Free Fall in Crimson

Travis McGee #19

by John D. MacDonald

Hired to find the person who killed an ailing tycoon with his bare hands, Travis McGee must contend with the tycoon's disinherited artist son and his aging actress wife

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Detective, Mystery Thriller, Thriller, Novels

246 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1981

About the author

John D. MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and educated at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Syracuse and Harvard, where he took an MBA in 1939. During WW2, he rose to the rank of Colonel, and while serving in the Army and in the Far East, sent a short story to his wife for sale, successfully. He served in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations. After the war, he decided to try writing for a year, to see if he could make a living. Over 500 short stories and 70 novels resulted, including 21 Travis McGee novels.

Following complications of an earlier heart bypass operation, MacDonald slipped into a coma on December 10 and died at age 70, on December 28, 1986, in St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was survived by his wife Dorothy (1911-1989) and a son, Maynard.

In the years since his death MacDonald has been praised by authors as diverse as Stephen King, Spider Robinson, Jimmy Buffett, Kingsley Amis and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. Thirty-three years after his passing the Travis McGee novels are still in print.

Reviews

[Bobby Underwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

“People who become legends in their own time usually have very little time left.” — Travis McGee, Free Fall in Crimson


There is a reason John D. MacDonald is the favorite novelist of Dean Koontz, and Sue Grafton calls him a dominant influence on writers crafting a series character. There’s a reason Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman and Mary Higgins Clark sing praises about his storytelling. It’s understandable why he’s the idol of Donald Westlake. Who could blame Ed McBain for being overjoyed when the Travis McGee series was once again back in print? It would have been shocking had Robert B. Parker not written that John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series was one of the greatest sagas in American fiction. They’re terrific writers, and they recognized the good stuff when they read it.

While MacDonald’s career goes much farther back than the Travis McGee series, and include some really outstanding pre-McGee crime fiction, the Travis McGee novels are most certainly the zenith of his legacy. In many ways, this fabulous series is the polar opposite of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. Whereas the Spenser series eventually settled for being great entertainment as it moved forward through the years, Travis McGee just got better. When John D. MacDonald burned out, and wrote what he considered a clunker in the Travis McGee series, he took a break from it. When he returned to it, it was what I call a Sinatra moment. It is much like the famous story of Sinatra in Mexico, his smooth voice hemorrhaging, his career as a singer in jeopardy. When he recovered, the smoothness his voice had during the Big Band era was but an echo, replaced by a wonderful rich resonance. And that’s what happened to MacDonald’s McGee novels, which had always been terrific reads. McGee himself had matured to some degree, and MacDonald began dealing with life and mortality, and the price McGee had paid for living life on his own terms. The resonance would reach its zenith in The Lonely Silver Rain, which turned out to be goodbye for one of the great writers, and one of the greatest series protagonists in American fiction.

If you’re unfamiliar with McGee, or the basic premise of the series, McGee was not a detective, but a tarnished white knight, a tall, muscular beach bum who loved the beach bunnies, and lived on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale he’d won in a card came — thus the boat’s name, Busted Flush. His adventures involved two types, but there were always women, remaining true to the genre. From time to time McGee did salvage work, recovering something which involved great danger or risk, and was generally believed lost without McGee’s help. His fee was exorbitant, and kept him solvent for long periods so that he could play the beach bum, live off the grid, on his own terms. The second type was helping out a friend. Sometimes the friend was male, a victim of some con or other, usually involving a woman somewhere underneath. Often, however, the catalyst was female, a wounded, damaged bird who needed McGee’s help. This gave birth to many tender moments, as well as some pulse-pounding action.

To hear the uber-sensitive PC knocks on this classic series, you’d think McGee was a lout, and a misogynist, because, you know, he appreciates the fairer sex, and doesn't act like a monk in a monastery when he sees one. That’s utterly ridiculous, especially considering the element is a very integral part of a genre MacDonald was being absolutely true to. If anything, MacDonald wrote McGee as too moralizing in regard to his intimate couplings, despite the fact that he was single, and residing on a boat moored in Lauderdale. These were real women, ones men could recognize from experience. They were good, bad, and everything in between, just like the men. They were not modern-day snowflakes. There were memorable women of low character, and strong and vital women like Gretal and Chookie and Anne. The good ones passed through McGee’s life all too briefly, for one reason or another. One of those women, in fact, hangs over this entry like a sad fog:

“Once in a great while, like once every fifty miles, I even got a look at a tiny slice of the Gulf of Mexico, way off to the right. And remembered bringing the Flush down this coast with Gretal aboard. And wished I could cry as easily as a child does.”

