Author of seventeen books and more articles and short stories than there are days in the year, James McKimmey is one of the most gifted crime writers of the '50s and '60s. Cornered, 24 Hours To Kill, Run If You're Guilty, Squeeze Play - you'll only be disappointed if you don't like fast-paced plots, snappy dialogue, fleshed-out characters or enough tension to snap a bungee cord. Allan Guthrie was lucky enough to speak to James (pictured) for Noir Originals.

James McKimmey: When I was in the Army during WWII, I had a good friend named Herb. We stayed together from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, all the way to Germany where he was killed in action. Herb was a very wise young man. His advice to me about finding success was, "Surround yourself with good people."

I’ve had two marriages in my long life, the first to Marty for 47 years and ending only with her death, the second to Starr and heading for a successful decade now. I was fortunate enough that both came my way, giving me those good people I so much needed to find the marital success I’ve enjoyed.

In the case of my writing, I had to go looking.

When I started out with my writing career, I was living in East Palo Alto on the San Francisco Peninsula. I rented a water tower for $5 a month and wrote in there, concentrating on science-fiction stories and doing Ki-Gor (a spin-off of Tarzan) novelettes for Jungle Stories as John Peter Drummond, where I truly learned plotting. But I wanted to break into the so-called slick market with more general fiction, for not only the money, but also to have my work read in large-circulation magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, American, and other such periodicals then in business.

I’d learned that the most successful freelancers working on the Peninsula then were Samuel W. Taylor, who’d written everything from Saturday Evening Post serials to short stories to novels to nonfiction books to movies, and his friend Rutherford Montgomery, one of the most successful juvenile authors ever to come along that literary path. I also learned that Sam was president of the local Authors Guild which met in San Francisco. I joined the Authors Guild and met Sam. And when I learned that Sam was driving Monty to the next meeting as a guest speaker, I suddenly developed car trouble. I phoned Sam and asked if he could drive me to that meeting too.

The night of the meeting I found myself riding in the back seat of an automobile containing Sam and Monty up front. How surrounded by successful people can you get? I rode, listening, and learned more about the writing business I was trying to enter from those two pros conversing than I’d learned in my entire prior life.

I had interested a literary agent about then and sent him several short stories pointed at that larger general market. He’d tried to sell some without success. The two I’d most recently sent he returned without trying to sell them, writing that they weren’t good enough even to put on the market. I told Sam about that. He said, "Let’s see them." He read the stories and said, "The hell they aren’t. Send them to my agent and I’ll write him an introduction for you."

I sent them to his agent who sold one to American and the other to Collier’s.

Now I had the agent. Now I could start writing that first novel. Opportunistic? Well, maybe. But not at anyone’s expense. And how much do you want to be a writer anyway? It’s how much I wanted to be one.

The new agent was Carl Brandt, of Brandt & Brandt. He had writers ranging from Sinclair Lewis to John P. Marquand. And it was about now when I saw on one of those hour-long TV dramas so popular then a young highly gifted actor playing the part of a character named Buggie, a hip musician-type and the personification of evil. I wrote down the actor’s name when the credits rolled. And then the plot of my first novel began shaping itself around a pivotal character named, you guessed it, Buggie.

I tried the idea with Carl Brandt, who said, "Write it." To finance it, I got a job as an expediter in an electronics plant and started writing the book evenings. When it was completed, I sent it to Carl who gave it to his book agent, Lucille Baumgarten, who thought it would work best in paper and sold it immediately to Dell. I quit my job, determined to use the advance money so carefully that I could write full time. Meantime, although I didn’t know it, Carl and his son, Carl, Jr., sent a copy of the book to Cosmopolitan. Days later they sold the first serial rights to that magazine for twice what the advance had been from Dell. Publication of the Cosmo version preceded the Dell.

Just days after the Cosmo sale, Marty and I were awakened by the telephone. I got up and answered it. In those days, telegrams were popular. A Western Union clerk read this one to me. I went back to bed and Marty said, "What was that?"

"A telegram."

"What kind of telegram?"

"An invitation to a party."

"What kind of party?"

"A Hollywood party."

"Who’s throwing it?"

