Book Review: John D. MacDonald, The End of the Night (1960)

Having recently read Weep for Me (1951), which John D. MacDonald identified as the worst of his early novels, I felt obligated to follow up by reading The End of the Night (1960), which was his favorite of the early books. The End of the Night chronicles the so-called Wolf Pack, three young men and a young woman who go on a cross-country crime spree. Given that JDM thought so highly of The End of the Night, I was expecting a great read. I did not stop to consider that there is a compelling reason for suspecting that JDM may not have been the best judge of his own work. To wit: Many readers, myself among them, find that JDM’s novels are aging poorly because of his habit of interjecting sociological lectures into his narratives, and these are precisely the sections of his books that JDM liked the best. Therefore, I should not have been surprised to find that The End of the Night is dominated by a pair of pretentious first-person narrators, both of whom are more interested in understanding the world than telling a story. Of course, this is not to say that noir fiction cannot be a vehicle for understanding the world—in fact, this is what distinguishes much of the best noir. But when JDM indulges his love of pontification, he fails to recognize that a well-told story can be not just a sufficient but a superior way of deepening readers’ understanding of the world. Grade: C+