One of the most poignant moments in the series was a letter written to him by a long lost love and it reverberated back through many books in the series. It was terrific writing, and from a feminine viewpoint MacDonald was sensitive enough to tell it from. McGee enjoyed the opposite sex, but it was always mutual. Because the series began in the 1960s and endured until MacDonald died in the 1980s, there is some mild sexism, but that is all. MacDonald occasionally, in the early books especially, perhaps overemphasized McGee's ability to restore a wounded bird with his maleness. But that was the character, and the genre. McGee also grew as a human being over time as the series became more and more resonant.

Travis McGee was the prototype for Jack Reacher, who is a stripped down version of him. McGee lamented all the connections society tries to hoist upon us. He couldn’t live off the grid entirely, but he kept as much distance between himself and conformity, a paper trail, as he could, while still remaining a part of the world. The series is laced with social commentary, some of it concerning Florida, or Mexico, but often the world as a whole. Once the teddy bear-like economist, Meyer, became an integral part of the series, it became smarter, the observations on society and human nature more pointed — and deadly accurate in many cases. There was violence, even brutality, but not in your face, or there for shock value. When violence came, it was deadly and realistic, but not blood and guts. MacDonald, like Parker, had lines he wouldn’t cross. You’d never find a graphically described brutalization and rape of a child, told from three different viewpoints, as you might in crime fiction written by women nowadays — yes, women — whose victims are nearly always women or children, and the perpetrator invariably, of course, a man. When the story on occasion did lead to a horrific act, as it did in one particular entry in the series (Bright Orange for the Shroud) it was written in such a way that the reader felt agonizing sympathy and deep sadness, not horror and shock. MacDonald’s writing and stories had class, they weren’t crass. The same could be said of Robert B. Parker.

Free Fall in Crimson is one of the best books of the series, in my opinion, despite it being a bit more free-wheeling narratively than other entries. I wanted to review a few favorites first, before going back to the early ones and moving forward, so I began here. Free Fall in Crimson begins on an April night aboard the Busted Flush, as Ron Easterland asks McGee to help him look into the death of his father, Ellis Easterland. Riddled with cancer, he was beaten to death in Citrus City, apparently meeting someone. But who? There is a lot of money involved, an ex-wife — he had a string of them — and a young woman named Anne Renzetti, with whom the older Easterland had taken up. While Meyer sails off with lady friend Aggie Sloane for a romantic liaison, McGee pokes around and discovers that outlaw bikers who starred in a couple of low budget films may or may not be involved. That leads him to the director of those films, who is now shooting a film about hot air balloons in Iowa.

Anne Renzetti is quite different from what McGee thought, and their interaction is classic McGee. She’s just been embarrassingly jilted before she even got to first base, and decides to use McGee to get over it. He feels uneasy about it, not wanting to turn her down and hurt her further on the one hand, but not really wanting to go through with it on the other. So he shows up, and breathes a sigh of relief when the very nice Anne comes to her senses and changes her mind. Of course, once they spend a little time together, eating, talking, she changes her mind again, for different reasons, and McGee is much more amenable to the idea. Anne is only one of three strong females in this particular entry — four, if you count Lysa Dean. McGee’s initial encounter with Anne is the type of situation for which the series is frequently knocked by a few. However, if the same situation, the exact same circumstances, were told from Anne’s perspective, the same group knocking it would be completely cool with it. But we don’t hear it from Anne’s head, we hear it from McGee’s, who understands exactly what’s going on with her, and within limits, tries to do the right thing.

A lot happens before we get to Iowa and the really stellar part of this Travis McGee novel. McGee looks up old pal Ted Blaylock, who runs a biker joint. He’s a paraplegic running out of time, and he and McGee have a connection going back to their time in the war. This is where the second excellent female character enters the narrative, as a skinny half-Seminole girl named Mitt is very much in love with Ted, and has been taking care of him, helping run his place. There are some poignant moments derived from the situation, both Ted and Mitt wonderfully written by MacDonald. What happens and its aftermath, the fallout, connect later in the narrative when McGee needs backup.

