Clemmie Read online

  Praise for John D. MacDonald

  “My favorite novelist of all time.”

  —DEAN KOONTZ

  “For my money, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction—not crime fiction; fiction, period—and millions of readers surely agree.”

  —The Washington Post

  “MacDonald isn’t simply popular; he’s also good.”

  —ROGER EBERT

  “MacDonald’s books are narcotic and, once hooked, a reader can’t kick the habit until the supply runs out.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  “Travis McGee is one of the most enduring and unusual heroes in detective fiction.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “John D. McDonald remains one of my idols.”

  —DONALD WESTLAKE

  “A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”

  —SUE GRAFTON

  “The Dickens of mid-century America—popular, prolific and … conscience-ridden about his environment … a thoroughly American author.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “It will be for his crisply written, smoothly plotted mysteries that MacDonald will be remembered.”

  —USA Today

  “MacDonald had the marvelous ability to create attention-getting characters who doubled as social critics. In MacDonald novels, it is the rule rather than the exception to find, in the midst of violence and mayhem, a sentence, a paragraph, or several pages of rumination on love, morality, religion, architecture, politics, business, the general state of the world or of Florida.”

  —Sarasota Herald-Tribune

  BY JOHN D. MACDONALD

  The Brass Cupcake

  Murder for the Bride

  Judge Me Not

  Wine for the Dreamers

  Ballroom of the Skies

  The Damned

  Dead Low Tide

  The Neon Jungle

  Cancel All Our Vows

  All These Condemned

  Area of Suspicion

  Contrary Pleasure

  A Bullet for Cinderella

  Cry Hard, Cry Fast

  You Live Once

  April Evil

  Border Town Girl

  Murder in the Wind

  Death Trap

  The Price of Murder

  The Empty Trap

  A Man of Affairs

  The Deceivers

  Clemmie

  Cape Fear (The Executioners)

  Soft Touch

  Deadly Welcome

  Please Write for Details

  The Crossroads

  The Beach Girls

  Slam the Big Door

  The End of the Night

  The Only Girl in the Game

  Where Is Janice Gantry?

  One Monday We Killed Them All

  A Key to the Suite

  A Flash of Green

  The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

  On the Run

  The Drowner

  The House Guest

  End of the Tiger and Other Stories

  The Last One Left

  S*E*V*E*N

  Condominium

  Other Times, Other Worlds

  Nothing Can Go Wrong

  The Good Old Stuff

  One More Sunday

  More Good Old Stuff

  Barrier Island

  A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974

  The Travis McGee Series

  The Deep Blue Good-by

  Nightmare in Pink

  A Purple Place for Dying

  The Quick Red Fox

  A Deadly Shade of Gold

  Bright Orange for the Shroud

  Darker Than Amber

  One Fearful Yellow Eye

  Pale Gray for Guilt

  The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

  Dress Her in Indigo

  The Long Lavender Look

  A Tan and Sandy Silence

  The Scarlet Ruse

  The Turquoise Lament

  The Dreadful Lemon Sky

  The Empty Copper Sea

  The Green Ripper

  Free Fall in Crimson

  Cinnamon Skin

  The Lonely Silver Rain

  The Official Travis McGee Quizbook

  Clemmie is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2013 Random House eBook Edition

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  Copyright © 1958 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 1986 by John D. MacDonald

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in paperback by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, in 1958.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82702-9

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Dean Koontz

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chaper Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  Dean Koontz

  When I was in college, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

  Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

  Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

  I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

  Over the years, I have read every no
vel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

  Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

  Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more. Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

  In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of Strangers to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that, as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.

  In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

  Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

  CHAPTER ONE

  He liked to drink sparingly after dinner, but now he realized he had let Chet Burney force three of his extra-potent highballs on him, and he guessed that they were the equivalent of six drinks at a bar. Chet believed firmly in the social prowess of alcohol, and when Chet and Alice gave a large cocktail party, there were many critical cases of remorse the next morning, and many earnest vows to be more careful at the next Burney affair.

  Craig guessed that neither Chet nor Alice were aware that their parties were as much dreaded as anticipated. They seemed to feel that the noisier they were, the more successful. Also, such parties were breeders of the sort of anecdote Chet seemed to enjoy. “Remember the time Lew Carran decided Bunny’s skirt was too long?”

  To Craig it had an embarrassingly collegiate flavor, and he had long since learned to keep a cautious eye on his glass when Chet was circulating with the Martini shaker.

  But this was not a party. This was family, Chet and Alice had insisted. “Just come over for some drinks and dinner, Craig. The kids eat on the first shift. Then, after they’re out of the way, just the three of us.”

