Sometimes people can’t see the forest for the trees. John D. MacDonald is a good example. He created his first series (admittedly a short series) character in 1950. Considering the multitude of stories he had written even before 1950, that is remarkable. One of the crutches to being a Pulp writer is to create series characters. There is a reason why there are so many Thubway Tham or Doc Swap tales. The writer could work faster writing new stories because he didn’t have to start from scratch each time. John D. to his credit did not do this. And largely because of this, much of his older material is quite readable today. Two collections of these stories can be found in The Good Old Stuff (1982) and More Good Old Stuff (1984).
Just a little side note here: when these books were published in hard cover they bore the most un-Pulp covers ever, one solid color with type, as if to deny their very heritage. A book of this type today would be smothered in old Black Mask, Detective Tales and Doc Savage pulp images. (Think of Otto Penzler’s Black Lizard’s Big Book of Pulp Stories). But back in 1982 this would have meant the wrong people would have bought the book. The wrong people being “not John D. MacDonald fans”. Today I like to think things are better, with more people acknowledging Pulp’s flashy but vibrant history.
Anyway, let’s get back to Park Falkner, the hero of our two story series. These were “Breathe No More, My Lovely” (Detective Tales, May 1950) and “The Lady is a Corpse” (Detective Tales, September 1950). Park is an eccentric millionaire who has inherited his money and suffers from boredom. Due to a strange tropical disease he is completely hairless, bald, no eye lashes, usually dressed in a sarong. This strange looking man has bought Grouper Island (sometimes called Falkner Island) and invites visitors out to enjoy the beach, play badminton and generally party. The guests are specially chosen, each having some dark secret or part in an affair. Falkner, along with his permanent guest Taffy Angus, stirs things up until something — happens. In the Chandleresque titled “Breathe No More, My Lovely” this means Carl Brannock murders a sleeping woman on the beach by suffocating her with a pile of sand. It’s a shocking and brutal way to start a story. As the tale goes on we learn about Park and we see how he solves the woman’s murder and defeats the villain. As a one-off, the story would have been notable but only one of many.
“The Lady is a Corpse” is where things get interesting. Having set up Park and his island, John D. now has to find his way through writing a sequel. The result reminds me of Michael Crichton’s only SF sequel The Lost World (1995), reluctant and not as much fun as the first ride. This time Park invites four men to the island, suspecting one is a psychotic murderer of a beautiful young woman. He hires two models to act as his agents to break up the foursome. Park’s intent and procedures are more blatant this time around, and you can feel MacDonald chaffing at the bit. When the fiancé of the dead girl is poisoned in a fake suicide, it becomes too much for Taffy Angus. She tells Park she is leaving him. She can’t deal with his playing God. (You can hear John D. in her voice, and when Taffy renigs at the end, John D. doesn’t.)
Now to get back to those trees. All the articles I have seen on Park Falkner have focused on how he is a dry run for John D. MacDonald’s most famous character, Travis McGee. There seems to be some disagreement about this. Some critics feel he is, and others see him as too dissimilar. I say, who care? Because you’ve miss the really important things. Park Falkner is John D.’s version of Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar. Taffy is Patricia Holm. But being John D. MacDonald and not Leslie Charteris, Park is not the light and bubbly Happy Highwayman, but a morose and largely unlikable character, behaving in many ways like the murderer from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Only his desire to do justice, not vengeance, redeems him.
John D. MacdDonald loved writing about characters more than anything else. This is one of things that makes his Science Fiction so much different than what others were doing during that time. He wrote forty SF tales including the novel Wine of Dreamers (1951). And I suspect why he ultimately moved away from the genre, finding it too “idea oriented” and not character driven enough. His love of character also made him a natural for anthology television, with shows like Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Lights Out and Climax! So here’s the real kicker: focused on Travis McGee, nobody seems to have noticed that John D. MacDonald invented one of the biggest character anthology shows ever, Fantasy Island (1977-1984). Park Falkner, like Mr. Roarke, hosts the guests with a desire to solve their innate problems or mysteries. Park has a cast of regulars that help him, though no one exactly like Tattoo. Aaron Spelling claims the idea for the show was suggested as a joke, a magical island where sexual fantasies come true.
This may be the case, as Fantasy Island always had a supernatural aspect to it. Was John D. lurking somewhere in Spelling’s memory? Perhaps the two men just thought along similar lines, as John D.’s Condominium (1977), the 1980 TV version anyway, sounds a lot like The Love Boat (1977-1987) with an Irwin Allen hurricane thrown in. Spelling has witnesses to the birth of Fantasy Island, Leonard Goldberg, his partner and Brandon Stoddard, the head of ABC at the time. Still, a tough guy like John D. could have sweated the truth out of them, using a rubber hose, while drinking a quart of scotch and smoking a million cigarettes… now, maybe I’m reading too many of MacDonald’s old Pulp stories. They are fun and better than most.