Next we get to revisit the beautiful sex-pot, Lysa Dean, from The Quick Red Fox. If you’ve read the series like many of us, we last saw Lysa sliding across the floor on her keister where McGee put her, spurning the actress's aggressive advances — yep, McGee turned down more than a few in this series, but you never hear about that. In Free Fall, in fact, McGee laments that he’s always wanted more than just the fleeting connections, facing up to the wide swath he’s cut through the opposite sex over the years.

It’s like old times for Travis and Lysa — almost — but MacDonald has improved as a writer in the books between Quick Red Fox and Free Fall, and I find the Lysa Dean here a much better character now that she’s a bit older. She’s still Lysa, and you never know if she’s being real or playing a part, but she’s more mature, and you get a sense she’s more self-aware. MacDonald’s description of the Mexican designed house she lives in, and Lysa Dean herself, as she gets out of the pool and greets him after all those years, is a terrific piece of writing. It is a single paragraph that takes up the entire page in the version with the fabulous introduction by Carl Hiaasen. It’s marvelous, worth reading twice! And there are lovely passages later about the hot air balloons:

“We moved in silence, looking at the flat rich country. We heard the birdsongs, heard a chain saw in the woodlot, heard horses whinny. Children ran and waved at us. We crossed small country roads and once saw our reflection in a farm pond.”

Armed with a sham letter of introduction from Lysa, McGee heads to Rosedale Station, Iowa. He meets hostility, because the town is angry about director Kesner’s film, and how it’s affecting the town. But there is far more to it than that. McGee meets another great female character in Joya. She is the woman in charge of the hot air balloons. Mistaking McGee for a Fed, she reveals to McGee the horrific reason everyone is so hostile toward the film crew. McGee also discovers a formidable enemy, in one of the bikers who may or may not have been involved in Ellis Easterland’s death. But it may be what he’s involved in now that will be the catalyst for one of the best endings of the entire series.

The conclusion to Free Fall in Crimson to the main story-line is not a conclusion at all, but only a prelude to a brutal and sad ending for a lot of people we hoped would stay around. The prelude involves the hot air balloons, and a mob more frightening than the folks with torches in Frankenstein. The chase, some through the air, some on foot, and the casualties, is exciting, nearly heart-pounding. That sequence is some of the finest writing of the entire series. And that’s no easy feat, considering how many wonderful moments there are in the series — or how many there are just in Free Fall in Crimson. But if that’s the quake, then what happens next is the aftershocks. They keep coming, until Meyer’s life is forever changed.

Perhaps only Boone Waxwell in Bright Orange for the Shroud is a more dangerous adversary in the series. But even that’s not a sure call. McGee reflects on lost chances, poignant goodbyes, and MacDonald gives us some breathtakingly written passages of description. Plus Free Fall is a terrific story, with great movement within the narrative. As a minor caveat, it’s probably best not to ponder the plausibility of someone using the Krugerrand to broker a drug deal, and just enjoy the ride. It’s a ride on the wings of one of the greatest writers of fiction during the twentieth-century. I know friends who prefer his standalone novels, but some of John D. MacDonald’s best moments as a writer came in the Travis McGee series. It’s the kind of series that has a cumulative effect. Each entry is like a tile in a mosaic, each additional one adding color and story until the picture was complete. The picture is as complete as it will ever be, because unlike current trends, it ended with The Lonely Silver Rain. Someone had the class, and maybe the good sense, to realize no one could ever duplicate MacDonald’s voice. At least so far…

“Okay. Okay. Okay. But, by God, it seemed that an awful lot of people were into dying. The ‘in’ thing this year, apparently. No chance for practice. You had to do it right the first and only time you got to do it. And you were never quite certain when your chance was coming. Stay braced at all times.”

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover. However, my copy of this features a man apparently plunging to his doom after falling out of a hot air balloon. That’s accurate which proves that you can’t always believe old adages.

Travis McGee agrees to look into the murder of a wealthy man. Rich guys are getting bumped off all the time in crime stories, but the twist here is that this fella was already dying of cancer. Was it just a robbery gone bad or was someone looking for an angle to get his estate? McGee finds a possible connections to biker clubs and Hollywood, and he turns to some old friends for help in gaining access to both of those communities.

This is a pretty solid crime novel overall. McGee gets to do his usual thing of acting as both con man and detective to try and figure out who killed the rich old bastard and there’s a decent mystery for him to unravel. The social commentary and McGee’s ennui with modern life are toned down a lot at this point almost as if MacDonald was writing him as being more accepting of the world although there is one memorable rant in which Travis bitches mightily about how he keeps getting put into more and more computer databases. I don’t think McGee would have been a big user of social media.

