VTG Soft Touch 1958 John D. MacDonald PB d1621/1. Suspense Pulps . Fawcett Gold Medal Book. Used. Condition Is “Good To Very Good” For Age. Paper Cover Has Aged Some And Yellowed. Has Some Stains And Has Blemishes And Unclean Spots. Pages Have Oxidized Due To Age To Light Yellow/ Brown. Remaining Components Are Solid. Shipped with USPS Media Mail. 724

A Cool Collectable Stand Alone Crime Pulp Vintage Paperback By John D. MacDonald.

“Jerry Jamison wants out: out of a sloppy marriage, a dull job and the empty suburban rat race. Once Jerry had a beautiful bride and a good salary at her old man's successful business - that was before his wife turned into a lush. Before the business started to go to pieces. And before the lazy afternoon when Vince Biskay, an old army buddy, rings his doorbell and makes an intriguing proposition. Vince promises to bring excitement into Jerry's life - and money - but this is a plan that leaves only death and destruction in its wake”

“Nineteen fifty-seven through 1959 was an extraordinarily productive period of time in the writing career of John D MacDonald. Each of these years saw the publication of four original novels, all but one of them uniformly very good or excellent. They covered a broad range of subject matter, from crime to comedy, adultery, corporate affairs in big business, the sociology of 1950’s America, sexual obsession, even the amateur art world. MacDonald had hit his stride as a novelist and rarely ever stumbled again. Fully confident in his abilities as a writer, he published two novels back to back in 1958 that had nothing to do with the world of crime, novels of “manners and mores” in the jungle of the American backyard, both of them excellent (The Deceivers and Clemmie) and they sold fairly well. But in August of that year, only a month after the appearance of Clemmie, he returned to the world of crime with the novel Soft Touch.

It was an expansion of a novella he had published in Cosmopolitan in March of that year titled “Taint of the Tiger,” and it represented more than just MacDonald returning to his strengths: it was the first time since 1951’s failed novel Weep for Me that the author featured a protagonist whose own criminal actions lead to his undoing. As such, it is an anomaly in the book-length works of JDM and contains the flavor of another author. Where Weep for Me was a conscious effort to ape the rush-toward-destruction fatalism of James M Cain, Soft Touch, with its growing sense of fear and hopelessness, reads like nothing less than a Jim Thompson novel. Yet it is singularly MacDonald in both style and characterization and comes, I think, as close to noir as the author ever got in a novel.”