Tag: The Dreadful Lemon Sky

Take a Chance On Me

Ah, Murder in the Rue Dauphine.

It’s always weird for me to talk about my writing and my books and so forth on here; I always worry that I am either contradicting and/or repeating myself. When you’re as self-obsessed as I am, that can be a problem; talking about myself is probably my favorite thing to do–on here, at least. And I feel like I’ve told the story of where Chanse came from and how the series developed from the very beginning many, many times.

It was when I was living in Houston that I rediscovered crime fiction, and the old love was even deeper once it was rediscovered. This was the period when I read most of the Perry Mason novels, discovered Paretsky and Grafton and Muller, and decided to give Travis McGee and John D. MacDonald another try. (I had read The Dreadful Lemon Sky when I was a teenager, but I hadn’t liked it; I was more into the classic detective mystery, with lots of suspects and a denouement with everyone gathered in a drawing room as the identity of the killer was unveiled–the McGee series was definitely not that. But MacDonald had written a superb introduction to Stephen King’s first short story collection, Night Shift, and I had always wanted to give him another chance–pun fully intended.) I devoured the McGee series this time around; and I really admired the character and how fully rounded and developed he was (I should give the series a reread; I’d be curious to see how they hold up now)…and armed with all these new private eye novels and Perry Mason puzzles, so I started coming up with my own version. Even the name was a shout out to McGee. My character was also tall with sandy/dirty blond hair, a former college football player, and he lived in Houston, with an office downtown and a secretary named Clara. The title of the first book was going to be The Body in the Bayou, and I started basing the case on the tragic Joan Robinson Hill case, immortalized in Tommy Thompson’s Blood and Money (the premise of the story was that the character representing Joan’s father hires Chanse after Joan’s death to find dirt on John–and then John is murdered; fictionalized, of course.) I wrote about six or seven really bad chapters long hand before giving up. I didn’t know how to write a novel then nor did I understand the concept of rewrites and revisions and drafts. (My ignorance was truly astounding.) The hurdle I couldn’t clear was typing. I was a terrible typist. I’d had a job in California working for an insurance brokerage that was computerized, and had a word processing program that I used to write short stories on; it made such an incredible difference that I knew I would have a much better shot at actually making my dreams come true if I only had a word processor…

In 1991, after I moved to Tampa, I managed to get a word processor, and that was what I wrote my first two and a half young adult novels on–the original drafts of Sara, Sorceress, and Sleeping Angel–and used it happily for several years until it finally died on me. But by then, I was living with Paul and had swung back around to wanting to write adult crime fiction again, and I wanted to write the Chanse character that I’d already created…so I picked back up on The Body in the Bayou, moved it from Houston to New Orleans, got rid of the office and the secretary, and made Chanse gay. I kept the title, but threw away the story; I wanted it to be a gay story, too. I don’t really remember the plot, but it had to do with the murder of a beautiful boy-toy for a wealthy closeted gay man in New Orleans…and Chanse knew the boy-toy from his days working as an escort before he landed the rich man, I wrote about six or seven chapters of this before we moved to New Orleans….and I realized I’d have to throw it all out again because it was all wrong; I’d made the classic mistake so many writers make when writing about New Orleans: writing about it having never lived here, I only had tourist experiences–which are vastly and dramatically different from the actually “living here” experiences. So, once again, I threw it all out and started over, this time calling it Tricks instead of The Body in the Bayou.

The title morphed again to the less saleable Faggots Die after the first draft; and I remember talking to Felice Picano–he was coming into town for the Tennessee Williams Festival, and I picked him up at the airport. As we drove back into the city from Kenner, we talked about my book and the series, and he nixed the new title as well as the old one. “No one, ” he wisely said, “will pick up a book called Faggots Die, and Tricks sounds like a pornographic memoir of your sex life.” Felice was actually the one who suggested I mimic titles for the series from a classic writer…and we were throwing titles around in the car when I said, “You know, the streets in the Quarter are technically rues–Rue Bourbon, Rue Royale, Rue Dumaine–and the murder happens on Dauphine. Maybe Murder in the Rue Dauphine?”

