No Need for Irvings

THE LAST ONE LEFT by John Mac-Donald. 369 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

During the past 20 years, John D. MacDonald, now 50, has written 600 short stories and 53 books (A Flash of Green, The Girl, the Goldwatch and Everything) that have sold 32 million copies around the world. His fans will know just what ingredients to expect in his newest novel: busy, well populated pages, a swift and intricate plot, strong characters, believable dialogue, a surfeit of sex and violence. The late Ian Fleming, no mean tale spinner himself, said, "I automatically buy every John D. MacDonald as it comes out."

Avoid the Unforgivable. This time, as he has done so often, MacDonald takes off from an actual, contemporary crime. The Last One Left goes back to the 1961 wreck of a 60-ft. ketch that burned and sank off the Bahamas, apparently with only one survivor, Skipper Julian Harvey. Three days later, a freighter picked up another survivor, an eleven-year-old girl, Terry Jo Duperrault. Harvey promptly killed himself--even before the child reported how the debt-burdened skipper had murdered her family and his own wife in a plot to collect $20,000 in insurance.

Author MacDonald raises the take to $800,000 in untraceable cash, and broadens the cast to include finagling financiers, tough Texas lawyers, Cuban exiles, beach boys, con men and cops. He has also invented a demented new character who holds the shipwrecked girl prisoner, thereby prolonging the story and deepening the suspense. The action ranges from Corpus Christi to Sarasota to Nassau--and everywhere MacDonald demonstrates his ability to handle complex relationships involving scads of people on a single page.

He seems to write out of an astonishing range of information about art, politics, corruption, finance. His imagery is sharp: "They were beautiful children, completely out of control, sweet, active and savage as weasels." He is occasionally aphoristic: "Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable." His only persistent fault is that he frequently falls into the Perry Mason syndrome. To wind up a plot quickly, the top suspect is likely to say, "All right, I did it," and then babble the confession without which he would go free.

10,000 Hours. MacDonald is so good, in fact, that it is a wonder he is not better. For years, friends and fans have urged him to tackle more serious themes, but MacDonald, who lives comfortably in a gulfside house on Siesta Key off Sarasota, insists that he is doing exactly what he wants. He feels no need, he says, to write "the Big Book," the kind written by "the Irvings--Irving Wallace, 'Irving' Robbins, 'Irving' Ruark, and that woman, 'Irving' Rand." His own work, he adds, without false modesty, is demanding enough. Anyone else could do it, provided, of course, "that all your life you have read at least two or three good books a week, that you have an IQ of 125-plus, that you are in good enough health to endure at least 10,000 sedentary hours, that your opinions are not rehashed fragments of what you have read and listened to, and that you are mare intent on telling' it true than selling it once it is told." Fortunately for MacDonald, he sells what he tells.

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