This Gold Medal edition of John D. MacDonald’s 1960 novel Slam the Big Door has awesome Charles Binger cover art that simply demanded a purchase. Plus, MacDonalds are cheap. It’s easy to set yourself a ten dollar ceiling and still be able to buy most any novel he wrote. The book is a Florida real estate drama about a guy named Troy Jamison who’s in over his head in a land development scheme, but receives a visit from old friend Mike Rodenska, who may have the means to help. There’s a group of men in town counting on the deal falling through, and the possibility that Rodenska may blow up the conspiracy sends this cabal into action. Jamison is an easy taget not only because he’s broke, but because he’s unstable.
We gather that this is a less popular MacDonald. If so we can see why. There isn’t much physical action. There aren’t really any by-the-book criminals in the story. The plot is unusually psychological in nature. By psychological, consider as an example that one of MacDonald’s go-to devices is the character that needs to be shaken from their stupor or arrogance. To that end, Rodenska isn’t very nice to Jamison, yet Jamison turns out to be grateful for the mistreatment: Thanks for waking me up, ole buddy! MacDonald really flogged this idea, especially in his Travis McGee series. We find it off-putting because he tended to use the device on women: You made me furious and I cried all night, but then I realized you did it on purpose and I needed it.
He also indulges in some of his usual social judgements. For example, he channels this tidbit through a minor character: “Not as messed up, honey, as the [sixteen-to-twenty year-old] group, the children of these people. Charge accounts, club memberships, no obligation to go get an education. They knock themselves off on the highways with miraculous efficiency, and the drama of mourning is intense but short, because when you’ve ceased feeling very much of anything else except the sensations of self-gratification, it’s tough to summon up legitimate grief.”
Geez, superior much? Aging can mix toxically with cultural change if you let it, and as MacDonald aged, hell-in-a-handbasket ravings came increasingly to fore of his fiction. It’s interesting that the very people he wrote about scathingly are now lodging similar complaints. Don’t get us wrong—an ironclad argument exists that the U.S. is getting worse, but not because of self gratifying slackers. Motivated, educated, ambitious, connected people are the ones who sent the jobs away, cut healthcare, stole pensions, and built a carceral state. But misdirected complaints are part of the package with MacDonald. In the end the book was fine. At this stage, he was not capable of failing to deliver a quality outing. Or as they say in baseball: aces gonna ace.