“That’s perfect,” Felice said, and then we played with Poe titles the rest of the way into the city–incidentally, one of them was The Purloined Rentboy, which became my short story “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy”, so never throw anything away.

And thus was Murder in the Rue Dauphine titled; and the plan for the series titles was also devised–the branding was changed by the publisher, but I can honestly say my first book was titled by Felice Picano.

Murder in the Rue Dauhoine has had three covers in its 21 years of existence. This center one is the current.

Never come to New Orleans in the summer. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s sticky. It’s damp. It’s hot. Air conditioners blow on high. Ceiling fans rotate. Nothing helps. The air is thick as syrup. Sweat becomes a given. No antiperspirant works. Aerosols, sticks, powders, and creams all fail. The thick air just hangs there, brooding. The sun shows no mercy. The vegetation grows out of control. Everything’s wet. The build­ings perspire. Even a simple task becomes a chore. Taking the garbage out becomes an ordeal. The heat makes the garbage rot faster. The city starts to smell sour. The locals try to mask the smell of sweat with more perfume. Hair spray sales go up. Women turn their hair into lacquered helmets that start to sag after an hour or so.

Even the flies get lazy.

My sinuses were giving me fits as I left the airport and headed into the city. It was only 7 o’clock in the morning but already hotter than hell. The air was thick. I reached for the box of tissue under my seat and blew my nose. The pressure in my ears popped. Blessed relief.

As I drove alongside the runways I could see a Transco Airlines 737 taxiing into takeoff position. I saluted as I drove past, thinking it might be the flight that my current lover was working. Paul looked good in the uniform. It takes a great body to look sexy in polyester. He does.

He’d be gone for four days on this trip. I was at loose ends. I’d wrapped up a security job for Crown Enterprises the previous Wednesday. The big check that I’d banked guaranteed I wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. I like when money’s not a concern.

And so began a series that lasted for seven titles and about twelve years or so; I don’t remember what year the last book in the series was published. I never expected anyone would publish it; it was intended to be a “practice novel” so I would get used to rejections and learn. It was also the first manuscript I ever wrote that went through multiple drafts before I thought it was finished enough to send out on query. It was supposed to be an exercise in learning humility and getting experience with the business while I wrote the book I did expect to get an agent with and sell–which was what I’d always called “the Kansas book” for over a decade at this point. (It eventually morphed into #shedeservedit.) But you never really learn what you’re supposed to when you’re stubborn, thin-skinned, and used to being demeaned and talked over and not taken seriously, for any number of reasons. I sent the manuscript to three agents: two sent me lovely but form rejections, which was disappointed but not surprising. I took this well, put the manuscripts away to send to three more once the final rejection came.

It came on a Friday, if I recall correctly. I went to pick-up the mail and my manuscript was there. Not a surprise, of course, but still a little disappointing. I went out to my car and opened the package…and paper-clipped to the title page of the rubber-band bound manuscript was a torn piece of used paper, with a note in ink reading I find this manuscript and characters neither interesting or compelling with the agent’s initials at the bottom.

It was like being slapped in the face.

By the time I got home I was in a raging fury. I was literally shaking with rage when I came inside. How fucking unprofessional, I thought as I sat down at my computer to check my emails, trying to decide how I would enact my vengeance on this rude piece of shit.1 There was an email there from the editor I was working with on an anthology which had taken my first-ever fiction short story and thus would be my first publication. I had never read the signature line–mainly because I was so excited for my first fiction sale (NARRATOR VOICE: it was porn). This day, he concluded his email with Please send us more work. We definitely want to see more from you and as my ego preened, slightly soothed from the insulting agent note from earlier in the day2, I also looked down at the signature line and realized I was communicating with the senior editor at Alyson Books! I immediately wrote him back a very short note: I’ve written a novel with a gay private eye set in New Orleans, would you be interested in that? and before I could talk myself out of it, hit send.

He wrote back immediately and said please send it to me ASAP!

I put the same manuscript back in a new envelope, and drove back to the postal service to get it in the mail before I changed my mind, and breathed a sigh of relief once I got back to the car–and immediately forgot all about it.

Six weeks later I came home to a phone message from the editor. I called him back, he made me an offer, and my career leapt forward much faster than I expected…and it started a roll of good luck and “being in the right place at the right time” that has kept me publishing almost non-stop since Murder in the Rue Dauphine was released in 2002.