"Saturday Evening Post. It’s for all those movie stars they’ve profiled. I don’t know anybody at the Post."

"Where’s the party going to be?"

"At the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills next weekend. It’s RSVP. I’ll send them a telegram we’re not going."

"What do you mean we’re not going!"

"We can’t afford it!"

"What the hell do you mean we can’t afford it! You made more on your book these past days than you did all year working in that electronics plant! Get on the phone! RSVP them we’re coming! And wire for hotel reservations too!"

"What hotel?"

"The Beverly Hilton Hotel, you idiot!"

The stars at that party included the brightest of the era, including John Wayne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jayne Mansfield and Charlton Heston. Carl Brandt had wrangled my invitation from his brother who was on the staff of the Post. Carl’s personal reward to me for writing that novel.

There’s an addendum. A few years later I was in Los Angeles pushing a new book. I told Jay Richards, my Hollywood agent then, about how, in my first novel, I’d patterned Buggie after the young actor I’d seen on TV.

"Who was the young actor?" Jay asked.

"Mark Rydell. I sent him a copy of that first book and explained his influence."

"He’s a director now, for Gunsmoke. I’ll get his number. Phone him up. He’ll like hearing from you."

I wasn’t at all sure about that, but I phoned. I said, "I’m sure you won’t remember me, but I’m Jim McKimmey. And—"

"Jim! Where are you?"

"Here in Hollywood. And—"

"Let’s have lunch. Tomorrow okay? Come over to the Desilu Studios and ask for me. About one? And bring your new book. I want to read it."

We had lunch in the commisary at Desilu the next day, the Hollywod party all over again, only more so. I never admired Mark Rydell more, before or after that lunch, no matter how that gifted gentleman later ascended as one of the most important directors of our day.

That’s how it happened, selling that first book.

JM: I don’t remember how many Ki-Gor novelettes I wrote for Jungle Stories. Only two or three within a year’s span, I think. Malcolm Reiss, a great editor with Fiction House, had bought some of my science fiction for Planet and asked me if I’d like to do some Ki-Gors. It was income and experience, and I went for it.

I read Hemingway’s African adventures as well as Robert Ruark’s. I think I got the flora-fauna down okay. I plotted them well enough, I think, and they were my own ideas. But I couldn’t make the characters talk right. Malcolm Reiss wrote me and said he liked everything but the dialogue. Malcolm said that Ki-Gor, a product of the jungle, talked a lot like a British aristocrat, which was a bit disconcerting.

I stopped writing them when I sold my first slick short story.

As far as pseudonyms, I also used Turkel Jones. Another was Benjamin Swift, and how that came about was that Joe Gores, one of the few really good writing friends in my life, told me about a guy who was making a good living writing novels designed to assist slow school readers. The guy was Albert Nussbaum, who’d once been on the top ten list of the most wanted criminals in America. He’d been doing time at Leavenworth, had corresponded with Joe about writing from that prison, and had gotten out because Joe Gores stood up at a hearing and convinced a board that Al should be released.

I wrote to Al, who lived in Los Angeles, and introduced myself. In turn, Al gave me the name of his editor at Scholastic which resulted in my selling that publisher Buckaroo. Al also introduced me to Pitman to whom I sold Play-Off, which was published under the Benjamin Swift pseudonym.

After Al found out I’d been selling to Good Housekeeping, I tried to return his favors by suggesting that we collaborate on a short story for the late, great GH fiction editor, Naome Lewis. We decided to use a pseudonym, of course. I can’t remember it now – it was something like Mary Truestuff or something similar. We put "HEART" in the title because they liked heart in titles. And we worked out a story, back and forth, and came to a polished product which Al mailed from L.A. under that pseudonym. Back came a wonderful letter from Naome Lewis. We didn’t sell it, but it was close. The last I heard from Al, who later died, was a letter written on a cruise boat where he was a guest writer along with none other than John D. MacDonald.

JM: I tried to put in six or seven hours a day. But I didn’t always do it. And sometimes I put in more hours than that. An example would be Winner Take All. I got the idea I could write 5,000 words a day. So I sat down with that goal in mind. And I did it for 10 days in a row, no matter what the hours added up to. That’s how long it took to write Winner, 10 days, 50,000 words. I read it through once and edited it that much. I then asked Marty, my wife then, if she would type it onto bond. I didn’t want to look at it again. She did. It sold immediately. Anthony Boucher gave it a fine review. I wrote The Satyr next and completed that one in 17 days. But I could never do those two things again.