Since we’re up to 1982 we also see a reduction in some of the sexism that goes along with the adventures of the ole Sea Cock. In fact, Trav is a one woman man in this one after hooking up with a pretty hotel manager. Of course, she only got that job after being the secretary and lover of the rich old bastard who died, and she lucked into the gig after that. Because a woman could never just earn an important job like running a hotel if she hadn’t been trained in the ways of business by the guy she was banging. And the lady that Meyer has a romantic interlude with is also a successful owner of a chain of newspapers, but of course she had to inherit the business from her late husband. That’s even less important than all the work she did to get into bikini shape for her vacation. So it’s not exactly a great example of feminism, but baby steps are welcome at this point.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spring is finally here and it's time to work on my tan. John D. MacDonald published twenty-one Travis McGee mysteries (between 1964 and 1984) narrated by his weary "salvage consultant" who often agrees to locate missing persons or items, 52-foot houseboat The Busted Flush docked in Fort Lauderdale serving as McGee's office. MacDonald was one of the earliest authors to use themed titles for their series and his brilliant use of color not only offered a visual motif to help readers distinguish each one, but generated some of my favorite titles: The Deep Blue Good-By, A Tan and Sandy Silence, The Lonely Silver Rain, etc.

Concluding my MacDonald/McGee jag is Free Fall In Crimson. Published in 1981, this entry combines at least three areas of interest for the author--dirty motorcycle gangs, moviemaking and hot air balloons--that make for very unlikely running partners, but propel the novel forward with the detail and menace that MacDonald keeps supplying with each novel. Our sleuth is introduced aboard his boat talking with Ron Esterland, a talented young painter who harbors some guilt for his estrangement from his father Ellis, a ball-busting prick who, while suffering from cancer, was mysteriously beaten to death nearly two years ago at a rest stop outside Citrus City.

An estate worth $3.5 million after taxes was left to Ron's half-sister Romola, who suffered a severe skull fracture from a bicycle fall in L.A. and died before her father. The IRS took a chunk of the estate, leaving $1 million to Romola's mother, Josephine Laurant, a film actress. No arrests were made in the beating of Ellis Esterland. His son dangles a $10,000 expense account at McGee to provide him closure with his father. McGee consults with his neighbor Meyer, a retired economist, who knows Ellis Esterland's personal secretary and partner Anne Renzetti. Traveling to Naples, where Anne works as a hotel manager, McGee finds what he feels is a kindred spirit with Anne, who like him, has had to pick up the pieces after the death of someone she loved, or felt she loved.

"I've been over it ten thousand times. It seems so pointless, dying like that. I wouldn't admit it to myself at the time, but I did later: I was relieved. I'd been bracing myself to go all the way with him. Through all the pain. Caring for him when he became helpless. I was getting myself charged up to really do a job. But at the same time I dreaded it. Which is natural. He didn't love me. He sort of liked me. I had good lines and I was obedient, like a show dog. And I sort of loved him.

"There can be a habit of love, I think. You justify the way you are living by telling yourself that love leaves you no other choice. And so you are into love. Women stay with dreadful men. You see it all the time. You wonder why. You know they are wasting their lives. You know they are worth more than what they have. But they stay on and on. They grow old staying on and on. They say it's love so often to themselves, it does become love. I can't understand the Anne Renzetti I was then. I look back and I don't understand her at all. We're all lots of people, I guess. We become different people in response to different times and places, different duties. Maybe in a lifetime we become a very limited bunch of people when, in fact, we could become many many more--if life moved us around more.

"Well, it moved me here and I know who I am now, and I will stay with this life for as long as I can. I never even suspected who I might really be. If it hadn't been for that new manager falling asleep at the wheel, I might never have known about this Anne. You can't miss what you don't know, can you? Maybe that's why we all have that funny little streak of sadness from time to time. We are missing something and don't even know what it is, or whether it will ever be revealed to us."

McGee and Meyer visit the River County Sheriff and after Meyer presents credentials as a "Certified Guarantor," McGee gets to study the case file on Ellis Esterland. He concludes that the victim was at that rest stop for a business meeting gone bad. The deputy investigating the murder is a member of a motorcycle club and found bike tracks he suspects could have been made by the killer, laying in wait for Esterland. While Meyer returns to Fort Lauderdale to entertain a newspaper publisher he's fancy with, McGee heads back to Naples to chat with Esterland's doctor, who reveals that he had suggested his late patient try hallucinogens to manage his pain.

