I read John D. MacDonald's ONE MONDAY WE KILLED THEM ALL
(1961) a few days ago. (He had three books and four short
stories out in 1960, two and nine in 1961, and three and
three in 1962.) It would make a nice pairing with W.L.
Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY: they're both set in the southern
US, they both have criminals coming to town and waiting while
planning something big, and of course they both have dates in
the title.
ONE MONDAY is told by Fenn Hillyer, a police lieutenant in
Brook City, a small, decaying city in some southeastern state
that has hills and backwoods country folk who don't like
being bothered. His loving wife is Meg, and his
brother-in-law is Dwight McAran, who just got out of jail
after serving time for beating a woman to death. McAran's a
violent hood who cares about nobody and will use his sister's
affection to get what he wants.
The blurbs on the cover of my late sixties Fawcett reprint
make the book out to be different than it is: "In just six
days McAran tore apart the quiet world of Brook City. On the
seventh he rested, waiting for the carnage that morning would
bring." No such thing happens.
The tension in the story builds and builds while Hillyer
tries to figure out what McAran is waiting for, and then
things really get going when McAran disappears one day and
there's a riot at the jail he just left. It all ends in a
violent showdown. It's fine, solid JDM stuff, though the
wife's behaviour is a bit tiring.
Equally interesting to all that is Brook City: JDM explains
how industry failed and unemployment and crime rose, how the
politicians and organized crime keep each other in check,
class and cultural differences between the rural and urban
dwellers, and the sociology of small American cities in the
late 1950s.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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