A Sprig of Laurel: Philip MacDonald, Some Preliminary Biography and Bibliography

Phillip MacDonald (1900-1980)
in his early thirties at the time of his
height of popularity as a crime writer

British novelist and screenwriter Philip MacDonald (1900-1980) was once of the most famous crime writers extant, but today he seems something of a forgotten man. Some of his books actually remained in print into the 1980s, after his death at age eighty in 1980, and for many decades at least five of them were deemed classics by vintage mystery aficionados: his debut mystery The Rasp (1924) and the crime novels Murder Gone Mad (1931), X v. Rex (1933), Warrant for X (1938) and The List of Adrian Messenger (1959), several of which were pioneering serial killer novels.  

Part of the reason for MacDonald's comparative obscurity is due, surely, to the fact that he did little to publicize himself personally.  

When he died in 1980 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, his obit in the Los Angeles Times was pitifully short, neglecting even to mention his crime writing career, describing him as a "veteran motion picture screenwriter" and "playwright in his native Scotland."  Prior to coming to California he was born and and lived in London and as far as I can tell did not write a play.  There are many other recorded details about his life that are in error as well, I have found.  

one of the many reprint editions  
of The Rasp

Several of MacDonald's titles had been reprinted by Avon and the Collins Crime Club in the 1970s and Dover Press reprinted The Rasp in 1979.  Vintage Books would reprint another round of his titles in the early 1980s after his death.  Carroll & Graf would reprint The Rasp in 1984.  When I started reading mysteries as a young man MacDonald was one of the authors I used to look for in used bookstores, where something by him usually could readily be found.  

One senses that MacDonald himself had something of an aversion to being known as a mystery writer.  After publishing The Rasp, which introduced the author's future series sleuth Colonel Anthony Gethryn, in 1924, when he was only 23 years old, MacDonald did not publish another Gethryn saga for four years, despite the acclaim that The Rasp had won acclaim from reviewers.  

MacDonald married the following year and the couple had a daughter in 1926, additional facts the recorded history omits to mention.  Unfortunately the marriage would founder in the 1930s.  

Also in 1927 MacDonald published a very successful war thriller novel Patrol, in it allegedly drawing partly on his own combat experiences.  It is said that he served in "all the campaigns in Mesopotamia for three years during the World War," but if he did he must have lied about his age, because he turned eighteen less than a week before the armistice was signed.  I know teenagers of the day lied about their ages to serve in the war (one was supposed to be nineteen to serve overseas), but it seems a bit much to believe that MacDonald got away with serving in combat at the age of fourteen or fifteen.  If he did, that is some story in itself!

One of the few facts that ever was consistently reported about MacDonald was that he was a grandson of Scottish minister and noted fantasy fiction author George MacDonald (1824-1905), who must have been a remarkably charismatic person indeed, judging from his rather mesmeric, Rasputin-like photos.  In contrast with the great big bushy beard of his Victorian grandfather, who died in 1905 when he, Philip, was shy of five years of age, Philip sported only a fashionably clipped moustache.  Oddly when Philip died in 1980, it was on the same date, December 10, that George had been born in 1825.  

not the mystic Rasputin
but the minister George MacDonald

George MacDonald's most renowned grandson published a second Gethryn mystery, The White Crow, in 1928, but he did not open the crime fiction spigot until 1930.  Then he kept it flowing at an impressive rate for the next four years. Between 1930 and 1933 MacDonald published 14 mystery novels, eight of them with Gethryn and three of them under the pen name Martin Porlock.  These were successful and highly publicized works in both the United States and the United Kingdom.  Then there was a gap before a single Gethryn mystery, The Nursemaid who Disappeared, aka Warrant for X, appeared in 1938.

What else was going with the author in the Thirties?  Well, it is said that MacDonald moved out to Hollywood to write screenplays in 1931, but I query this.  

The author's first wife seems to have been living with their daughter in London in Earl's Court in 1934, but both mother and child traveled by ship from London to Los Angeles that year.  Was MacDonald living in LA alone for three years, or did he maintain a transatlantic existence, or was he simply in London for most of that time?  I think Macdonald probably did not actually relocate to LA until 1932/33 (not that long after Edgar Wallace went there to work on the script for King Kong and ended  up dying there), and his wife and daughter followed him out there in 1934.

Both grandfather and and son were tellers
of tales with lively imaginations.  
George had eleven children; Philip just one.

Between 1929 and 1931, MacDonald was involved as a screenwriter with seven ENGLISH films.  The first of these was Lost Patrol, a silent adaptation of MacDonald's novel Patrol.  Then there came Raise the Roof, the first British musical (a talkie obviously).  Then there came five films helmed by noted director Michael Powell (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, etc.).  The first two of these, Rynox and The Rasp, were co-written with Powell and crime writer Jefferson Farjeon (who himself had a famous grandfather) and adapted from Macdonald mysteries.  

There in fact appears to be no connection between MacDonald and Hollywood until 1933/4, when director John Ford made his own film version of Patrol, called The Lost Patrol.  Made around the same time was The Mystery of Mr. X, which obviously was an adaptation of MacDonald's X v. Rex, and Menace, adapted from MacDonald's novel RIP.  MacDonald also worked at the time on three other screenplays, including the series mystery Charlie Chan in London.  He stayed a busy fella in the Thirties!

In the early 1930s
MacDonald left England and made
a name for himself in Hollywood

I don't believe it's any coincidence that MacDonald's American screenwriting credits start in 1934, nor do I think it's incidental that the author's crime fiction career suddenly comes to a screeching halt, for four full years, at the end of 1933.  For what it is worth, his paltry 1980 LA Times obit states that he began his screenwriting career in 1933.  

Moreover, a 1933 newspaper publicity article (one of the rare ones) about Macdonald posted from Hollywood certainly makes it sounds as if the author is a newcomer to LA.  Ironically the main theme of the piece is how Macdonald hates publicity: "A comfortable apartment, a pipe and a can of shag is more to his style."  How English!

Some time between 1934 and 1943, MacDonald and his first wife divorced, for he married again in 1943.  (She remarried too.)  Their daughter married in California in 1947.  The two women were still alive in 1980, when MacDonald died, but sadly he seems to have been estranged from them.  No mention of them, or of his first wife, or even of his grandfather is made in his obituary.    

Ellery Queen, or more precisely Fred Dannay, seems to have cajoled MacDonald back to mystery fiction again in 1946, when he published MacDonald's "Malice Domestic" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1946.  A Gethryn story, "The-Wood-for-the-Trees," would follow the next year.  A suspense novel, The Dark Wheel, which MacDonald co-wrote with a friend, appeared in 1948, making it the author's first novel in a decade.  

a much lauded crime writer in both the US and UK

Four years later in 1952 MacDonald published his first crime story collection, Something To Hide (Fingers of Fear in the UK), which was awarded the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for best short fiction in 1953.  Three years after that MacDonald published a second short story collection, The Man out of the Rain, and a suspense novel, Guest in the House.  "Dream No More," one of the stories from the second collection, won a short fiction Edgar as well in 1956.  

Gethryn returned in the final, much-lauded MacDonald novel, The List of Adrian Messenger, in 1959 (it was nominated for an Edgar for best novel, though it did not win); and a final fanciful short fiction collection, Death and Chicanery, appeared in 1962.  I'll be back soon to post on some of MacDonald's short fiction, providing some more details about his life as well.

I am pleased to say that I will be involved in the upcoming months with reprinting some of his work.