Travis McGee in A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald: Gold Medal First Printing, 1964; Ronnie Lesser Cover Art

As a wee McGee bonus post in the wake of those Pan paperback editions of John D. MacDonald's first two Travis McGee mystery novels – The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink – I thought I'd show you another McGee I stumbled upon only very recently:

A Purple Place for Dying, the third of MacDonald's twenty-one books starring retriever of lost (or stolen) stuff, Travis McGee. This copy is the original 1964 Fawcett/Gold Medal paperback edition, which I found in the basement of a Cecil Court secondhand bookshop during a recent sojourn to London, and managed to secure for a hell of a lot less than it's probably worth. Because you see, it's the first printing as well as the first edition, as evidenced by the 40 cent cover price and the presence on the copyright page of the Gold Medal serial number #K1417 (without two dots, which would indicate a second printing):

Considering the Gold Medal edition went through something like twenty-five printings over the next twenty years, to chance across a genuine first printing in a British secondhand bookshop was quite something.

Remarkably, The Deep Blue Good-by (to give it its US title), Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying and the next McGee, The Quick Red Fox, were all published by Gold Medal in 1964, with the first three appearing at the rate of one a month. All four – and a handful of later McGees – boast rather lovely cover art by Ronnie Lesser, further examples of whose work can be found on Pulp Covers. And while we're linking, might I direct you to John D. MacDonald Covers, the mission statement of which is: "To create a comprehensive collection of John D. MacDonald bookcovers in one place for the use of collectors, readers, or compulsive completists (you know who you are)." An admirable aim, and yes: we do indeed know who we are.

And I'm staying with Gold Medal for the final paperback post of the year (there'll be further paperbacks next year, but I have the traditional Existential Ennui end-of-year round-up posts to deal with before then), on two early '60s spy novels...

Travis McGee in The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald (Pan Paperbacks, 1968)

NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker. Featured as part of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

Next in this series of posts on vintage softcovers, a pair of paperbacks I was basically badgered into buying by one of the regular commenters on Existential Ennui and The Violent World of Parker (where I'm co-blogger) – which is why I'm posting them over there as well as here (that and the fact that there's a certain amount of fan crossover between these books and Donald E. "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels):

The first British paperback editions of John D. MacDonald's The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink, both published by Pan in 1968 (and both originally published in the US by Fawcett/Gold Medal in 1964, the former as The Deep Blue Good-by), with cover artwork by Sam Peffer – among the last covers that the prolific Pan artist must have created for that publisher (I believe he left Pan in 1967). They are, respectively, books one and two in MacDonald's twenty-one book crime fiction series starring finder of lost fings, Travis McGee, a series that EE and TVWoP regular David Plante reckoned I would find rewarding.

Now, I have tried a John D. MacDonald novel before – The Only Girl in the Game, which I liked a lot – but I'd never read any McGee. But given that Kingsley Amis was an admirer of MacDonald's, and I am, in turn, an admirer of Amis's; and that another writer I love, Elmore Leonard, put it on record that MacDonald was "the best first-person writer I've ever read", adding, "Travis McGee's 'I' was never intrusive"; and that David bloody Plante clearly wasn't going to give it a bloody rest or give me a moment's bloody peace until I relented and cracked the spine of a bloody McGee (figuratively speaking – because as we all know, cracking the spines of books – even ones already bloodied – is WRONG), there was nothing else for it but to dive in.

Of course, that begged the question: which editions of the early McGee novels (I'm not worrying about the later ones just yet) to begin collecting? The original Gold Medal paperbacks would be the obvious choice; not so easy to come by for someone living in the UK, but not impossible. In truth, though, those are in relatively plentiful supply if one can be arsed to order online from the States – and anyway, when have I ever plumped for the obvious choice? That left, to my mind, two options: the British hardback editions of the novels, published by Robert Hale in the 1960s and '70s, which, with their miniscule print runs and beautiful Barbara Walton dust jackets, are prohibitively expensive these days, running into the hundreds if not thousands of pounds per book; or the British paperback editions, issued by Pan, which, when you can find them (and I found these two copies online and on a table outside a secondhand bookshop in Brighton), are fairly cheap. Naturally, skinflint that I am, I opted for the Pan paperbacks.

