDonald
 
“The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King
 
“My favorite novelist of all time.”—Dean Koontz
 
“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut
 
“A master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer . . . John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about the best.”—Mary Higgins Clark

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812984729
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/11/2013
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	280,194
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short-story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980, he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life, he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business, he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.

Date of Birth:

July 24, 1916

Date of Death:

December 28, 1986

Place of Birth:

Sharon, PA

Place of Death:

Milwaukee, WI

Education:

Syracuse University 1938; M.B. A. Harvard University, 1939

Read an Excerpt

Deadly Damsel
 
When she had awakened that morning, she had looked at her husband in the other bed. Howard’s slack mouth was open, there was a stubble of beard on his chin and he was puffy under the eyes. It was at that moment she realized how bored she was.
 
Howard Goodkin bored her and so did the little city of Wanderloo, Ohio. As had happened so many times before, the plot and lines and scenery failed to wear well.
 
When he came down to breakfast she kissed him warmly, smiled up into his eyes—and wondered if he should be buried in the blue suit or the gray one.
 
The gray would go with his eyes, she decided. The gray suit and one of the new white shirts and the blue silk tie with the tiny pattern of white triangles. While she talked casually with him about the weather, the state of the flower garden and the leaking faucet in the upstairs bathroom, she mentally decided on the Gortzen Funeral Home. They seemed to do the best job. Mrs. Hall had looked so lifelike. She thought of it all, and she could almost hear the soft music, the sonorous words of the service. She wanted to hug herself with excitement.
 
Finally Howard stood up, patted his mouth with the napkin, leaned over to kiss her good-by and left. She stood at the window and waved to him, wondering how much she would get for the year-old car. She decided that she’d try to get seventeen hundred.
 
She hummed to herself as she finished up the breakfast dishes. The house was pleasantly warm. She kicked off her slippers and walked through the dim rooms of the pleasant house.
 
When she passed the full-length mirror in the hall, she jumped. Then she smiled at her own foolishness.
 
She stood near the mirror and looked at herself. She thought it was odd how young her figure remained. Absurd the way it was still the figure of a young girl. She frowned as she tried to remember her true age. Forty? No. Born in 1908 in Wilmington. That would make it forty-one. Howard thought she was thirty-two. She was a small woman with an erect carriage, shapely legs, a tiny waist. There was no trace of gray in her rich brown hair, and her large eyes were a pleasant deep blue, almost a lavender.
 
She assumed the exaggerated pose of a model, then laughed at herself with her voice of throaty silver and tripped prettily up the stairs. She took the heavy suitcase from the back of the closet, lugged it out into the room.
 
With a needle, she picked the stitches out of a place where the lining had been ripped and mended. Reaching through the rent, she pulled out the heavy packet, took it over to the bed and opened it with excited fingers. The packet contained three envelopes. That was the secret. To be systematic.
 
The first envelope contained small pictures of varied sizes. Five of them. Five pictures of five men. On the back of each picture, in neat, dainty printing, were a few facts. The name of the man. The city or town where they had lived. The name she had used each time. A guarded phrase to indicate the manner of death. A tiny figure to indicate the net gain, in thousands, by his death.
 
Humming once more, she went to her bureau drawer, took out the small picture of Howard Goodkin, took it back to the bed along with her silver fountain pen. Resting the picture face down, she printed certain facts neatly on the back of it.
 
She put it in the envelope with the other pictures. In the second envelope was a listing of several Chicago banks. Following the name of each bank was the name she had used to open the safety-deposit box, and a statement of the amount of cash in each box.
 
The third envelope contained the keys to the boxes, each one carefully tagged. On the back of each tag was the date when the box rent would be due. In the beginning she had paid ten years’ rent in advance, and each box had been renewed through the payment of a second ten years’ rental.
 
She sat on the bed and thought of the wonderful massive vaults, the tightly locked boxes, the neat bundles of cash in each box. A great deal of cash. An enormous amount, she thought, considering the ease with which it had been obtained.
 
She replaced the packet in the suitcase under the lining, repaired the rent with clean, tiny stitches.
 
Already there was great delight in thinking ahead to the wreath on the door, the neighbors bringing baked things, the quiet words of comfort. It was so easy to cry when they spoke to her—so easy to play the part of the stricken widow.
 
