A previously unknown story by John D MacDonald, author of The Executioners, the novel twice filmed as Cape Fear, is published for the first time on Tuesday in the Strand Magazine.
The Accomplice is the hard-boiled story of Joey, a young grocery store worker who attracts the attentions of Belle, the much younger wife of the store owner.
“Take a look at John when he gets back,” Belle says. “Think of what we could do and the money we could make if he wasn’t around. And he’s got four thousand insurance.”
“‘But he’s only about fifty something.’
“She laughed shortly. ‘Just think about it, Joey.’
“He thought about it during the night.”
Andrew F Gulli, managing editor of the Strand, has recently published unknown stories by James M Cain, Truman Capote and Rod Serling and an essay by GK Chesterton.
The Accomplice was found in the MacDonald archives at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Gulli then confirmed with Calvin Branche, a MacDonald scholar, that it had never been published – though a “completely different” story about a grocery clerk entangled with an older woman, also called The Accomplice, did appear in 1980.
Judging the unpublished story a product of the late 1940s, Gulli says it shows a young man “caught in a moral dilemma, torn between loyalty to his employer, his strange fascination with a one-of-a-kind femme fatale and the lure of material gain”.
MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, in 1916 and graduated from Syracuse and Harvard. In the second world war, he served with the US army and the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. After the war, he moved into writing full-time.
Branche first found MacDonald’s work in Connecticut in the 1960s, at “a local bookstore that sold paperbacks for sometimes as little as a dime”. He thinks the author is less known nowadays thanks to the simple passage of time, but says that “every time I do hear of somebody reading McDonald for the first time, they’re really impressed”.
MacDonald’s reputation as a noir master is established, thanks in part to the book that became Cape Fear, filmed in 1962, with Gregory Peck as the attorney Sam Bowden and Robert Mitchum as the vengeful Max Cady, and in 1991, by Martin Scorsese with Nick Nolte and Robert De Niro. More expansive, and hugely successful, were MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels, about a Floridian “salvage consultant” recovering stolen property, from The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) to The Lonely Silver Rain (1985).
MacDonald was prolific, publishing 78 books and around 450 stories. Often, Branche says, “pulp magazines would have 15 stories, and every one would be by MacDonald, with pseudonyms, because he was he was that good”.
In Gulli’s eyes, even in such profusion MacDonald “brought something unique to his genre: a deeper exploration of the complexities of human behavior amid societal disillusionment … focused not only on crime, but on the broader social and environmental issues of his time, including the ruthless greed of land developers and the destruction of the natural world.
“Renowned for professional discipline, MacDonald rejected the clichés of artistic struggle – writer’s block, the endless search for inspiration, the brooding temperament of the tortured artist.”
In 1964, MacDonald described his work: “Most of my published novels are of the folk dancing category, the steps, the patterns traditionally imperative, the retributions obligatory. Within these limits I have struggled for freshness, for what insights I can muster, for validity of characterization and motivation, for the accuracies of method and environment which enhance any illusion of reality.”
When MacDonald died, in 1986, aged 70, the New York Times noted his rigorous writing regime – “daily, for seven to nine hours, with a break for lunch and another at the cocktail hour” – adding: “He used expensive bond paper, explaining: ‘I think the same situation is involved as painting and sculpture. If you use the best materials you can afford, somehow you have more respect for what you do with it.’”
The version of The Accomplice now published in the Strand deals with more basic materials, found in grocery stores: canned goods, the hamburg machine, “a dozen cartons of number twelve juice” … the frisson of the owner’s wife “squeezing by behind the meat counter where the space was narrow”.
“What becomes of punks like you, Joey?” Belle asks, in a “hard voice”, running her “fingers like a comb into his hair”, turning her hand “into a fist and pull[ing] back”.
Branche detects weakness in the story, “some errors in terms of character development” on display when Joey finally decides how to react to Belle’s plot but excised from the later, published version.
“All the short stories and the novels, everything by MacDonald show he had a very strong ethical sense,” Branche says. “And I think his later story would show the ethical sense, and not the earlier one.”
Gulli classes MacDonald alongside “noir legends” including Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich, saluting how MacDonald “used the genre to expose the moral decay and psychological angst of post-war America”, producing work “as prescient and verbally precise as anyone writing today”.
Bestselling writers agree. Those to have paid tribute include Stephen King, who said he was “knocked cockeyed” by MacDonald; Dean Koontz, who called MacDonald “arguably the greatest author of popular fiction in the 20th century”; and Lee Child, who called MacDonald “an inspiration” and presented a documentary about him. The popular historian Nathaniel Philbrick compared MacDonald with Child and Carl Hiaasen, another Florida writer.
Some hold MacDonald in even higher regard. Kingsley Amis deemed him “by any standards a better writer” than the Pulitzer-winning novelist Saul Bellow, “only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels”.
