Going for the Gold

Supplementing The Rap Sheet’s regular and rather lengthy blogroll—found running down the right side of every page—I maintain a separate Archive Sites page. There I’ve installed links to crime fiction-oriented blogs and other Web sites that are no longer being updated, but that I think remain useful. I am always reluctant to move something from the active list to those dusty annals, especially if I think its author might one day get the itch to write again. Such revivals are few and far between, but they do happen.

Which brings us to Steve Scott’s The Trap of Solid Gold.

That blog, focused on the life and literary escapades of John D. MacDonald (and taking its name from the title of a 1960 MacDonald short story), debuted back in 2009. But it suddenly went dark after a post on November 16, 2016. Knowing that Scott, a onetime commercial banker living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, had—for reasons only later explained—taken two previous years off (2012 and 2013) from contributing to his excellent blog, I tried to be patient about this latest dilatoriness. By the beginning of 2018, however, I had pretty much resigned myself to the notion that The Trap of Solid Gold had run its course. I was ready to add it to my list of Archive Sites.

Wouldn’t you know it, though? That’s exactly when Scott decided it was time to kick his blog back into gear. Since then, he’s been posting about once a week, covering topics that range from MacDonald’s early efforts to create a series character (before he gave birth to Travis McGee, of course) and his 1959 standalone novel, The Crossroads, to the 1968 TV pilot film Kona Coast (based on a MacDonald short story and starring Richard Boone) and the role MacDonald’s wife, Dorothy, played in his fiction-writing career.

If you haven’t been keeping track of The Trap of Solid Gold, it’s time to add it to your reading list. Let’s hope Steve Scott doesn’t take another vacation from updating it at anytime soon.