JOHN D. MacDONALD – Free Fall in Crimson. Travis McGee #19. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1981. Fawcett, paperback, 1982. Reprinted a number of times since.

   I’ve been doing some research. The first Travis McGee story was entitled The Deep Blue Goodbye, and it was published first as a paperback in May of 1964, back when a book sold in softcover would set you back all of forty cents or so.

   It’s now exactly seventeen years, eighteen books, and an equal number of colors later [1981], and real money, the folding kind, is going to be what it takes to get your hands on a copy of the latest in the series. [$10.95] No more loose pocket change!

   This negative sort of progress notwithstanding, what this does is to illustrate one of the most remarkable aspects of John D. MacDonald’s long writing career. Ignored by the critics until just recently, he began in the late 1940’s writing hundreds of stories published in the pulp magazines {and mostly still buried there). In the 1950’s, with the demise of the pulps at hand, he switched to novels, with a list of them fully a page long, but all of them in paperback and in paperback only.

   Only in the last five or ten years has it been that his books have come out first in hardcover, and now when they do, they head straight for the bestseller list. Readers have known all along. They’ve known that MacDonald’s name on a story has meant just what they’ve been looking for.

   Today, of course, MacDonald is best known for his adventures of Travis McGee. Other than myriads of articles for TV Guide and blurbs for the dust jackets for the books of other authors, he seems to be writing nothing else. It seems a little strange for those of us who’ve been with him all the while, but apparently McGee is enough to keep the demands of the vast majority of his legions of fans satisfied.

   The format is restricting, but given the continued storytelling drive of a Free Fall in Crimson, plus the usual amount of free-wheeling MacDonald-ian philosophy thrown in for good measure, it seems unlikely that any change is due in the near future.

   In the opening chapters, McGee is still mourning the loss of Gretel, lost but then avenged when last we met him, in The Green Ripper. He is doing a lot of thinking about “destiny,” and not until this new case comes along does he extricate himself from the deep, self-induced funk he’s dug himself into.

   He is asked to investigate, long after the fact, the strange death of an artist’s estranged father. The man was dying of cancer, but perhaps not fast enough, for before he does, he is beaten to death by persons unknown in an isolated wayside rest area. His heir is his wife, from whom he was legally separated. Her current boyfriend specializes in making R-rated biker movies, but his latest films have not been faring well.

   McGee’s solution, when it comes to it, as it always does, is to give fate a handy shove in the right direction. Fate’s response, as is usual in JDM’s books, is tough and uncaring. Unfortunately, McGee neglects some loose ends this time, and as a result, in the next book it will be his best friend, Meyer, who will need some rehabilitating.

   In the Travis McGee universe, it is not wise to stand too close to the target area.

Rating: A minus.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, July/August 1981.