The Drowner: A Novel

The Drowner: A Novel

The Drowner: A Novel

The Drowner: A Novel


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Overview

The Drowner, one of many classic novels from crime writer John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.
 
Lucille Hanson left her rich husband, a man who lived casually and loved carelessly. She found a new man, one who appeared to treat her right. Lucille was putting together the pieces of her life, determined not to make the old mistakes, the foolish ones that had almost wrecked her the first time around . . . until all of her hopes came to rest at the bottom of the lake where her body is found. It must have been an accident, most people say. It might have been suicide, others think. But among her mourners, just one person refuses to believe it was anything other than murder.
 
Features a new Introduction by Dean Koontz
 
Praise for John D. MacDonald
 
The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King
 
“My favorite novelist of all time.”—Dean Koontz
 
“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut
 
“A master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer . . . John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about the best.”—Mary Higgins Clark

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307826930
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 06/11/2013
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 160
Sales rank: 254,059
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

About The Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short-story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980, he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life, he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business, he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.

Date of Birth:

July 24, 1916

Date of Death:

December 28, 1986

Place of Birth:

Sharon, PA

Place of Death:

Milwaukee, WI

Education:

Syracuse University 1938; M.B. A. Harvard University, 1939

Read an Excerpt

One
 
One day after it was all over, after it was ended and done and there was no going back to change any part of it, Paul Stanial realized, checking the dates, that he and the Hanson woman had gone swimming on the same day, at the same hour, over a hundred miles apart, and had walked from the same noontime simmer of May in Florida, across sand into coolness. But on that day he had never heard of her, or even of the grove-country lake in which she had died that day.
 
Nevertheless, it had changed his life at a time it most desperately needed changing, and he found a strange significance in the fact that her swim in that silent lake had ended her life, and that his swim off that junk beach below Lauderdale had been part of the procedures that were sickening him, and had led him to demand the change which brought his life into tangent with hers, after hers was over.
 
His was a cool and watchful mind, full of measurements and dimensions, capable of fits of black rage over which he had achieved a precarious control, but not prone to make fanciful relationships between unrelated events. By the time he could see this fateful coincidence, he knew just how it had been for her. And though he never saw Lucille Hanson alive, by then he had talked to those who had known her, and he had seen where it had happened, and he knew the flavors of her mind and spirit from reading her letters. He saw it over and over, like an arbitrary eye suspended perhaps twenty feet above the shoreline of Dayker’s Lake. He saw the old car nose down through the brush on the sand road in the bright noon-time heat and stop, facing the lake. He saw the woman get out, leaving the car door open, and take off her denim wrap-around skirt and toss it into the car. She wore a white swim suit and sandals. Her hair was fair, a golden white, and her body was tanned. Her rather narrow face, long throat, small breasts and long slender waist gave her a deceptive look of fragility. But there was a sturdy breadth to her round strong hips, and her thighs and calves were rounded and heavy. He saw her mash a mosquito against the top of a solid thigh, and reach into the car, get her gear, slam the car door and walk quickly to the edge of the small sandy beach. He saw her spread her towel, put the other articles down, step out of her sandals, and then walk to the water, tucking her pale hair into the blue swim cap, her expression that of a woman alone, slightly solemn, preoccupied, thinking of the two men who loved her, perhaps, and the one she loved.
 
And then the objective eye turned and he saw her swim out, the strong legs pumping, the arms reaching smoothly, the head turning at the right beat to take the deep easy breath. From that vantage point he watched just how it was done to her, saw how she was given no chance at all. He watched below then, down in the amber murk of twenty feet, watched her come down slowly and alone when it was over for her, turning, unmarked except for that emptiness of death upon her face, sinking to the weeds and mud of the bottom, rebounding slightly, turning in a random current, and then settling, sprawled on her side, eyes open, an edge of white teeth showing, a last reflex moving the left hand, some gassy bubbles and then weedy silence in the brown-gold depths.
 
But his own swim that same day, that same hour, on a trashy dazzle of beach at Hallandale, adjacent to glossy motels, had been entirely different in flavor. The agency had used him on this one because, he realized with a certain sourness, he looked enough like the other beach bums to be next to invisible in the throng. His natural skin tone was dark enough to take and hold a deep tan. His hair was black and his deep-set eyes a clear, bright blue. He was tall and long-legged, with flat hips, a lithe, narrow waist, but a deep chest, short broad neck, and wide, heavily muscled shoulders. From a distance his trimness made him look years younger than he was.
 