And I'm pleased to report that David was perfectly justified in his persistent pestering, because The Deep Blue Goodbye at least – I haven't made it as far as Nightmare in Pink yet – is terrific: tough, but also surprisingly tender, especially once Travis McGee, who's been hired to trace a twisted sort named Junior Allen and recover the loot Allen stole, visits Allen's former mistress and, finding her in a dreadful state, casts aside his affected nonchalance and decides to stay and nurse her back to health. In his essay "A New James Bond", Kingsley Amis noted that MacDonald "is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?", but on the evidence of The Deep Blue Goodbye – and indeed The Only Girl in the Game – I'd say that MacDonald could do "human-heart" as well as anyone – and he was no slouch at the thrills either, as demonstrated by a gripping and violent final encounter at sea.

Pan had largely switched to photographic covers by the late 1960s, and while the first Pan printings of The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink could boast Sam Peffer cover art, subsequent printings, and subsequent McGees, sported photographic designs. So, having started collecting the Pan paperbacks, I'm not sure I'll stick with them... and serendipitously, just the other day I chanced across a different edition of the next book in the series, A Purple Place for Dying...

The Only Girl in the Game by John D. MacDonald (Pan Paperback)

Aaaaand the connection between Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald is... their surname. Yeah, OK, it's a bit lame, but there is more to it than that. First, though, there's this:

The 1967 UK Pan paperback (first thus) of John D. MacDonald's The Only Girl in the Game, originally published in the States by Gold Medal in 1960 and in the UK (in a now-very valuable hardback, natch) by Robert Hale in 1962. As with the book featured in the previous post, I bought this at the recent London Pulp and Paperback Fair. I've never read any MacDonald, but the cover caught my eye, and the Las Vegas setting intrigued me, and it was cheap, and I knew I wanted to read something of MacDonald's at some point, but didn't want to get sucked into another series – in MacDonald's case the Travis McGee novels. So I grabbed this.

And as it turns out, it looks as if it's going to be a splendid introduction to MacDonald's writing. The excellent blog Mystery File has a terrific post on MacDonald, focusing on, as luck would have it, The Only Girl in the Game. Follow that link and give it a read, and I'll meet you back here when you're done.

Finished? Good, wasn't it? Plus, it saves you the horror of having to read one of my dreadful sight-unseen plot summaries, not to mention me the chore of having to write one. Anyway, back to that Macdonald / MacDonald connection. Aside from the similar surnames – Ross Macdonald's being invented, of course – the two Macs were also contemporaries. And both being creators of a series of first-person novels starring a private investigator – Macdonald's Lew Archer and MacDonald's aforementioned Travis McGee – you'd think they might have had much in common, maybe even have been friends, or at least associates. Not so. A 1976 Roger Ebert interview with John D. MacDonald recently surfaced online, and towards the end of that, Ebert raises the question of the similarity between the two writers' names. MacDonald points out that Ross Macdonald's then-latest book, The Blue Hammer, sported the kind of title that John D. might've picked for one of his own famously colour-themed Travis McGee titles. He then goes on to say:

"I wrote him... I said, 'no doubt this is innocence on your part, but people are going to think it's meretricious.' He didn't reply. I must confess I feel a little irritated by that."

Not a lot of love lost there, then. As for the cover of this Pan edition of The Only Girl in the Game, I can't tell you for sure who was responsible for that snazzy photo-montage, but it's possible David Larkin had a hand in it, as I think by this point he'd taken over as Pan's art director, moving the imprint's covers in a more photographic direction. As ever, if you want to know more about Pan Books, head over to the Pan Paperback Collectors Website, where you'll find a near-complete Pan bibliography and accompanying covers.