A Man of Affairs by John D MacDonald

MacDonald was once a well-known writer of hard-boiled crime novels. He was probably the best known of such writers in the 1950s and 1960s, and had a string of bestsellers with his series hero Travis McGee.

In the 1950s he was making his reputation. Such books didn’t often make the bestseller lists. The stories were published in the pulps and the novels as Fawcett Gold Crest paperbacks.

Many of those novels were not really crime novels, just brutal slice of life pieces. He had a jaundiced view of postwar America.

A Man of Affairs is interesting because it’s the story of a corporate raider, Mike Dean, who’s like Gordon Gecko’s father, but in a time when buying up corporations to either break them up or re-mold them was supposedly virtually unknown. Yet MacDonald was writing about such a fictional company and raider nearly sixty years ago.

The hero is Sam Glidden, one of the corporate executives, having been the protege of the man who pushed it into the modern era, from being an old-fashioned family business. He was born on the rougher side of town, but the patriarch liked him and promoted him. But when the patriarch died, those left behind discovered that the old man had let the business slide. It couldn’t afford the general dividends it’d been paying. It needed to modernize to meet the demands of the current marketplace.

So Sam Glidden is running hard to put the company back on a solid footing. But he gets little support from a girl he was once attracted to in high school – the patriarch’s daughter, and her alcoholic cheating husband and her war hero brother who’s stopped trying to live productively.

They’re the company’s major stockholders, and are easy targets for Mike Dean’s manipulative offers. But Glidden gets himself invited to a house party on an island in the Caribbean so he can try to botch the settlement.

Here MacDonald writes well of the people and events, transmitting a solid sense of the violent potential below the sunshine and bright blue water surface. Glidden is unusual for a MacDonald character in that he does bed the pretty writer for Dean’s public relations agency, though it’s not surprising when they later decide they’re in love. MacDonald is nothing if not sexually moralistic.

Death does come, as we knew it was going to, although it’s something of a surprise. The perpetrators are symbolic rather than actual people. The worthless alcoholic husband is killed by an actual barracuda before the business barracuda can impoverish the couple. Mike Dean himself dies of a heart attack – not surprising given he has no heart.

So all ends well, thanks to the hand of God, which MacDonald knows is not normally a satisfying way to end a novel, so he must have been making a point. Perhaps it’s that the schemes of such manipulators will always backfire, eventually.

A Man of Affairs by John D MacDonald