McGee and Anne take a roll in the sheets. He shares his theory that Esterland was murdered in a drug buy gone bad, but this is shot down by Anne, who thinks she can account for all of her ex's finances. Recalling that some unaccounted for Krugerrand was discovered in one of Esterland's suits after his death, she has to admit he could've had some funds stashed on the side, used to spend on a treatment he'd have been too proud to tell anyone about. McGee connects the biker tracks with Josie Laurant's boyfriend Peter Kesner, a film director who shot to prestige with two low budget biker pictures that were hits, starring two real-life bikers as anti-heroes "Dirty Bob" and "The Senator."

Seeking out an Army buddy named Ted Blaylock who runs a biker bar and tattoo parlor, McGee confirms a biker "legend" that Dirty Bob and The Senator killed Ellis Esterland. Operating on the theory that their director Peter Kesner put them up to snuffing out Esterland so that Josie would inherit his estate, McGee visits an old flame in L.A., TV game show producer Lysa Dean. She shares the gossip she has on Josie & Peter and Dirty Bob, alias Desmin Grizzle, all in Iowa shooting a runaway production about hot air ballooning called Free Fall. She provides McGee cover as a network consultant making a TV show about the film business and McGee heads to Iowa to confront Esterland's killer or killers.

I had begun to feel a little bit like Sellers in his immortal Being There. I felt no urge to enrich either Ron Esterland or myself. And no urge to punish Josie Laurant any more than she was going to be punished by the gods of stupidity at some time in that future which was getting ready to crash down on her. I was a fake consultant in the employ of Lysa Dean, queen of the game shows. I represented, to Kesner, a chance for free promotion of a motion picture that would probably never be shown in the unlikely event it was ever completed.

I had zigged and zagged until, finally, I had completely confused myself. I had spent some of Ron's money and had myself a nice balloon ride, and I wished heartily that Meyer would happen along, listen, and tell me what to do next.

There's a lot of zigging and zagging in Free Fall In Crimson, the nineteenth entry in the Travis McGee series. The good part in that MacDonald never tires, holding so many hoops for the reader to leap through--estate beneficiaries, a dark haired and dark eyed hotel manager, straight motorcycle clubs, outlaw motorcycle clubs, a biker bar brawl, Hollywood, movie stars, hot air balloons, behind the scenes intrigue--that he can't be accused of getting too old in the tooth. Desmin Grizzle/ Dirty Bob develops into a grim reaper who kills more people than Freddy Kruger and strikes such existential terror into Meyer that MacDonald would need to resolve it in Cinnamon Skin.

I glanced at Meyer. There was going to be no help there. It happens sometimes. I think it is the deep unwavering conviction that life is about to end. It is an ultimate fear, immobilizing, squalid. It crowds everything else out of the mind. There is no room for hope, no chance of being saved. I have seen it happen to some very good men, and most of them did indeed die badly and soon, and the ones who did not die were seldom the same again. Were a man to awaken from sound sleep to the dry-gourd rattle of a diamondback coiled on his chest, head big as a fist, forked tongue flickering, he would go into that dreadful numbness of the ultimate fright.

I don't feel that Anne Renzetti, motorcycle gangs or Hollywood gel in terms of story well enough to rank this as the best entry I've read so far--that would be The Empty Copper Sea--but what thrills me about the Travis McGee series is how MacDonald uses his iconoclastic sleuth to explore questions about happiness and a life well lived, questions that are far more compelling to me than what weapon Mr. Body was killed with and in what room. In these mysteries, I never cease to learn something about criminal activity, self-defense or how to lie to the police, info I hope I never need, though John MacDonald has me convinced I'm far more likely to at some point than how to order a martini or acquit myself in one of Ian Fleming's casinos.

[Darwin8u · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not the fall that kills you... it's the sudden stop at the end."
- Douglas Adams



I'm a huge fan of John D. MacDonald. I think he is funny and sharp. He has a certain pulp formula and sticks with it and usually the cake rises, browns, and turns out just fine. But this book was just kinda -- meh. Which is surprising because you would think a book with motorcycle gangs, pornography rings, and people falling out of hot air balloons would be kinda exciting. It just wasn't. It was like he read Around the Wold in 80 days, watched a couple James Bond flicks, and followed that up with an Easy Rider/road movie marathon and felt he could easily combine the three things. He managed to combine these elements, but the novel just didn't have enough tickle, lift or torque.

