I'm in a bit of a minor quandary with myself this month. I have an on-deck shelf that is mostly filled with authors whom I like and whose books I was quite excited to find (John D. MacDonald's non Travis McGee's, Charlotte Armstrong, James Hadley Chase, William Haggard). However, since I have read books by each of them already this year, I want to save and savour these waiting books over time. This desire conflicts directly with my obsessive need to clear out my on-deck shelf. I had made a temporary solution by deciding this year to read a single series or author of a big fantasy or science fiction book in order and live with the on-deck shelf not going down much. That author was to be Robin Hobb and my plan was nicely confirmed by how much I enjoyed the first book in the Farseer trilogy, Assassin's Apprentice. Unfortunately, it all came undone with my order of the second and third books in the trilogy which won't arrive here until May, assuming all goes well! So now I am stuck back facing my on deck shelf. I have decided to take this opportunity to narrow down what I have in the next few weeks. There are a few books by authors other than the ones mentioned above, but I thought I would go with this John D. MacDonald as it is his first book and I suspected would be quite different from the books where he had really found his voice.
It is a great setup. Cliff is an agent of an insurance company, an ex-cop whose rigorous honesty got him kicked off the force in Florence City, a nice little resort town in Florida. A wealthy old New England socialite gets bumped off in her winter hotel suite, her jewels stolen. Because Cliff has some underworld connections and has done dropoffs before, he gets the job to try and reach out to the thieves and do a payoff from the insurance company to get the jewels back. This has often worked with past thefts. The company still takes a loss, but nowhere near what they would have to pay to replace the jewels to the insured. In this case, however, because of the murder and the damage it does to the reputation as a safe town where the rich can spend their winter months, the cops are all over it and they already hate Cliff. They won't let him do the payoff because they want to catch the murderers too badly. To make things worse, Cliff starts to fall for the socialite's niece, who may be involved.
It's a great ride, nicely paced with lots of action. It's much more wild than you usually get with JDM (at one point, he chases down thugs in a car). The social theorizing is peppered in only sparsely, which makes it more enjoyable. It's a light touch as opposed to the sometimes heavy moralizing that can wear you down a bit with JDM. The sexual politics are as weird as ever, abhorrent at one point near the end where a woman gets slapped to have some sense put in her about marrying the dude who slapped her. Again, though, they are mostly in the action and the subtext rather than JDM telling us directly his bizarre theories on women and gender, so they don't bog the book down. There are two actual sex scenes as well, one which is quite effective in a steaming hot Florida apartment in a sudden thunderstorm and one which is so bad and weirdly written that I had to take a picture of it. You can see the text below, whose climax is "twin convexities of alive plum-tautness" to describe the woman's buttocks.
Despite my weariness with JDM, which I think is overly emphasized in my review here, the guy really can create a rich and gripping situation and setting. The town is so well portrayed, the various locations, the shitty corrupt cops (whose brutality is as nasty as ever), the syndicate run high-end club, not just physically but in how it all works. He also weaves a realistic and interesting portrayal of how jewel thieves and the payoffs work. I don't know where he got all this stuff from, but it is convincing and absorbing. The title is a nice touch. A cupcake, according the Cliff, is the term for little special things you get in jail in some prisons in the south, like cigarettes or a pint bottle of something, things that can also be taken away. The brass cupcake is how he comes to see his badge, which he had thought sparkled with gold when it was first pinned on him.
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