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 much a 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 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. Although in the mid-Thirties he 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, aka Fingers of Fear, 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 and one specifically for the 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, published by MacDonald between 1927 and 1960. The table of contents is as follows:
Dream No More: Fifteen Memorable Tales of Murder, Malice and Mayhem by Philip Macdonald
Horror/Weird
His Mother's Eyes 1927
Ten O'Clock 1931
Our Feathered Friends 1931
Private--Keep Out 1949
Solitary Confinement (Hub) 1951
Crime
Malice 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
 |
| Philip Macdonald in the late 1940s around the time he started writing short crime stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine |
"His Mother's Eyes," set in a muddy trench in Mesopotamia during World War One, is MacDonald's original serial killer tale (why has this never been televised), "Ten O'Clock" is a weird tale originally anthologized by Dashiell Hammett, and "Our Feathered Friends," which anticipated a certain famous avian tale by Daphne Du Maurier, was originally anthologized by Lady Cynthia Asquith.
The postwar "Private--Keep Out" is an eerie and uncanny 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") 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 "cozy" suspenser "Malice Domestic," the sole Anthony Gethryn detective story "The-Wood-for-the-Trees," and "The-Green-and-Gold-String," about mentalist conman Dr. Alcazar, were all second-place finishers in the EQMM short story contests.
 |
| What happened to Tonathal? |
"The Go-Between" is the sole comedic story in the collection, a sort of locked room problem concerning a vanished Teddy bear, while "Fingers of Fear," a tale about a depraved child murderer, is a pioneering police procedural. "The Man out of the Rain" and "Deed of Mercy" are nailbighters about protagonists put in dire personal predicaments.
Arguably "Love Lies Bleeding," "The Ticker Tape" and "Dream No More" are the most psychologically incisive and sinister of the lot. "Love Lies Bleeding" concerns the deadly love triangle of two men and a woman (brush up on your geometry for this one); "The Ticker Tape" concerns the sexually sadistic slaying on a beach of an adolescent Mexican boy (this one was too frank for the mystery magazines); and "Dream No More" concerns a handsome crew-cut, collegiate mama's boy who falls heavily under the sway of his charismatic male English professor. With this trio of tales in particular, MacDonald presaged the modern crime novel with his unblinkered look at outre sexual situations.
 |
| 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 did not live far from MacDonald on the California coast. |
I do hope you take a 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 6200 word introduction to the volume is packed with more information on MacDonald's writing and his life, about which there have been quite a few errors made in the telling. During the summer I imagine I will be writing more about MacDonald's personal life and his writing for the screen, big and small.
No comments:
Post a Comment