Great critiques have already been written about Murder in the Wind (1956) assessing its place in John D. MacDonald's development as a writer, and Stephen King has praised it as an influence. It's another I picked up in conjunction with a re-read of It. Wind, like The End of the Night, suggests influence on King and especially the massive multi-viewpoint approach in It.

Several other factors were also involved in my purchase and reading, beyond studying King.

I love MacDonald's work, as this blog would indicate, and Murder, sometimes called Hurricane really seemed like something I ought to take a look at after enduring Hurricane Irma as it swept through Central Florida. It's almost like a 60-year-old prophecy of a storm's path.

In some ways, Murder also reminds me of The Crossroads, a slightly later fifties novel that really re-awakened my interest in MacDonald several years ago as well as kicking off a period of non-Travis McGee reading. Like Wind, it winds together various plot and character threads around an almost-peripheral crime.

Murder in the Wind is interesting immediately as a historic thumbnail perspective on hurricanes before the development of current technology and modeling.

The fictional hurricane that kicks off the book's action sweeps around Cuba, into the Gulf of Mexico and gains power before battering Florida's West coast. No one really quite knows what's coming as the story unfolds.

And MacDonald begins to introduce characters who'll be in its path. It's an episodic ride that anticipates future disaster fiction and movies.

We meet a young family who came south to find better climate for an ailing child only to find the struggle of starting a small firm to great. They're beginning the trek back north under a gloom of personal failure.

There's also a deal-making businessman and his aging underling who's failed to manage a merger properly, so both are headed north to fix the problems.

Then there are two young criminals and their despondent girlfriend, a slightly mentally challenged young woman who's found their company preferable to bad family circumstances. An FBI agent grief stricken over the loss of his wife rounds things out and ultimate helps tie threads together as the murder of the title and other tragedies unfold at the novel's core.

And a host of others join in. MacDonald even gives us a finely drawn portrait of a long-haul trucker distracted by the recent discovery of his wife's cheating while he's on the road. That leads to the disastrous accident and road blockage that throws the disparate strangers together in an abandoned house to ride out the storm.

As plans are made for the weathering, MacDonald shifts gears, providing the other side of the equations introduced in the early portion of the books. We learn the assistant's understanding of the failed merger and more as the murder transpires and nature and brutal happenstance take over.

MacDonald builds to a satisfying conclusion in the storm's aftermath and ends with a ray of hope.

I'm glad I didn't read it while riding out Irma, but I'm happy to have experienced the novel. It really captures the blend of dread and denial connected with an approaching storm and gives a realistic taste of the brief period in the eye of a storm when disaster seems imminent and possible.

He also delves into human experience in rich and meaningful ways and offers a snapshot of the times. Murder in the Wind is a great read and a worthy work of fiction. ( )

Published in 1956, this is another of MacDonald's multi-perspective novels, reminiscent of, but inferor to, the Damned. It is all a big soap opera as a group of disparate characters find themselves cut off from escape and forced to take refuge in a rickety abandoned house as a hurricane bears down on Florida's West Coast. MacDonald throws in pretty much everything you would want to know about how a hurricane forms, in between the stories of each group of characters, mostly told in flashback. In fact, the book is more than half over before the narrative shifts to mostly present tense. Once in the house, we get to see which characters hold up and which don't, all under the intense scrutiny of MacDonald as writer, moralist, and ultimate judge of human character. Godlike, he determines his characters fate. It is all much too well stage-managed, and I suspect he has his own amusement in mind even more than his readers. But if you have read MacDonald before, that won't come as a surprise. Neither will the fact that despite the sometime annoyances of his writing style and his attitude, he tells a hell of a tale that will keep you gripped from first page to last. ( )

It is really about a hurricane and a group of people caught in it. The description of the hurricane and its destruction is very graphic. The characterizations are very well done. Despite the large group of people, the final scenes of people taking refuge in an old house while the wind and the flood advances against them bring out each family's strengths and weaknesses. It has wickedness, tragedy, and love intertwined. ( )

Published first in 1956, this is one of the top five MacDonald efforts as we follow several separate parties into the eye of a type 5 hurricane that hits just as the Gulf Coast experiences high tide, bringing flood waters 18 miles inland. ( )