[Philip] MacDonald is at once a craftsman of writing, whose prose, characterization and evocation of mood (comic or terrible) might be envied by the most serious literary practitioner, and a craftsman of plot technique, whose construction and misdirection should delight (and startle) Carr or Christie.
--Anthony Boucher, NYTBR review of Macdonald's short fiction collection Something to Hide
The author [has] a quality which few detective story writers possess, the ability to construct situations of almost unbearable suspense. Common sense may tell us that right must triumph, but until we reach the last page our harrowed sensibilities will not allow is to lay aside the book.
--The Times
Golden Age mystery writer Philip MacDonald (1900-1980) had one of the more unusual careers of the genre writers of his generation, enjoying a sort of rebirth after World War Two with short crime fiction written in a much different style. He embodied in his one person the transition from the more labored formal ratiocinative detective fiction of the Golden Age to the sleeker, faster-paced suspense fiction of the modern mid-century.
To be sure, MacDonald, a native Englishman who at the height of his mystery writing career in 1932 migrated to Hollywood to write film screenplays, was something of an odd man out even back in the Twenties and Thirties.
Strong suspense or "thriller" elements often invaded his detective fiction and some of his crime novels, like Murder Gone Mad, X v. Rex, Menace, aka RIP and Escape, aka Mystery in Kensington Gore, essentially are thrillers. In his Twenties mysteries The Rasp and The White Crow his murderers have deeply aberrant psychological motivations.
Although in the mid-Thirties MacDonald wrote the first original screenplays for the Charlie Chan mystery series (Charlie Chan in London and Charlie Chan in Paris), in the Forties he would also write screenplays for suspensers like Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, Strangers in the Night, The Body Snatcher, Dangerous Intruder, Love from a Stranger, The Dark Past and The Man who Cheated Himself.
During his peak productivity as a crime writer in the early 1930s, Philip MacDonald published 14 crime novels in four years. Within a year after his move to Hollywood, however, he stopped writing crime novels for five years, until he published Warrant for X in 1938. Over the next two decades he would publish only four crime novels, culminating in 1959 in the Edgar Award best novel runner-up The List of Adrian Messenger.
In the field of crime fiction MacDonald after World War Two instead concentrated on shorter works, novelettes and short stories, which he gathered in three collections: Something to Hide, (Fingers of Fear in the UK), The Man out of the Rain and Death and Chicanery. "I feel occasionally the need to blow off steam," MacDonald told a newspaper in the late 1940s. "When this happens I write a short story."
Indeed he did and these stories he wrote were steamy with morbid criminal psychology and suspense. Critics and his fellow mystery writers responded very favorably to them; the Mystery Writers of America awarded MacDonald two Edgars for his short fiction, one for his first collection of tales, Something to Hide, and one specifically for the 1955 story "Dream No More."
Dream No More is the title we have given to to this new retrospective volume of Philip MacDonald short crime fiction, which is comprised of fifteen short works, novelettes and short stories, which MacDonald published over 35 years, between 1927 and 1962. The table of contents is as follows:
Dream No More: Fifteen Memorable Tales of Murder, Malice and Mayhem by Philip Macdonald
I. Horror/Weird Stories
His Mother's Eyes 1927
Ten O'Clock 1931
Our Feathered Friends 1931
Private--Keep Out 1949
Solitary Confinement (Hub) 1951
II. Crime StoriesMalice Domestic 1946
The-Wood-for-the-Trees 1946 (Anthony Gethryn) 1947
The-Green-and-Gold String (Dr. Alcazar) 1948
The Go-Between (Harry-the-Hat) 1949
Love Lies Bleeding 1950
Fingers of Fear 1952
The Man out of the Rain 1954
Dream No More 1955
Deed of Mercy 1960
The Ticker Tape 1962
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| Philip Macdonald in the late 1940s around the time he started writing short crime stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine |
The postwar "Private--Keep Out" is an eerie and uncanny Forties sci-fi tale which was highly praised by Isaac Asimov and the original inspiration for the famous Twilight Zone episode "When the Sky Was Opened," while the more obscure "Solitary Confinement" (aka "Hub"), much shorter but similarly dark, sees publication in book form here for the first time.
After World War Two MacDonald began publishing tales in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; all eight of the MacDonald EQMM tales published during the author's lifetime appear here in this volume. The first three of them, the maliciously "cozy" suspenser "Malice Domestic," the sole Anthony Gethryn detective story "The-Wood-for-the-Trees" (another serial killer at work), and "The-Green-and-Gold-String," about mentalist conman Dr. Alcazar, who stumbles onto evidence of a murder with another one impending, were all second-place finishers in the EQMM short story contests.
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| What happened to Tonathal? This answer will surprise you. |
"The Go-Between" is the sole comedic story in the collection, a sort of O. Henryesque locked room problem concerning a vanished Teddy bear, if you can imagine such a thing, while "Fingers of Fear," a tale about a depraved child murderer that originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, is a pioneering police procedural. "The Man out of the Rain" and "Deed of Mercy" are nailbighters about protagonists whom odd people put in dire personal predicaments.