It sold really well, got mostly favorable reviews, and scored me my first Lambda Literary Award nomination.

Not bad for a manuscript and characters who were neither interesting or compelling, right?3

It also took me a long time to realize–or rationalize–that the note wasn’t meant for me. (I was most offended that I wasn’t even worthy of an actual form rejection letter; that was the truly insulting part for me.) I realized when telling this story on a panel somewhere, that the note was probably meant for an intern or a secretary or an assistant, who just shoved the whole thing in an envelope to do the rejection and through some wild Lucy-and-Ethel office shenanigans, it went out without the rejection letter and with the note intended for internal eyes only…and made me wonder, how different would my career and life be had that fuck-up not happened?

We’ll never know, I guess.

  1. Not really proud of this reaction, but I did get the last laugh. ↩︎
  2. Said agent died a few years later. I may have smiled and said good, a la Bette Davis vis a vis Joan Crawford’s death. ↩︎
  3. I may be more forgiving about a lot of things these days, but I will always be petty about that hateful agent. ↩︎

One More Chance

My first series will always be special to me, even though I’ve retired Chanse MacLeod…at least for now, at any rate; I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that I shouldn’t ever say never when it comes to my writing career. Chanse will always be special for me in that he was the main character in my first book to be published as well as the first series of mine to see print. I originally created Chanse in 1989–can you believe that? Thirteen years from the time I first started constructing the character and him getting into print.

When I left California and moved to Houston that year, I decided to put the miseries of the 1980’s behind me, forget the past, and try to move on to the future I wanted for myself. I still had no idea what I wanted to do to make a living, but I knew I was never going to become a writer unless I actually, you know, wrote. When I moved to Houston, I moved away from reading mostly epic fantasy and horror to reading crime and horror. Sue Grafton’s F is for Fugitive had just been released, and the bookstore–Bookstop?–I frequented in Houston had a store catalogue that had book reviews and author interviews, and Sue Grafton was on the cover. I thought the alphabet titles was a great idea, so I bought the first three and took them home. I loved them, and started diving back into the crime fiction genre headfirst. I also started reading the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novels again–I’d read some when I was a kid–and I also started reading the rest of the Travis McGee series (I’d read, and not liked, The Dreadful Lemon Sky when I was thirteen; I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the series) and absolutely loved them. I loved McDonald’s writing style more than anything else, and the descriptions of McGee sounded, well, hot.

I started creating Chanse MacLeod as a blend of Kinsey and Travis McGee, really; I was driving to work one day and crossed a bayou. noticing the sign for the first time, and thought “The Body in the Bayou would be a great title for his first book” and so i started constructing the character and his world. He was a former cop turned private eye in Houston; he’d played college football at Auburn but suffered a career-ending injury his senior year and so he went into law enforcement, eventually going out on his own. He had a secretary named Clara that he shared with a couple of lawyers in an office suite in downtown Houston, and most of his work involved trying to get evidence of adultery for wealthy and suspicious spouses. In 1994. after I fell in love with New Orleans, I moved Chanse to New Orleans and his college experience to LSU; I also was discovering gay crime novels around this same time, so I decided to make Chanse a gay man; from a small town in Texas with homophobic parents and family, playing a sport where homophobia is rife, and he too discovered and fell in love with New Orlean…so he became a cop when his football career ended, eventually becoming a private eye. I started rewriting the four or five chapters I’d written with the story set in Houston…but once I moved to New Orleans and began to grasp what it was actually like to live here, I threw the entire thing out and started over.

That manuscript I started over became Murder in the Rue Dauphine, and the first place I submitted it to offered me a contract six weeks after I mailed them the manuscript. Alyson was home for the first five books in the series…before Alyson Books went belly-up, without paying me the advance for the fifth book and no longer paying me royalties on the others (the entire series was still in print when Alyson folded).

Burn in hell, corporate trash who bought Alyson.