The assignment was a soft, beefy, youngish man from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, named Geoffrey Rogers. He had married a monied woman who was anxious to divorce him, but Rogers was holding out for a private settlement before agreeing. They’d been given the word he was taking a little break in the Miami area with a blonde hostess from a Detroit night spot. The office had traced him through the phone number he had given the airlines for his return reservation, and had found him holed up in cabana unit G of the Beachscape Motel, registered as Mr. and Mrs. R. Jeffries of Lansing.
 
Paul Stanial had been detailed to pick up all the client would need to pry herself loose from Rogers with minimum expense. So he checked into the cheapest single at the Beachscape so as to have the run of the place and the beach. He wired a battery-driven, 35-millimeter camera into a small green plastic tackle box, loaded with a 36-exposure roll of Kodachrome, and cut a hole under the side latch for the wide-angle lens. He cut another hole on top next to the carrying handle, big enough so he could stick his index finger through it and punch the shutter button. Properly set for bright sunlight, he was in focus from four feet to infinity, and the wide-angle simplified the aiming problem. They were so sexually engrossed in each other, he was in no danger of being detected as he took his shots of them, some from as close as five feet. She was a vapid-faced woman with a rich body just beginning to go to seed. They sprawled and necked on their beach towels in a meaty abandon, while he sunned nearby and caught some of the more incriminating pawings. He took them leaving and entering their cabana, and he got one on the terrace of the cabana with Rogers supine on a white sun chaise, the woman straddling his thighs, facing him, leaning toward him, his hand under her bikini top and her hand rammed up the leg of his swim trunks. Moments later they got up and went into the cabana and drew the draperies across the picture window. Stanial put the camera in his room and went for a swim. He swam out and floated on the swells and wondered how many waves it would take to wash away the stink of that pair, and suddenly he knew he couldn’t take much more of this kind of assignment. Something had to change before he found he had stopped giving a damn what he had to do, so long as he was paid.
 
He took the film to a special order lab, asked for one color slide of each exposure, and waited fifty minutes in an air-conditioned bar down the street while they ran it through the electronic processing equipment. He signed the charge slip, went out and sat on a bench and held each slide up to the light. They were no example of the art of photography, but they clearly established the identities and the specific relationship between the pair.
 
He went back to the office and turned the slides and the photostat of the registration over to Kippler and sat while Kippler looked carefully at each picture.
 
“This broad is really stacked,” Kippler murmured. “And eager. Say, this one nails it good, her opening the door and the number showing up good on the door, and him with the towels and stuff. By the way, Charlie got a Thermofax of the car rental sheet. Rogers used his own name on that so he could use his credit card.” He pursed his lips and studied one picture. “There’s too much in focus, so it wasn’t telephoto. What’d you do, fella? Join the group?”
 
“Is that the next step?”
 
Kippler looked at him thoughtfully. “What’s chewing you?”
 
“I’ve had too much of this kind of thing, one after the other. I’m fed up to here with it. Is this the only kind of business you get down here?”
 
“It’s a big part of it.”
 
“For God’s sake, get me some cop work so I can live with myself for a little while. I’ve got cop training. This kind of assignment sickens me.”
 
“So maybe you’re a little stale, Paul. Try B and B. Broad and bottle.”
 
“Let me ask you one question, Mr. Kippler. Am I worth hanging onto?”
 
“You’re working out pretty good here.”
 
“Then please assign me to something more like police work, and soon, or I’m going to have to get out. I don’t care if it’s something that checks out to be nothing at all, just so long as I get a change from the bedroom circuit.”
 
“You’re working in the world’s biggest bedroom.”
 
“I can take it, if I get a change once in a while.”
 
Kippler sighed. “I shouldn’t do this. But the very next thing that comes along, you get it. The thing I have for you now, I don’t even want to show you the file until you’re in a better mood. So come in in the morning, and best of all, come in with a slight hangover, Paul.”
 
And so, that evening, thinking Kippler’s advice might do some good, he dated a girl he knew slightly. They cruised the beach and had a little too much to drink and he kept telling himself he was having a good time, that he was relaxing. He went back with her to her small apartment on the mainland, and as soon as they were inside the small living room, before she had turned a light on, she turned hard into his arms and broke her mouth upward against his in a breathless hunger, dug her nails into his back and canted her body into him in total, unmistakable presentation of herself. For a moment it was fine, until suddenly in the darkness she was the very same woman Rogers had been enjoying, the same woman he had seen over and over again, in different shapes and sizes.
 

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