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  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. MacDonald 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

  Please Write for Details 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

  Copyright © 1959 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 1987 by Maynard MacDonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random Houses, 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 in the United States by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1959.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82691-6

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  To my son, John. P., who knows a better Mexico and loves her people

  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 novel 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 so
metimes 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.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Book Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Book Three

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About the Author

  BOOK ONE

  In which a small Institution of Art is devised in an Exotic Clime for the purpose of Immediate Profit; a Staff, Faculty and Student Body are acquired by Random Methods; these Assorted Persons arrive at a Curious Edifice and acquaint themselves with One Another; Certain Tensions become Apparent; the Courses of Instruction begin.

  Chapter One

  Announcing the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop: A limited number of painting students will be accepted for the Workshop for the months of July and August. Instruction in painting by renowned artists Gambel Torrigan and Agnes Partridge Keeley. Fee of $500 includes de luxe housing in beautiful small hotel, gourmet food, expert instruction, and a chance to summer in the beautiful city of eternal springtime. Write Miles Drummond, Apartado #300, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico, for details and application blank.

  On a bright morning on the twenty-second day of June, Miles Drummond walked five brisk blocks from his tiny bachelor house to the Cuernavaca Post Office. He was a spry, small-boned man in his fifties wearing sandals, weathered khaki trousers freshly pressed, a green rayon sports shirt. He carried a leather zipper case fat with documents. He had too much iron-gray hair, curly and carefully tended. Behind the bright glint of the Mexican sun on octagonal rimless glasses, his was a clerical face, rather pinched, myopic, with a look of chronic apprehension.

  He stepped from the sunlight into the dusty confusion of the small post office, reaching for his box key as he nimbly skirted the outstretched hand of the elderly beggarwoman who partially blocked the doorway. He was tempted to continue at his headlong pace toward the boxes, but he was conscious of a feeling of breathlessness and an impression that his heart sat too high in his chest, tapping impatiently against his collarbone. He made himself saunter to Box 300. Through the dirty glass, beyond the peeling gilt of the number, he could see that he had mail. At his third stab the key went in and he opened the door and took out three letters. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and took the mail over to a vacant place at one of the high, slanting counters by the windows.

  The top letter was from his sister. He set Martha’s letter aside. She was ten years older than he, lived meagerly in a co-operative rest home outside Philadelphia, and wrote him once a week. He wrote her once a month. He had not seen her since he had moved to Mexico on a rentista status fifteen years ago.

  The second letter was on heavy bond paper, letterhead paper, and apparently typed on an electric machine. Jenningson and Kemp, Architects. Mr. John Kemp wrote that he was enclosing his check for four hundred and fifty dollars to cover the balance of the fee for the Summer Workshop, and that he would fly from New Orleans to Mexico City on Eastern Airlines, arriving at noon on June thirtieth.

  The check was on salmon-colored paper and had been written on a check-writer. Miles Drummond folded it and put it in his wallet. The last letter was from an Agnes Archibald in Denver. She had sent her fifty-dollar registration fee back in February, the first money to come in. She had carried on an exhausting correspondence with Drummond demanding all manner of nonpertinent information, and had at last decided not to attend the Workshop. The current letter was in answer to Miles Drummond’s letter explaining that it had been clearly stated in the literature that the registration fee could not be returned. In the current letter she again demanded her fifty dollars, and made dark threats about people who used the mails to defraud.

  Drummond unzipped the case and looked for his master list. He thumbed through all the papers and could not find it. He emptied the case completely, thoroughly alarmed as he thought of the confusion that would ensue had he lost the master list. He had mislaid just enough of the correspondence so that it would be difficult if not impossible to construct a new master list. When he was close to despair he found it, folded twice and hidden inside the list of food requirements.

  He unfolded the master list of the fifty-three persons who had responded to the advertisement for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. He took out his pen, ran it down the list until he came to Kemp, John A. After the name he wrote, “Pd. Arr June 30, noon, Eastern, Mexico.”

  He put all the papers back into the case, along with the three letters he had received, and headed for the Banco Nacional de México, Cuernavaca Branch, on the corner of Calle Dwight Morrow. He walked by the new government building and through the small north zócalo and past the Bella Vista. Once he was in the bank he had to take everything out of the zipper case again in order to find his deposit book.

  One of the pretty little girls behind the counter entered the check in Drummond’s peso account. Five thousand six hundred and twenty-five more pesos. It made him feel pleasantly flushed and slightly dizzy
to look at the new grand total. Nearly seventy-five thousand pesos. It seemed unreal to him that he could have acquired this much money merely through the writing of various letters. It seemed unfair, somehow, that in ten days the Workshop would begin and he would have to run it, and a lot of this money would have to be paid out. He could not begin to visualize what the summer would be like. He knew only that he dreaded it. And dreaded it more now that Gloria seemed to be losing interest so rapidly.

  He walked four blocks from the bank to the establishment of the mechanic who was trying to restore to a state of relative health the Volkswagen bus which Drummond had acquired for the summer through a very complicated deal. The first owner was not known. The second owner had been a man who dreamed of establishing a great new bus business. He had begun with the Volkswagen, building a huge luggage rack on top, and driving it himself on a punishing run between Cuernavaca and Cuautla. It had been Número Uno of the Consolidated New World Transport Company. After untold miles and great endurance of goats, rockslides, and passengers saturated with pulque, the embittered owner-driver had lettered a name on it. Estoy Perdido. I am lost. And soon after that he went out of business. When it was known that Miles Drummond wanted the use of such a vehicle without actually owning it, his cook-houseman, Felipe Cedro, came up with a deal involving Estoy Perdido. The new proprietor of the broken bus was willing to rent it to Miles Drummond for x pesos for the summer, provided Drummond had the bus completely repaired in the shop of Antonio Vasques, a cousin of the new owner’s wife. One half the cost of repairs would be deducted from the rental. Furthermore, Señor Drummond would agree to employ, as driver of said vehicle, one Fidelio Melocotonero, the novio of the new owner’s daughter, at a salary of two hundred pesos a month, or sixteen dollars American. As Drummond did not own and could not drive a car, and because the home of the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop would be in the structure four miles north of town, the old building last known as the Hotel Hutchinson, Drummond agreed to the arrangement, knowing, from past experience, that Felipe Cedro was somehow making some money from the arrangement.