(The company had been doomed for a while, and the unfortunate last minute attempt to rescue it failed, which I thought was horrifically unfair to the person who they brought in to save it. The final collapse was hardly his fault; his predecessors had made so many unbelievably stupid mistakes there was no saving the business, really. And ebooks and so forth started eroding away at the reader base, at the same time the business began to crumble. I’ve always felt bad for the poor dude who was the last to hold the title of publisher. I don’t think he had any staff and he was the only person working there by the bitter end.)

But when Alyson went belly-up and chose to stop honoring their contractual obligations to pay their writers, I’d already moved the Scotty series to Bold Strokes Books and was doing not only anthologies for them but also editorial work for them, so moving the Chanse series there was a no-brainer.

The last two books in the series were done with Bold Strokes Books.

As with anything with my career, I had a plan for the Chanse series but of course, man plans and the gods laugh. I had always intended the series to be seven books, from the very beginning, and I had this emotional journey for him all mapped out: the series would chart his progression from lonely, damaged and scarred loner with a snide sense of humor to more centered, more grounded, more mature and more settled into his life. So, when the series opened, he was–against his better judgment–seeing a hot flight attendant, and wondering if he was actually falling in love and had the opportunity to be happy for once in his life. I really did give him a miserable backstory; alcoholic mother, abusive drunk redneck father, grew up living in a trailer park in a snotty small Texas town where no one would let him forget he was trash until he showed some football playing ability–and he was just cynical enough to understand they still considered him trash, but trash with a skill they appreciated. He went to LSU and joined a fraternity in a final attempt to banish the homosexuality from his brain (it didn’t work), and then was injured in a bowl game so his career was over–he’d been considering going for the NFL draft. He was a big man, as such; and spent a lot of time in the gym working out and keeping fit. I also had to make a horrific decision while writing the second book–with every intention of walking that ending back in the third.

And then Katrina happened, and everything changed.

My editor at Alyson Books at the time, Joe Pittman, was new. He had come on board shortly after my previous editor was let go (I had a different editor for each of the first three Chanse books, and in fact had a different for the last two–so the Chanse series went through five editors at Alyson…now I would see that as a sign), and I was assigned to him as a gay mystery writer. He got in touch with me after Katrina to check in on me and of course, to encourage me to write about Katrina, which I did NOT want to do whilst I was in the middle of experiencing the aftermath still. I was still unhoused at the time, staying with my parents in Kentucky, before moving back to Hammond, Louisiana, just before Rita to housesit. Paul and I talked on the phone one morning and suggested we do a fundraising anthology for Katrina victims…but I wasn’t interested. Joe called me that afternoon and with the same suggestion, so I told him Paul wanted to do one and that was how Love, Bourbon Street came to be. Joe also kept insisting to me that I should write a post-Katrina book as the next Chanse book, and despite my reluctance I decided to go ahead and do it. Part of the problem, as I saw it, was, how do you end a book on a hopeful note when the city is still in ruins and most of the population still displaced? Joe kept pushing me, and I finally agreed to write Murder in the Rue Chartres–and I really don’t remember anything about writing the book other than I did actually write it, and it turned out to be one of my best books. It won the Lambda, for one thing, and got great reviews everywhere.

The fourth Chanse novel was, in my opinion, the weakest of the series. They’d fired my editor before I signed a contract for the fourth book, and when that finally happened, they needed me to write in like eight weeks. I asked for a two book contract so I would never have to write another book in eight weeks again (LOL at my naivete), and they were so desperate for the fourth they agreed. (I had already written a Scotty book that was just sitting in a drawer; I turned it into the fourth Chanse and to this day I think it was a mistake.) Of course, they did publish the fifth, but they never paid me a dime for Murder in the Garden District. The only money I’ve made off that book is from the ebook Bold Strokes put up–I gave them the entire Chanse backlist for ebooks, and those Chanse books still sell.

Maybe I shouldn’t have ended the series at seven?

But it felt like the right place to stop. Chanse’s personal story of personal growth and how it happened kind of got lost along the way; he grew and changed as the series progressed, but writing the last two–which I also think are good–felt a little paint-by-the-numbers for me; I felt that writing the sixth and when I felt it again in the seventh, I decided to stop there. I wasn’t getting any satisfaction for writing the books anymore, there was no joy derived from doing them, and since I’d already planned to stop at seven…I stopped at seven.

