Robert Mitchum and John D MacDonald

The Executioners, Cape Fear, and Bright Orange for the Shroud

(these books deal with rough material, nothing graphic but a lot of implied sexual violence)

There’s a certain type of villain John D MacDonald wrote better than anyone. A swaggering, swampy good ole boy sexual predator, cunning enough to flaunt society’s rules, handsome enough to lure in victims, emotionally vacant at heart. A homme fatale, you could say.

Max Cady in The Executioners (filmed twice as Cape Fear) is the most famous example. It’s hard to think of a passage more blood-chilling than Cady’s speech to Sam Bowden, the man Cady blames for his recent incarceration.

Without being graphic or delicate, Cady talks about getting out of prison and finding his wife remarried. About abducting her for weeks, and before setting her free, making her send her new husband a letter explaining that the trip was her idea. It’s a sickening act that acknowledges society’s bias around consent and victim-blaming, and uses that to do further harm. You and I know rape culture exists, Cady implies. Watch me exploit that to get at you.

In the first adaptation, directed by J Lee Thompson, Robert Mitchum delivers that speech with a laconic, icy glee. Gregory Peck’s response seems wooden to me, but maybe that’s the point: what could he say to that? Cady has figured the angles.

That type of character shows up later in MacDonald’s Travis McGee series: Junior Allen in The Deep Blue Good-by, and especially Boone Waxwell in Bright Orange for the Shroud, which I think is JDM’s most terrifying novel.

Waxwell seems to core out the people he comes in contact with. The local connection in a real estate swindle, his victims include the wife of the man he bankrupts, a fifteen year-old high school student, and a country club tennis player whose husband was in on the scam. Waxwell knows the Florida swamps and has an extended family in the area. He’s beyond the reach by the law. His strategy when meeting Trav is to grin and approach, slow and affable, and then sucker punch and stomp his prey. If that doesn’t work, he carries a knife hidden in his belt buckle.

At one point Trav’s friend says Waxwell is “you, gone bad.” On the nose, but chilling.

Here’s MacDonald’s description of Boone Waxwell:

Then the door opened and a man came out onto the porch. He wore dirty khaki pants. He was barefoot, bare to the waist. Glossy black curly hair, dense black mat of hair on his chest. Blue eyes. Sallow face. Tattoo as Arthur had described it. But Arthur’s description hadn’t caught the essence of the man, perhaps because Arthur wouldn’t know what to call it…In posture, expression, impact, he had that stud look, that curiously theatrical blend of brutality and irony. Bogart, Mitchum, Gable, Flynn—the same flavour was there, a seedy, indolent brutality, a wisdom of the flesh…

The Mitchum version of Cape Fear came out in 1962, Bright Orange three years later. Doubtless MacDonald saw Mitchum’s performance in the adaptation of his own novel, and here he is revising that character type, adding reference to Mitchum’s corrupted leading man allure to this new take on Cady.

Elmore Leonard said that of all the actors who interpreted his work, Richard Boone in The Tall T and Hombre got the closest to what he envisioned. (Boone is so fucking good in both.) I wonder if Mitchum got even closer to what MacDonald envisioned, close enough his performance suggested a revision of the character type.

There are a lot of variations on the male detective hero, and most are fatuous—concerned with being cool, tough, witty, long-suffering, etc. To me, only MacDonald and James Lee Burke concerned themselves with living rightly. Trav and Dave Robicheaux are imperfect men who care deeply about their friends, about how they make a living, about the natural world, and what they do with their lives. As silly as this might read, they’re flawed and perhaps fantastical versions of goodness and right living. (Walter Mosley is also concerned with this, especially in the Socrates Fortlaw books, which deserve their own write-up.)

Maybe that’s what makes MacDonald’s conception of evil so chilling. Waxwell and Cady have all the attributes he gave Travis McGee, too, stripped of a moral compass.