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RARA-AVIS: Ross vs. John D.
To say that John D. MacDonald was a hack creates more problems than it
solves; to compare him to Ross Macdonald is unfair to both men, who could
hardly be more different as writers.
While obviously John D. was no Dostoyevsky, and while he can be safely
described as a writing machine,his enormous output contains many gems.
These are gems in the pulp tradition, and even the best of them could
have benefited from more careful writing - but John D.'s ability to
spin a yarn was uncanny, and we keep reading even through semi- or
totally sloppy patches.
Sloppiness is the last thing one could bring up about Ross Macdonald;
his novels and short stories are perfectly finished and beautifully
proportioned (the repetitiveness of the plots never bothered me;
Bergman and Bunuel made the same movie over and over, to great
acclaim...) If classicism in style is the thing, he has few rivals
in the mystery field, before or after him - among current mystery
writers, only Greenleaf and Lyons achieve that kind of perfection in
the private-eye field. On the other hand, Ross could not have written
the pulpy, spontaneous tales that made John D. famous (and rich).
If one denies John D. a place in the pantheon, one is implicitly
condemning pulpsters for not being polished, a criticism that
has something circular in it and is ironic to boot.
Incidentally, Raymond Chandler liked John D. a lot and strongly disliked
Ross. Go figure.
Regards,
Mario Taboada
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