The Poetry of John D. MacDonald

To my knowledge John D. MacDonald never wrote poetry. These excerpts are prose from A Purple Place For Dying. When I teach poetry I do so from the perspective of defining it by not only asking what is a poem but what can be a poem. These lines from MacDonald's fiction are poetry.

Strange Little Button

By John D. MacDonald

A Purple Place for Dying

Strange little button

Comforted by being held

Great reservoirs of affection

Both of these are very Haiku-ish or minimalist poems. This one doesn’t work perfectly, but the next one works better.

A Man’s Room

By John D. MacDonald

A Purple Place for Dying

A man’s room

Leather and wood

Stone and books and bar

Cluttered desk

Gun rack

Logs chuckling comfortably

In a big deep fireplace

John D. MacDonald wrote 78 books and nearly 500 short stories. He was productive but he was no Edward D. Hoch or Hugh B. Cave--lol. He is mostly known for his Travis McGee series the titles of which all contain a color. His most popularly adapted book was The Executioners, which was retitled Cape Fear both times it was filmed.

In my opinion he belongs to the top ten most important detective/crime writers. I usually consider Hammett, Chandler and Spillane the best and most important and in that order, followed by Parker, probably Sjowall and Wahloo in no particular order and some others I am forgetting , including the three Mac/McDonalds--Ross Macdonald, creator of the Lew Archer series; Gregory McDonald, creator of the Fletch series; and our present guest John D. MacDonald--my apologies to any mistyped "mac's" or "mc's" and also not in order.

Incidentally, I oftentimes mark up a book sometimes when I find something that reads like poetry. I'll have to dig up some more, but the only other lines I have discovered are some nicely metered lines from Mickey Spillane and Fredric Brown, the latter of which might be in the top fifteen for crime/detective writers. As a matter of fact I have a work in progress, a poem called "Pardon My Ghoulish Laughter," which is the title of a collection of Brown's short stories and might be a title of one of the short stories.