Arguably "Love Lies Bleeding," "The Ticker Tape" and "Dream No More" are the most psychologically incisive and sinister tales of the lot.
"Love Lies Bleeding" concerns the deadly love triangle of two men and a woman. Brush up on your sexual geometry for this one!
"The Ticker Tape" concerns the sexually sadistic slaying on a beach of a "beautiful" adolescent Mexican boy. This one was too frank for the mystery magazines and it appeared originally in the volume Death and Chicanery. It was the last story MacDonald wrote, at age 62, the coda to his writing career.
"Dream No More" concerns a handsome crew-cut, collegiate mama's boy who falls heavily under the sway of his exceedingly charming and charismatic middle-aged male English professor. With this trio of tales in particular, MacDonald presaged the modern crime novel with his unblinkered look at outre sexual situations. They were really ahead of their time, and pretty remarkable for a man who was born when Queen Victoria still reigned over much of the world.
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| Readers of MacDonald's 1955 story "Dream No More" may gets some vibes of gay author Christopher Isherwood's 1962 novel A Single Man. Isherwood lived not far from MacDonald on the California coast and it's possible the two men knew each other. Pictured: Colin Firth and Nicholas Hoult in the 2009 film version of A Single Man. |
I do hope you take a good look at Dream No More; it was a labor of love for me and I think a hugely deserved tribute to one of the great figures in vintage crime fiction. My 6300 word introduction to the volume is packed with more information on MacDonald's writing and his life, about which over the years there have been quite a few errors made in the telling. MacDonald was a rather private, if not secretive, man. During the summer I imagine I will be writing more about MacDonald's personal life and his writing for the screen, big and small.
Congratulations! This looks an intriguing collection.
ReplyDeleteI would NOT have picked MacDonald as a writer with gay themes. If anything, having read The White Crow, I've always thought of him as reactionary, if not quasi-fascist.
The White Crow certainly was not his finest moment in some respects, lol. I reviewed here without trying to spoil it. But even it shows rather a remarkable, ahead of its time interest in rather outre sexual themes. The whole subplot about the vanished male clerk could be appear in a modern crime novel, easily.
DeleteAnd thank you, it really is an interesting volume, well-written. MacDonald's politics are hard to pin down. There's definitely more "liberal" sentiment in these stories. I think he was capable of growth.
DeleteI'll just say some Twenties fascist adjacent writer like "Sapper" could never in a million years have written these stories.
DeleteI own, and admire, all of PMC's mystery and detective stories from the three collections published by Doubleday, Collins, and Jenkins, but I only know one of his horror stories. It will be interesting to read the others, as well as your introduction. Have you learned anything new about PMC's final years? It's certainly strange that he stopped writing 18 years before his death.
ReplyDeleteNo not much about the later ones. He wrote an intro to one of his omnibus volumes in 63 I think, but yeah he stopped fiction and screenwriting, just apparently retired. He was well off and perhaps felt he'd said all he had to say. He lived at the Motion Pictures retirement home in his seventies for some years, even though his wife and daughter were still alive, which seems odd. Didn't have dementia evidently because he was interviewed by Dilys Wynn not too long before he died and was perfectly cogent. His daughter died two years after him and his wife a decade later. Perhaps they became estranged.
DeleteI mostly looked at the question of his Great War service, his film writing career and his affair with his secretary, divorce and eventual marriage to said secretary. He seems to have had very bad feelings about his first wife (there are some very vicious women in his fiction) and very positive feelings about his second wife, at least through the forties and fifties.
Yeah, this collection will largely not be new to the MacDonald super aficionados but I hope it will put him back on the map as a great writer of short crime fiction, because that's what he was.
I included the four weird/horror stories because I thought they were really strong so omitted the four weaker crime stories (the one about the horse only VERY loosely crime and then there's fable in Mongolia, and two kind of weak later Alcazars) because this is a very big collection as is. Then I found Hub which is just a short short but has never been published in a book before. He was a really good weird writer, should have done more of that. Private-Keep Out is one of the best short stories I have read. Our Feathered Friends is horrifying. His Mother's Eyes should be televised someday: a serial killer tale set in a trench in WW1. Brilliant!
DeleteThe introduction you recall was written in 1963 for a collection of three of his novels, Three for Midnight. There, MacDonald recalled Carr's praise for one of his novels included in the volume, Murder Gone Mad.
ReplyDeleteI don't have the introduction Julian Symons wrote for the 1980 reprint of The Maze, but I remember him recounting meeting MacDonald in this retirement home and how Macdonald still cared a lot about his appearance because he had appeared before him all dapper, with a walking stick and slicked-back hair.
Our Feathered Friends, the only horror story by the author I know, is truly impressive. One of those stories you never forget once you've read them.
One thing I remember Symons saying in his interview was that MacDonald seemed to him like a man from another era, as if he were still living in the past.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the library of his retirement home, MacDonald told him, there wasn't a single one of his books!