I think the real and only secret involved in writing and selling at any sort of prolific rate is having an actively buying market for your product. During that interval to which you’re referring, there was still a good paperback original market. But as in all aspects of life, conditions changed. Dell stopped publishing the kind of books I’d been writing. In fact, by that time, they’d bought The Hot Fire and didn’t publish it within the usual time frame they had those before it. Later, they decided to publish the book. And, because of the good contract my agent had drawn up, they had to buy it from me all over again.

It’s quite simple, really. Any writer has got to have a market for his wares. I suppose if a writer is good enough, there’s usually a market somewhere for what he or she has written. But I think it’s possible that there are some really fine manuscripts out there that aren’t published simply because there’s no good market for them. Time can change that, of course. But if it takes too much time, how long can any writer live?

JM: When I began writing The Perfect Victim, I didn’t think that I was writing anything in the crime/mystery genre. I just had this basic idea and overall plan for a novel. When I’d finished, I realized that the book could be in that general category. There was a murder, after all. After it sold to Dell and then to Cosmopolitan, I knew the effort was definitely in the crime/mystery arena. So I didn’t go there on purpose, I just naturally happened to get there.

Where the multiple viewpoints came from I definitely remember. During that phase when I was writing for Fiction House, which is to say Planet and Jungle Stories, my editor was the legendary Malcolm Reis. He was a marvel. It was for him that I started writing the longer-length stories. I was using a single viewpoint and I was having trouble. Malcolm wrote me a letter of advice that has remained with me to this moment. He said, "Think in terms of your longer stories being movies. Move that camera around so that you’re getting different points of view." I began to think in those terms and was astonished to find that it made all the difference for me. And it was primarily using that technique in my novel-writing that produced whatever that branch of crime/mystery writing most of my books might represent.

JM: The Dell novel that generated the most income for me was the first one, The Perfect Victim. It did so because it also was sold to Cosmopolitan, had good foreign sales and also was optioned twice as a movie. The first option was to Stanley Frazen who also optioned one of John D. MacDonald’s books. As John wrote to me at the time, "I hope you realize that we are now in a most curious relationship. If the movie Frazen is making from Soft Touch, which for some reason which passeth all understanding they have retitled Deadlock, makes any money for Frazen, then he will very probably pick up your option." Frazen didn’t pick up the option. But the book was again optioned when Paramount story editors Joe Goldberg and John Boswell optioned all of my paperbacks for films. Although that option was renewed, none of the books were made into a movie.

The longer efforts that generated the most income were the short novels, or novellas, I wrote for Good Housekeeping, a Hearst publication like Cosmo. There were only three as I recall – a new editor-in-chief replaced the original novellas with second-rights condensed romance novels, which obviated the opportunity to do more of them. You understand that the dollar was worth more then. My price was in five figures. And so we could live a year on one sale of one novella to GH. Add a short story here and there, and we could live very comfortably. We had a big camper-truck at the time, and I would go out daily somewhere in these Sierra mountains, usually by a beautiful stream, and write so many words of one of those novellas. The reward, over and beyond the doing and the monetary reward, was eventually seeing the work in a magazine with about five million readers. It was the time of any commercial writer’s life and surely the time of mine.

If there was a personal favorite of any of those longer efforts, I guess it was The Perfect Victim. I liked that story, and it opened up so much for me.

JM: The MacDonald influence has been, I guess, rather huge. But I would also like to include Ray Bradbury in this answer because, dissimilar as they were, both were very big writing heroes to me. Both gave me a tremendous amount of time, attention and encouragement. Both became extraordinarily successful. Ray is still the hero to me he always was. I was enormously impressed by his work. I still am. But that has been a different influence than John’s. Ray writes on pure instinct. He taught me to rely on that much more than I might have otherwise. But most of us just can’t approach writing exactly as Ray does for the simple reason that he, in my opinion, is a genius. What he has done, and how he has done it, is not what the rest of us can do. I believe that Ray has a very good concept of who he is as a writer and what he has accomplished. But I don’t think that he truly recognizes the fact that he is genius. Which, all by itself, makes him one of the nicest geniuses who has ever come down the literary trail. That’s what I think about Ray Bradbury.

