MacDonald was once a well-known writer of tough crime novels. He was probably the best known of these writers in the 1950s and 1960s, and had a series of bestsellers with series hero Travis McGee.

By the 1950s he was building a reputation. These books are rarely on the bestseller lists. The stories were published in pulps and novels as Fawcett Gold Crest paperbacks.

Many of those novels weren’t really crime novels, just brutal pieces of life. He had a bitter vision of postwar America.

A Man of Affairs is interesting because it is the story of a corporate assailant, Mike Dean, who is like Gordon Gecko’s father, but at a time when buying corporations to split or reshape them was supposedly virtually unknown. Yet MacDonald was writing about a fictitious company and a robber nearly sixty years ago.

The hero is Sam Glidden, one of the corporate executives, having been the protégé of the man who pushed him into the modern age, from being an old-fashioned family business. He was born on the harshest side of town, but the patriarch liked him and promoted him. But when the patriarch died, those left behind discovered that the old man had let the business slip. He couldn’t afford the general dividends he had been paying. It needed to be modernized to meet the demands of today’s market.

So Sam Glidden is working hard to get the company back on a solid footing. But he receives little support from a girl who once attracted him to high school: the patriarch’s daughter, her alcoholic and cheater husband, and her war hero brother who gave up trying to live productively.

They are the main shareholders of the company and an easy target for the manipulative offers of Mike Dean. But Glidden gets invited to a party at a house on a Caribbean island to try to ruin the settlement.

Here MacDonald writes well about people and events, conveying a strong sense of violent potential under the sunlight and bright blue water surface. Glidden is unusual for a MacDonald character as he sleeps with the pretty writer from Dean’s PR agency, though not surprising when they later decide they are in love. MacDonald is nothing if he is not sexually moralistic.

Death comes, as we knew it would come, although it is somewhat surprising. The perpetrators are symbolic rather than real people. The worthless alcoholic husband is killed by a real barracuda before the commercial barracuda can impoverish the couple. Mike Dean himself dies of a heart attack, which is not surprising given that he has no heart.

So it all ends well, thank goodness, which MacDonald knows is typically not a satisfying way to end a novel, so he must have been making a point. Perhaps it is that the schemes of such manipulators will always backfire, eventually.