  Now he realized he was slightly drunk. It was nearly midnight. Tomorrow was a working day. He knew he would feel grim in the morning. Yet he knew he should not blame Chet. His restlessness since Maura had left had made it a little easier to take that next drink. When you were not having a very good time, you hoped one more drink would help. The evening had been a little awkward merely because the four of them had been together so often. The absence of Maura made a great gap and caused unexpected silences. Craig knew that during all the time Maura would be away, from this Wednesday, the tenth of July, until she arrived back in New York, six hundred miles away, on Friday, the sixth of September, the Burneys would have him over from time to time. Not too often, as this evening had not been entirely comfortable, yet not so seldom that his terminal report to Maura would indicate thoughtlessness.

  He realized that Chet was telling a story that Craig had heard many times before. Alice was sitting on the floor in front of Chet’s chair. She had her cheek against the side of his knee and, as Chet talked and played with her cropped hair with his blunt fingers, she wore an expression that was at once smug and dreamy. She was a small lean woman with coarse dark-red hair, delicate pointed features, large gray eyes. She was not particularly intelligent, but she had a good sense of fun. She was a superb cook, and despite three children, she kept her house gleaming. Yet the clothes she selected for herself and the make-up she used were never quite right for her. This lack of style had absolutely no effect on the impression she made on most men, and the impression she so obviously made on her husband. This was a wife who, in spite of a boyish body, in spite of an absence of the mannerisms of the temptress, was obviously very capable and very eager. And with equivalent emphasis, those favors were available only to Chet Burney.

  Chet was a big-chested blond man with a boyish face that made him look younger than thirty-nine, quite a bit younger. Craig, who knew that Chet and he were only three weeks apart in age, was sometimes faintly indignant about Chet’s air of youthfulness. Yet, of late, the blond hair was thinning more rapidly, and the paunch was becoming more than a hint. In another ten years the situation would be reversed.

  Chet Burney was a lawyer, a junior partner in the firm of Tolle, Rufus, Kell and Burney. The firm made a speciality of corporation law and, on local problems that were not of a serious nature, was quite often retained by the firm where Craig worked, the Quality Metal Products Division of the U.S. Automotive Corporation. Burney was a bluff and friendly man who liked to tell people that if it wasn’t for lawyers, the law would be a very easy thing to understand.

  Burney played good golf and had a weakness for important-looking automobiles. Craig suspected that when Chet and Alice had bought this house in the River Woods section, he had taken on more than he should have. But the odds were good that Chet’s income would continue to improve. His political connections were good, and he was well-liked.

  Chet was telling the story Craig had heard so many times. “Well, old Junior Thompson, the well-known wolf, had this little girl right here come to the house party on a football week end. We were playing Cornell that week end. This little Alice here was trying to look all grown up, but I found out she’d just turned seventeen and she was only a junior in high school, and she’d done some plain and fancy lying to get her people to let her come along. After I got a good look, I moved right in, and knowing how much of a chance she would have stood with a sharp operator like Thompson, I’ll bet you I wasn’t more than ten minutes too soon. Junior was sure sore. But I had me a date for that week end too. Big ole blonde girl from Smith. Name of Nancy. Nancy and Junior stayed sore for all of twelve minutes when we suggested we trade off, and you know …”

  Craig stopped listening. It had happened a long time ago. He had heard it before. Once he had as
ked Maura on the way home why in the world Chet, who wasn’t usually boring, kept repeating that very ordinary yarn of how they met. Maura thought a moment and said, “He never tells it unless she’s so close he can touch her. Then he seems to be talking to her more than to anyone else. I think it’s a sort of love play with them. You can almost hear her purr.”

  Craig watched her. She had a sleepy, flushed, almost humid look. The heavy fingers toyed with her hair. She arched her back in an almost imperceptible way, and Craig felt a sharp sudden thrust of envy and desire. Not specific desire for Alice. Nor was it desire for Maura. It was not as specified. It was a desire for flesh, for togetherness, in which identity seemed of small importance.

  When Chet was through and tried to give him another drink, Craig said he had to go. They told him he shouldn’t run off so early, but their protestations were more glib than sincere. They walked out to his car with him. The July night was sticky. A passenger liner moved slowly overhead at about four thousand, running lights blinking, curving towards the big airfield on the other side of Still River.

  “When Maura gets back, Craig, you two ought to consider moving out here. The new school will be going up next year. No through traffic. Playgrounds. No city taxes. It’s great for dogs and cats and kids. And there’s a damn fine bunch out here.”

  “It’ll be even handier when the new shopping section is finished,” Alice said.

  “It’s a little out of my reach, kids,” Craig said.

  “I think you ought to grab a good lot, though, before those go out of sight. Then you’ve got it, and when you get ready to change, you’ve got a place to build. You know, I can go from my garage to the Club in twelve minutes.”

  “And you ought to take twenty. You drive too fast,” Alice said.

  “We’ll talk about it when Maura comes back,” Craig said. “But, you know, she likes that old place. I guess because it’s got all the inconveniences she’s always been used to.”

  “If you want to make your limey bride feel really at home, you ought to have the central heating ripped out,” Chet said, laughing.