John MacDonald, on the other hand, was a highly industrious man with very good intelligence, who could think his way along his career with great good judgment and taught himself to write as well as he did by writing. And I could better relate to that in terms of trying to do likewise. Early in my career, the late, great mystery critic and science-fiction editor, Anthony Boucher, rejected one of my short stories with the notation that I was writing as good Bradbury fiction as Bradbury wrote on a bad day. I had to take stock.

Then came my interest in John D.. The same Anthony Boucher later reviewed one of my Dell novels, the one with MacDonald’s quote, stating that I was using the ways (my emphasis) of MacDonald by then, but not aping the style as I had that of Ray Bradbury. I got over attempting to write exactly like Mr. Bradbury, but I don’t think I ever quite got over using the ways of Mr. Macdonald, which is to say that I wanted to write entertaining fiction with as much sense of place as existed in reality, do it for as many readers as possible and get paid as much as I could for doing it. I never remotely approached John’s readership or, certainly, his earnings. But the desire to do it was always there.

And there is where heroes and followers part ways. The hero does it. The follower only tries to do it. One cannot successfully imitate genius. Which is why there is only one Ray Bradbury. But can you successfully, and truly, imitate a writer such as John D. MacDonald? I don’t think so. I don’t believe he was a genius. But he had a combination of qualities including a desire and ability to work harder than anyone else in the world that made him the unique writer he became. Most of us don’t want to work as hard as he did as a way of professional life. I didn’t. But if I had, I still wouldn’t have accomplished precisely what he did because his traits as a writer were unique to him.

I see nothing wrong whatever in having heroes. They can give you what you need when you need it. But eventually certain of their capabilities entirely outweigh yours. What happens then is that you start depending more and more upon your own capabilities, those unique to you. That’s when you become the entity that is honestly what you are.

But those earlier heroes leave their marks so that what you eventually become includes a part of what they were. I was very fortunate to have had two men such as John D. MacDonald and Ray Bradbury as the principal heroes of my life. Whatever qualities I might have as a writer, as opposed to the deficiencies, which I definitely own as well, those two surely helped develop. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have had them in my life.

    If you love to write
    you ain’t doing it right;
    but if you love to have written,
    being a pro’s where you’re gittin’

Having presented that, I hope I’ve made two indisputable impressions. (1) I shall never be a poet. (2) Writing is the hardest work in this world, and so the great satisfaction is having done it.

Short stories, of course, usually provide a far quicker return for the effort than does writing the novel, one major reason I seem to have preferred writing them.

A perfect example is one entitled Last Reunion. I woke up at home on the ranch south of San Francisco and realized that I wanted to write a short story but didn’t have an idea in my head. I got in the car and went searching for one. I drove west to the ocean. By noon I found a rustic seafood restaurant built right next to the water. During lunch I was inventing a former WWII infantry captain, down on his luck. Put a guy like that in this restaurant by the sea. Etc., etc..

I drove home fast and started writing. I wrote through dinner. I wrote through most of the night. When I got up late the next day, I typed a final copy and sent it to my agent who sold it to Cosmopolitan in three days. Cosmo published it within weeks. Days after it hit the stands, my telephone rang.

It was a producer from an anthology TV show, GE Theater. He’d like to buy my reunion story for the show. Did I have an agent?

"Yes, sir!" I bellowed.

In the following months, I wrote a new novel. We celebrated its completion by driving to Lake Tahoe for a few days of well-earned rest. I’ve always been a celebrity fan. And this trip to Tahoe was highlighted by sitting down in Harrah’s main casino lounge and finding ourselves a few tables away from an easily recognizable Lee Marvin, with his wife. I had admired this man for some time, a combat veteran of WWII, who’d made it big as a realistic tough-guy actor. We smiled at him. He smiled back. If ever a celebrity seemed open to being approached, it was Lee Marvin that day in that cocktail lounge. We were the only four customers in there.

"I’d like to shake his hand," I whispered.