Then, after several months of wearing black had gone by and she had begun to tire of her practiced role of widow, she would go to a few selected friends, the ones who would talk, and she would explain how she could no longer remain there where her memories of Howard were so clear and so sharp. She would sell everything and go away. Some letters, a few postcards—and then silence.
 
They would forget. They always did. Then she would be ready for a new little city, a new man, a new background, carefully memorized so that there would be no slip-up. The eternal delightful gambit of courtship, marriage, setting up a home and making friends. Then, in a year or two—death. It always ended in death.
 
To be such a friend of death gave her a feeling of power that she bore with her wherever she went. She looked on the dull, tidy little lives of the women in the small cities in which she lived, and she felt like a goddess. She could write all manner of things on the black slate of life, and then, with one gesture, wipe the slate clean and begin all over again. New words, new love, new tenderness and a new manner of death.
 
She had read of stupid women who poisoned one husband after another. That was the most spectacular stupidity. Through such methods the police were enabled to establish pattern. No, murder, to be successful, must be done with infinite variety—and in ways that could not be connected with the heartbroken little woman who sobbed out her grief to the coroner and to the police.
 
Whenever she read articles which proclaimed that there was no such thing as a perfect murder, she laughed inside. She sat and laughed without any change of facial expression. And inside of her she felt a glow of triumph.
 
It was good to kill men. Only one thing sometimes bothered her. To get such joy out of killing men must indicate some psychotic condition. She was a well-read woman, but it was not until after the fourth death that she managed to connect her joy with that half-forgotten incident in the woods near her home when she had been fourteen.
 
The man had caught her by the wrist, reaching out from beyond a patch of brush as she walked slowly by. He was ragged and he stank of liquor and his filthy hand had muffled her screams.
 
Sometimes she would wake up in the night and once again feel the hand pressing on her lips.
 
They had sent him to jail. Shortly after that both of her parents died. As she had looked on their faces she had thought that they were dead and yet that horrible man still lived.
 
It bothered her that her hatred of men had to be based on a particular incident. She would rather it had been hatred without apparent cause, because it would have seemed cleaner that way.
 
She married at seventeen. A boy named Albert Gordon. After the first week with him, she knew that one day she would kill him. In killing him she would somehow be exacting her just vengeance.
 
She married him under her own name—Alicia Bowie. For two years she planned. For two years she endured him, and got delight out of being able to successfully play the part of the happy bride.
 
Two days after her nineteenth birthday, the papers announced that tragic death of Albert Gordon while on a swimming picnic with his young wife at Lake Hobart. According to the newspaper accounts, Albert Gordon had dived from the high limb of a tree and had misjudged the depth of the water.
 
She could still remember exactly how it was. The late-afternoon sun slanting across the water. Albert was near her, waist deep in water, looking out across the lake. The tree was above them. She had fumbled on the rocky bottom, found a loose boulder of about ten pounds’ weight. She had held it poised. The shore dropped steeply, and the water, while up to his waist, lapped gently around her legs. She had brought it down on the top of his head. Some of Albert’s blond hair adhered to the rock. She had carefully placed the rock in three feet of water under the limb of the tree, bloody side up. That’s where they had found it.
 
With Albert’s insurance, she had moved eight hundred miles away. She had changed her name. She had established the pattern.
 
Now she got up from the bed, showered, put on a crisp cotton dress and raised the shades, filling the house with sunshine. As she listened with part of her mind to a morning radio program, another part, a cold mechanical part, was weighing, discarding, considering alternate methods of accomplishing the sudden death of Howard Goodkin, successful manager of a chain of grocery stores in and around Wanderloo, Ohio.
 
By lunchtime she had cut the feasible methods down to two. Neither of them duplicated any of the previous murder methods. Both of them were carefully selected to fit the habits of Howard Goodkin.
 
Howard came in for lunch, smiling. He kissed her, patted her affectionately and said, “Anything exciting happen this morning?”
 
I decided to kill you, Howard. “Not a thing, darling. That dog across the street chased the Robinsons’ cat up into our maple tree and Betty was standing around wringing her hands. When she was about to call the firemen, the dog went away and the cat came down. When she picked it up, it scratched her wrist.”
 
Howard grinned, his eyes crinkling pleasantly. “Big morning, huh?”
 
It won’t be hard to weep for you, Howard. In many ways you’re quite nice. “A nice, quiet morning, darling. Is the salad all right?”
 
“Wonderful, honey! I love it with onion.”