I still get ideas for Chanse books, of course. I have an LSU fraternity murder that would be a perfect Chanse story–I planned it as a novella–and of course, I’ve always wanted to fictionalize the Jeff Davis Eight murders as a Chanse novel, too. Maybe I could do three Chanse novellas published in one book?

That would make a lot more sense, and could be even more fun to write than one long single story novel.

Or I may not do anything with Chanse at all, and use those stories/plots for something else.

Cruel Summer

As far as summers go, I’d say this is one of the cruelest of my life thus far. (Nothing, however, including this one, has been as bad as 2005; let me make that very clear–but this one also isn’t over yet and apparently the Saharan dust storm that was hindering the formation of hurricanes is over now. Yay.)

I read an interesting piece on Crimereads about Robert S. Parker and his creation of his iconic character, Spenser, which put me back in mind of how I came to create MY character, Chanse MacLeod–who I have been thinking about lately ( I’ve decided that rather than writing novels about him I’m going to work on some novellas, and then put four of them together as a book; currently the working titles for the first three are “Once a Tiger,” “The Body in the Bayou,” and “The Man in the Velvet Mask”–I still need a fourth, and it’s entirely possible that any of these could turn actually into a novel, and I do have some amorphous ideas about what the fourth one could be), and reading this piece, which is excerpted from a scholarly tome about the genre I would like to read (Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-boiled History by Susanna Lee), made me start thinking about how I created Chanse, and the entire process that the series actually went through over the years of his development.

It also made me think about looking at Chanse, the series, the characters, and the stories I chose to tell in a more critical, analytic way; I am not sure if I can do this, actually–while I’ve not published a Chanse novel since Murder in the Arts District back on October 14, 2014 (!!! Six years? It’s been six years since I retired the series? WOW)–which means I do have some distance from the books now, I still am the person who wrote them…even though I barely remember any of them now; I cannot recall plot points, or character names, outside of the regulars who populate every one of the books (I also cheated by using some of the same regulars in the Scotty series; Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague, the police detective partners, appear in both series; and Paige Tourneur, Chanse’s best friend and a reporter, originally for the Times-Picayune who eventually moved on to become editor of Crescent City magazine, also turned up in the Scotty series, in Garden District Gothic and then again in Royal Street Reveillon. Serena Castlemaine, one of the cast members of the Grande Dames of New Orleans, who shows up in the most recent two Scotty books–the same as Paige–is a cousin of the deceased husband of Chanse’s landlady and erstwhile regular employer, Barbara Palmer Castlemaine).

I first created the character of Chanse MacLeod while I was living in Houston in 1989, and the series was intended to be set in Houston as well. I didn’t know of any crime novels or series set in Houston, one of the biggest cities in the country, and I thought that was strange (and probably wrong). Houston seemed like the perfect city for a crime series–huge and sprawling, economically depressed at the time but there was still a lot of oil money and speculators, con artists and crime–and the original story was called The Body in the Bayou (a title of which I am very fond, and is currently back in the running to be the title of a Chanse novella), because Houston also has bayous. I was reading John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series at the time, and loving them–I particularly loved the character of Travis McGee–and how twisty and complicated (if sometimes farfetched) the plots of the novels were. I had read The Dreadful Lemon Sky when I was thirteen, and liked it; but promptly forgot about MacDonald and McGee; a Book Stop in Houston that I frequented reminded me of them and I started picking them up. I had also discovered Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky by this time, and was falling in love with the crime genre all over again, developing a taste for the more hard-boiled side I disliked as a teenager. This was when I decided to try writing in this field again–for most of the 1980’s I was trying to write horror and science fiction (and doing so, very badly).

But coming back to the field that I loved as a kid, tearing through the paperback stand alones from Scholastic Book Club and all the series, from Nancy Drew to the Three Investigators to Trixie Belden before graduating on to Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner, seemed preordained, and also seemed somehow right; writing mysteries, or crime fiction, seemed to me the right path to becoming a published author (turns out, that was the correct assumption for me to make, and one that I have never regretted).