"Go do it," Marty said.

"He was a Marine sniper during the war."

"He’d be pleased to know that you know that."

"If I went over, he’d probably ask us to join them."

"Did you have better plans?"

"That was a joke!"

"Go ahead. Do it."

But I’d read how much celebrities hated being approached when they were relaxing. And at the rate Mr. Marvin was putting down drinks, I knew he was relaxing a whole lot. I couldn’t finally bring myself to interrupt his pleasure.

A few months later, in a TV listing, I learned that Last Reunion was being shown the following Sunday night. There was no other information in those days, including who would be starring.

You’ve guessed it? Isn’t that marvelous?

Wasn’t it marvelous, to sit and watch my story right there on that television screen starring none other than Lee Marvin. That’s what a short story can do for you. Of course, that was the only short story that did quite that much for me. But the history of it rings of the sort of glitter and glamour and personal reward that I love. Perhaps if any of the options on my novels had been exercised, I’d feel differently. But that’s how it has personally been.

My only faint regret is that I didn’t know that Lee Marvin, when we’d been sitting a table away from him, had been the star of my dramatized short story – they’d obviously filmed the show before we both arrived at Tahoe.

Yeah, it would have been fun, especially if he’d indeed have invited us to his table. But I’ll happily settle for the way it all happened, with that short story, any day, any week.

JM: Although I’ve never been a true outdoorsman, I’ve always loved the outdoors. When I was in the Army in Georgia, I found myself in the country on a field trip (with my military buddies, of course) lying on the ground in my bedroll as a cold January rain poured down on us. And then when I was in Normandy, on the way to combat in Germany, it was outdoors in the rain again except we were able to share two-men pup tents for shelter. And I swore I would never again camp out, and I never have since.

But I have enjoyed long walks in the kind of country in which I now live and hope I’ve reported it with some accuracy in my work.

Gambling has long fascinated me. I recognize the fact that it can be as deadly to some as booze is to others, but it’s there. And I’ve lived in a gambling community for 42 years, so I think I know a lot about it. I have no doubt that it was Ernest Hemingway’s involvement in it that attracted me in the first place. I don’t glamorize it anymore. But I still get a kick out of walking through a casino. By now, however, it’s a rare day indeed when I find myself in a casino.

Ambivalence is right, about my attitude toward small towns. I spent until age 13 living in small towns in Nebraska. Then I found myself in Omaha. Omaha is not a city in the sense of New York City, of course. But it’s a city. And I loved being there from the day I arrived. I haven’t been back for a very long time, but I still have the very best memories of that city. The small towns, however, have limitations that I simply do not like. I don’t like being watched, the way they watch you in small towns. I don’t like the community spirit necessary for existence in such towns. I don’t like the limited vision that comes with small-town existence. South Lake Tahoe is, of course, a relatively small community. But because of the gambling, because of the world-class resort nature of a very beautiful mountain town, drawing visitors from everywhere else in the world, the basic nature of this place is extremely cosmopolitan. The result is the best of both the small town and the city. I’ve liked
living here.

Your comments were fair indeed. 

JM: I got into science fiction because of Ray Bradbury’s influence. I found some buying markets, such as Planet and If. But I never got into it in the fashion of, say, Philip K. Dick. Phil and I corresponded a lot when we were both starting out. I saved his letters, and he had no idea that he would become a sort of icon in the science-fiction world. He was just writing what he felt he had to write, and perhaps there’s a lesson there.

I wrote a couple of remedial-reading novels, Buckaroo and Play-Off as well as some short stories. But I’m such a simple writer that it was no trouble for editors to turn the work into fiction geared for high school students reading at a fourth-grade level. Several of my adult stories landed in the same textbook anthologies.

I really never wrote much with a deliberate intent of achieving literary quality. I think when I really enjoyed writing a short story, and sold it to a target market, was when I later had it picked up in what might be called a literary anthology. An example was a story entitled The Man Who Danced. I wrote that for and sold it to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Then it was picked up for a college-level text book entitled Literature 1 which also featured short stories written by all of those writers I’d studied in college, from Steinbeck to Hemingway. I’ve always been proud of that inclusion.

Part Two of the interview continues here