I read John D. MacDonald's 1962 Gold Medal original A KEY TO
THE SUITE today--146 pages of the usual tight, crisp JDM/Gold
Medal writing, with nothing wasted and no padding. I picked
it up over the weekend at a used bookstore that had a milk
crate full of JDM, mostly McGee books, but a number of
others, including this one which I'd never seen before.
It's about a guy who's sent to a trade convention to give a
final look at a sales manager his boss wants to fire. The
cover makes it out to be an expose of business conventions,
and brother, if conventions were like that, I hope they're
not any more. There are prostitutes, alcoholics, murders, and
a guy phoning up a friend on the police force to get a drunk
taken to a private hospital and doped up for a few days to
keep him quiet. The protagonist seems at the start to be the
JDM hero we expect, but he turns out not to be, he's been
broken by the system and the modern business world and his
own weakness.
Are there any other boks about the business world by
hardboiled writers? THE OFFICE by Frederic Brown comes to
mind, but it's more a memoir as I recall. Willeford talked
about how used car salesmen work in THE WOMAN CHASER. Are
there any that get into offices and the daily grind at 9-to-5
white collar jobs?
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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