Chanse was originally, as a straight man, a graduate of Texas A&M and a two year veteran of the Houston Oilers; an injury eventually led to early retirement and joining the Houston PD, where he only lasted another three years before quitting and getting a private eye license. He had a secretary, a woman of color named Clara, who was heavyset and in her early fifties. That was about as far as I got; I think I wrote a first draft of a first chapter which established him as having his office near NASA, in Clear Lake (which was near where I lived) and his first case was going to involve a wealthy oil family in River Oaks. Chanse was also six four, dirty blond hair, green eyes, and weighed about two-twenty. When I fell in love with New Orleans four or five years later, I started revising the character and started writing The Body in the Bayou while I lived in Minneapolis. By this time I’d discovered that gay fiction was actually a thing, and that queer mysteries actually existed: Joseph Hanson, Michael Nava, RD Zimmerman, etc. I wanted to write about New Orleans, and I wanted to write a more hard-boiled, MacDonald like hero than what I was reading. (Not that Hanson, Nava, and the rest weren’t doing hard-boiled stuff; they were–I just wanted to subvert the trope of the straight male loner-hero detective.)

Chanse was definitely a loner, and after I moved to New Orleans I once again started revising the manuscript and story that eventually became Murder in the Rue Dauphine. He was cynical about life, love and relationships, even as he was slowly inching his way into a relationship with a flight attendant named Paul Maxwell; he had only two friends, really: Paige Tourneur, who’d been his “beard” while he was at LSU and in a fraternity and was now a reporter for the Times-Picayune; and Blaine Tujague, a former one-night stand and fellow gay man on the NOPD (I changed his backstory to having attended LSU on a football scholarship and a career-ending injury in the Sugar Bowl at the end of his senior year, which led him to joining NOPD, where he lasted for two years before going out on his own). He also lived in a one bedroom apartment on Camp Street, across the street from Coliseum Square in a converted Victorian, the living room also served as his office–and that was the same place where Paul and I lived when we first moved to New Orleans.

The series and the character evolved in ways I didn’t foresee when I first imagined him as that straight private eye in Houston; or even when I rebooted him into a gay one in New Orleans. The original plan was to have him evolve and grow from every case he took on–which would parallel some kind of personal issue and/or crisis he was enduring as he solved the case–the first case was about his concerns about getting involved in a serious relationship as he investigated a case that made him realize he was very lucky to have found someone that he could be with openly; the second case was about investigating someone who wasn’t who they claimed to be while at the same time he was finding out things about Paul’s past that made him uncomfortable. Katrina, of course, came along between book two and book three and changed everything; I know I also wrote another that dealt with the issues between mothers and children which made him reexamine his own relationship with his mother.

The great irony is I probably need to revisit the books to talk about them individually, or to even take a stronger, more in-depth look at the character; maybe that’s something I can do (since I have ebooks of the entire series) when I am too tired to focus on reading something new or to write anything.

And it’s really not a bad idea to reexamine all of my books and short stories at some point, in order to get an idea of what to do (and how to do it) going forward.

And now back to the spice mines.

Baby-Baby-Baby

John D. MacDonald is one of my favorite authors. Period.

I first read MacDonald when I was about thirteen: The Dreadful Lemon Sky. I didn’t care too much for it on my first read; I was coming off reading Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner and Charlotte Armstrong, and was deep into my Victoria Holt/Phyllis Whitney phase, so I was confused–this isn’t a mystery at all, I remember thinking as I read it…and ironically, it was this enormous disappointment that led to me moving away from reading mystery/crime novels for a very long time.

When I was about sixteen, I bought a couple of ratty old MacDonald paperbacks for a dime each at a flea market: Murder in the Wind, The Crossroads, and The Drowner. These were three of his stand-alones from his pulp days, before he started writing the Travis McGee series, and I loved all three of them. This was my first experience with pulp fiction/noir; it was shortly after this that I went on my James M. Cain kick, and slowly came to an appreciation of the less-traditional style  of  crime novel. Years later, when Grafton, Muller and Paretsky brought me back into reading crime, I remembered how much I’d enjoyed those pulpy MacDonalds and decided to give Travis McGee another try. I bought another copy of The Dreadful Lemon Sky, and this time, the character caught on with me–and soon I was tearing through the entire series. The earlier MacDonald novels had all mostly gone out of print, but he periodically was still writing stand-alones; still dark and twisty and noir and pulpy, but these novels had more heft–Condominium, One More Sunday, Barrier Island–and I think those later three don’t get the credit they deserve.

