The Good Old Stuff

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Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

For millions of readers John D. MacDonald is the consummate storyteller of our time, a writer who, with his energetic prose, his vivid sense of character, his all but miraculous skill at describing every sort of person and setting and event with economy, elegance, and total credibility, makes us turn and turn his pages with our minds in awe and our hearts hovering around our Adam’s apple. The thirteen stories in this collection demonstrate how fantastically good his best work was at the start of his career.

MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on July 24, 1916. His father was a strong-willed workaholic who rose Horatio Alger-like from humble origins to become a top executive at a firearms company in Utica, New York. A near-fatal attack of mastoiditis and scarlet fever at age twelve confined young MacDonald to bed for a year, and lack of anything else to do in those days before radio and TV virtually forced him to read or have his mother read to him, huge quantities of books. As soon as he was back on his feet, he began haunting the public library, compulsively devouring every book on the shelves.

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