To me it felt like MacDonald wasn't sailing this novel. He had it tied down and was just letting nature take its course. There was no emotional texture and the narrative was just kinda straight. I knew where he was going and by the end I just didn't really care. AND, I did't even mention one of my MacDonald peeves. Sex. Hey, I think sex is nifty and neato and all the rest. Sure sure. But MacDonald writing about it is like talking dirty with an unmarried uncle. No thanks. I'll pass.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bikers, Balloonists, and Producers

Once MacDonald gets his hook in your jaw with the Travis McGee series, just try to wriggle out of its grasp. Can’t be done. For those who have dipped their toes into this classic American literature, there’s just too much here to back away from.

In brief, McGee is a guy who lives in a houseboat in Florida and does favors for people, hoping maybe to salvage half of what’s recovered in what are generally situations where the authorities can’t get involved. Besides the action, what these novels are often known for is extensive commentary on modern life. McGee doesn’t like the 9 to 5 world and doesn’t like the overdevelopment and overpopulation of his beloved Florida coast. But, more importantly, what makes him tick isn’t necessarily tuning in and dropping out, but being a white knight on a steed and doing the right thing for folks that need such help.

Free Fall in Crimson is one of the later novels in the series and features an aging MCGee who reminisces about the past and is at this point borderline monogamous. He’s asked to investigate a mysterious death of an old rich guy in a roadside rest stop that no one’s made much sense of and stumbles into a veritable nest of vipers that nearly proves his undoing.

The start of the book is perhaps a bit slower and more plodding than some of the other books in the series. But stay tuned, there’s plenty of action to dive into before it all ends. There’s also a bit less of McGee’s philosophical interludes here, but the commentary is still there - just skillfully worked into the story. There’s an exploration of the nature of evil and, besides the monster whose evil is obvious, there’s others who through greed and lust also fall into evil little by little. There’s a thorough indictment of Hollywood here and all the horrors that can be hidden away and covered up by fame and fortune and the people who will go along with it and cover it up. The comparison of Hollywood with small-town apple pie can’t be missed.

All in all, a satisfying read that might not be the best one to start the series with.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only 3.5 stars

Sadly, an uneven and often long-winded tale, the 19th outing for MacDonald, and his heart just doesn't seem to be in it.

Much of the plot is clever, but the dialogue is often listless. The first climax is very nicely plotted, followed by a truly irritating info-dump of resolution. The final climax is short and sweet and brutal, followed by a nice little cruise with McGee's current love.


Full size image here

As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.

A bit unfocused to start. Neither McGee or Meyer seem very sharp.

29%
It's a bit strange and sad as McGee now often thinks of Gretel, and their conversations and experiences, and we only come to know her long after her death.

An example:
In childhood I was taught that every pleasure has its price. As an adult I learned that the reprehensible and dreadful sin is to hurt someone purposely, for no valid reason except the pleasure of hurting. Gretel, in her wisdom about me, said one night, "You are never entirely here. Do you know that? You are always a little way down the road. You are always fretting about consequences instead of giving yourself up totally to the present moment."

Which leads to this quite wonderful observation:
Add those ingredients together and stir well, and you can come up with a lasting case of psychological impotence.
Meyer said to me, "You spend too much time in the wings, watching your performance onstage, aching to rewrite your own lines, your own destiny."
"And just what the hell is my destiny?" I can never forget his strange smile.
"It is a classic destiny. The knight of the windmills. The man rolling the stone up the mountain. The endlessness of effort, Travis, so that the effort becomes the goal."

Hot air balloons

Full size image here

85%
Huge info-dump. Quite boring and lazy. It's sadly clear MacDonald's heart is not in this or recent books.

99%
Short, sweet and brutal final climax.