In the last few years I’ve been acquiring used copies of those old MacDonald pulp stand-alones–and while they are dated, they are still compelling reads. And yes, as I have said before, Chanse MacLeod owes a lot to Travis McGee.

So, you can IMAGINE my thrill that the MacDonald Estate allowed me to reprint one of his stories in Florida Happens.

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From his website: This website is devoted to John D. MacDonald, author of 78 books, including the famous Travis McGee series.  JDM is well-known in mystery fiction writing, especially for his books with Florida as a setting.  Most of the current Florida mystery writers acknowledge JDM’s impact on their writing.

Born In Sharon, Pa., MacDonald , as a young boy, wished he had been born a writer, believing that they were a separate “race,” marked from birth.  But two years of  writing 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week, in 1945 and 1946, convinced him otherwise.

By the time he died he had published 78 books, with more than 75 million copies in print.

He married Dorothy Prentiss in a secret ceremony in 1937 in Pennsylvania  and a public wedding was held in Poland, N.Y.  in 1938.

He graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in business in 1939 and then went to Harvard to work on an MBA. His son, Maynard, was born that year.

He worked at several menial jobs after earning his MBA in 1939.

MacDonald then served in the Army beginning in 1940 at the Rochester N.Y Ordnance station.  He was sent to  India in late 1943, and was accepted in the OSS in late 1944 . He  was sent  to Ceylon  where he was the Commander of Detachment 404.  He was not a spy, however, but served in the Ordnance areas.

He wrote nearly 450 short stories, and published his first novel ,The Brass Cupcake, in 1950 (complete bibliography here) He continues to earn praise from millions of readers and lasting respect from fellow authors. He was given the Grandmaster Award in 1972 by the Mystery Writers of America; the Ben Franklin Award (1955);and was Guest of Honor at Bouchercon in 1983. Numerous other awards and Honorary Doctorates were given to him as well.

Perhaps the greatest testament to his writing, now decades  after his death in 1986, is that his books continue to sell, movies continue to be planned, and the internet continues to serve as a place to discuss his work and related matters.  See the Facebook Busted Flush group.

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The story is “Hangover.”

He dreamed that he had dropped something, lost something of value in the furnace, and he lay on his side trying to look down at an angle through a little hole, look beyond the flame down into the dark guts of the furnace for what he had lost. But the flame kept pulsing through the hole with a brightness that hurt his eyes, with a heat that parched his face, pulsing with an intermittent husky rasping sound.

With his awakening, the dream became painfully explicable—the pulsing roar was his own harsh breathing, the parched feeling was a consuming thirst, the brightness was transmuted into pain intensely localized behind his eyes. When he opened his eyes, a long slant of early morning sun dazzled him, and he shut his eyes quickly again.

This was a morning time of awareness of discomfort so acute that he had no thought for anything beyond the appraisal of the body and its functions. Though he was dimly aware of psychic discomforts that might later exceed the anguish of the flesh, the immediacy of bodily pain localized his attentions. Even without the horizontal brightness of the sun, he would have known it was early. Long sleep would have muffled the beat of the taxed heart to a softened, sedate, and comfortable rhythm. But it was early and the heart knocked sharply with a violence and in a cadence almost hysterical, so that no matter how he turned his head, he could feel it, a tack hammer chipping away at his mortality.

His thirst was monstrous, undiminished by the random nausea that teased at the back of his throat. His hands and feet were cool, yet where his thighs touched he was sweaty. His body felt clotted, and he knew that he had perspired heavily during the evening, an oily perspiration that left an unpleasant residue when it dried. The pain behind his eyes was a slow bulging and shrinking, in contrapuntal rhythm to the clatter of his heart.

He sat on the edge of the bed, head bowed, eyes squeezed shut, cool trembling fingers resting on his bare knees. He felt weak, nauseated, and acutely depressed.

This was the great joke. This was a hangover. Thing of sly wink, of rueful guffaw. This was death in the morning.

Great, terrific writing.

And now I can say I edited an anthology with John D. MacDonald as a contributor.

I may never stop being thrilled.