The New Black Mask (No 8)

Начало книги

John D. MacDonald was born in Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, and Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He served six years in the army in World War II. He is married and has one son and five grandchildren residing in New Zealand. Since he began writing in 1946 and has published seventy-five books and over six hundred short stories, novelettes, and articles. His work has been translated into sixteen languages, and his books have sold over ninety million copies worldwide.

NBM: You began your writing career producing stories for the pulps, a large writers’ market that no longer exists. How important was your pulp-writing apprenticeship, and how has the demise of the pulps affected genre fiction — especially the mystery?

MacDonald: I began my career writing stories for the pulp magazines as well as the so-called slicks, in the first years — 1946 to 1950 — I had stories published in American Magazine, Argosy, Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Story Magazine, Liberty, This Week, and the Toronto Star Weekly, in addition to a wide range of pulp magazines. I do not think that the demise of the pulps has affected the quality of today’s fiction writing as much as has the demise of those slick-paper magazines, which used so many pieces of fiction each year. In the case of The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Liberty alone, a market for seven hundred pieces of fiction a year at quite good rates disappeared seemingly overnight. Thus in the general field of the novel, in all categories, some very clumsy work is being published. There is no training area. The university courses lean so heavily on subjectivity that the prose becomes muddy and pretentious.

Читать дальше →