The Last One Left

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE
, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned
. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of
Strangers
to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that, as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

AT THE SMALL
bon voyage party at the Delmar Bay Yacht Club Kip and Selma had given Howard and Junie Prowt a little brass plaque to affix to one of the bulkheads of the HoJun. It read “Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small!”

Pull off the backing paper and press the gummed back of the plaque to any smooth clean surface.

Out in the middle of the Gulf Stream, at ten o’clock on the bright morning of a windy and cloudless day in May, Howard Prowt, braced on the fly bridge of his thirty-four-foot Owens cruiser, knew the precise corner of the exact drawer where he had stowed the gift, and fought the absurd compulsion to go below and find it and peel it and stick it up.

The stacks and tan cubes of Fort Lauderdale were below the horizon astern. He had plotted his course exactly as he had been taught in the Power Squadron classes, making the proper allowance for the northerly run of the Gulf Stream, and for standard deviation and
compass deviation. He had computed his time of arrival at Bimini on the basis of 2300 rpm on his twin 150’s. They had left Pier 66 at 8:30 and had passed the sea buoy at fourteen minutes before nine. At eleven minutes past noon the HoJun should reach the channel across the bar outside Bimini harbor.

Nobody told you how it would be. How it would feel. That was the trouble. They just said it could get a little dusty out there in the Stream. They didn’t tell you about the strangeness, the alone-ness, the strange blue color and the power of it. There was an indifference about it, a lack of interest in you and your little boat. It changed the way everything looked and felt.

Howard Prowt kept trying to scan the dials, to check oil pressure, temperature, rpm’s—and to check the performance of the automatic pilot against the compass, then would find himself staring, mind empty, braced for the next long lift of the hull, the teeter, the crash that would send water flashing white out to either side of the bow.

It’s a good day to cross, he told himself. They build them for this.

The HoJun had felt massive, ponderous, trustworthy in all the other places he had taken her since accepting delivery last November. She had looked large tied up at their backyard dock on Heron Bayou, sizeable in the yacht club boat basin. He had learned exactly how she would respond in all conditions of wind and tide, priding himself on that gentle touch on the throttles which would ease her so close to a dock that Junie, on the bow, could step ashore with the line and put the loop over a piling. There had been several short cruises, and one long one—up to Stuart and through the lake and down the river to Fort Myers, then down the Gulf Coast to Marathon, and back home through Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay. He had taken her into some ugly chop in the Gulf, and had handled her in a tricky following sea. In his navigation he had always double-checked
his course and had the pleasure of seeing the target markers, after long runs, loom out of the sea mist.

But this was not the same. It made everything else seem like pretend. This was not the same sea they had watched two years ago from the recreation deck of the little Italian cruise ship which had taken them through the Caribbean, as far down as Curaçao.