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Jonathan Yardley revisits author John D. McDonald in the Washington Post (there may be a few questionnaire questions at the Post website--just lie). McDonald's most famous book is probably The Executioners, filmed twice as Cape Fear. I would say he's a brilliant writer but not a good writer. He could produce some stinker lines, sometimes in the same paragraph with the most cutting social observations. Even some of the sentences Yardley quotes are kind of overdone (the Meyer excerpt is first rate, though). I recently reread McDonald's two science fiction novels from the 1950s, and found Wine of the Dreamers dated but Ballroom of the Skies unbeatable. A conspiracy of alien telepaths keeps Earth in a constant state of war and economic strife to produce "Earthlings," titanium-tough administrators who prevent a decadent galactic civilization from declining further. I believe it's all true and the telepaths heavily influenced the 2000 Presidential election (Bush being not the Earthling but a catalyst for war).
Here's a sample McDonald passage, from Pale Gray for Guilt, a Travis McGee book from '68. Readers are invited to put more choice quotes in the comments to this post.
It had been a fine hot lazy summer, a drifting time of good fish, old friends, new girls, of talk and laughter.Cold beer, good music and a place to go.
That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happymeter, so every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope. When it happens so often, wouldn't you think I'd be more ready for it?
Excellent Mike Davis piece connecting the marauding, raping protagonists of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with the recently revealed Tiger Force atrocities no on is talking about (from the Vietnam era), and by implication, atrocities we may yet discover if the Government keeps pouring on the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. Good question he raises: How the fzck is Bob Kerrey still president of the New School after it came out that his unit was a bunch of throat slashers in Vietnam? That was then, this is now, right.