Notes and Quotes:

I had so often in the past seen dumb domestic animals in Africa so aware of the secret intent of the people who had bred and reared them and earned their trust that they could hardly walk, knowing they were being led to a distant place of slaughter. Laurens Van Der Post, The Night of the New Moon
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Once in a great while, like once every fifty miles, I even got a look at a tiny slice of the Gulf of Mexico, way off to the right. And remembered bringing the Plush down this coast with Gretel aboard. And wished I could cry as easily as a child does.
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(Perhaps MacDonald read the best of all detective noir stories? The Last Good Kiss By James Crumley
"You better comfort me with apples, fella. Or is it roses? And stay me with flagons, whatever that means. Always wondered. And for God's sake you better be discreet or it'll undermine any authority I have left around here."
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"Myths. Meyer says we build our own myths. We live in the flatlands and the myths are our mountains, so we build them to change the contours of our lives, to make them more interesting."
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In childhood I was taught that every pleasure has its price. As an adult I learned that the reprehensible and dreadful sin is to hurt someone purposely, for no valid reason except the pleasure of hurting.
Gretel, in her wisdom about me, said one night, "You are never entirely here. Do you know that? You are always a little way down the road. You are always fretting about consequences instead of giving yourself up totally to the present moment."
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Add those ingredients together and stir well, and you can come up with a lasting case of psychological impotence.
Meyer said to me, "You spend too much time in the wings, watching your performance onstage, aching to rewrite your own lines, your own destiny."
"And just what the hell is my destiny?" I can never forget his strange smile.
"It is a classic destiny. The knight of the windmills. The man rolling the stone up the mountain. The endles effort of Travis so that the effort becomes the goal."
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What I did not want, most of all, was to become some kind of symbol of challenge, so that their buddies would look me up to take a chop and try their luck. I wanted no part of any OK Corral syndrome. I had long outgrown that kind of testicular lunacy. People who become legends in their own time usually have very little time left.
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"Time flies, friends flee, temperance fuggit."
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Travis sings, as did the now dead Tush in a previous book:
"Roll me over, in the clover. .. With 'is 'ead tooked underneath ‘is arm, 'e' aunts the bluiddy tower. ... Never let a sailor put his hand above your kneeeee..." And other tender love songs and ballads of the years gone by.
-
...by God, it seemed that an awful lot of people were into dying. The "in" thing this year, apparently. No chance for practice. You had to do it right the first and only time you got to do it. And you were never quite certain when your chance was coming. Stay braced at all times.
-
I had begun to feel a little bit like Sellers in his immortal Being There.
-
I had zigged and zagged until, finally, I had completely confused myself. I had spent some of Ron's money and had myself a nice balloon ride, and I wished heartily that Meyer would happen along, listen, and tell me what to do next.
-
Lecturing oneself does not cure the megrims. It does not create the indifference one seeks.
-
"He'll want to get into something rough. He'll look for a chance to try to recover his self-respect. And it might be a very close play indeed to try to keep him from getting himself killed. He seeks that absolution, the end of shame. And that is a primitive reaction."


Bonus. From the 1970 "Darker Than Amber" movie starring Rod Taylor, pictures of the producers' ideas of McGee's "The Busted Flush":


Full size image here


Full size image here


Full size image here

And finally, two great blogs about John D. MacDonald, McGee and the rumoured-never-written novel where McGee dies"...

The Birth of Travis McGee (fascinating)
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.co...

"Black Border for McGee" (rumours surrounding a final book, never published)
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.co...

.

[Daniel Villines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Within my mind, small little brain cells hold memories that I can no longer access. They are there, but the little neural pathways that serve as the bridges to my consciousness have been removed. All that is left of these memories are general feelings about their disposition as being good, bad, or indifferent. The Travis McGee novels bring to mind a lot of good general feelings and in my younger days, these books served as a gateway into reading.

Free Fall in Crimson was a joy to read. There were certain points throughout this book where those neuron bridges snapped into place and trapped memories came into being as if they had never left. The story is interesting, but it's nothing innovative or original beyond the mystery novel that it is. Travis McGee, who evolved in the '70s, does not quite make a full transition from the height of the Hugh Hefner era into the modern day world. Nonetheless, this was great trip down memory lane.

First Read: 1982ish

[Mackenzie Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second reading of Free Fall In Crimson. Our hero starts to feel creeping age slowing him down a little and wonders whether it's time to find another line of work, when he's hired by a successful painter to discover the reason his terminally ill father was beaten to death in the middle of nowhere. The search leads him into the arms of Anne Renzetti, a hotelier who was acquainted with the dead man, but also forces him to enter the dangerous world of outlaw motorcyclists, uncover a porn ring and a trail that winds like a rattlesnake and proves twice as deadly.
Beautifully written, fabulously plotted and filled to the brim with social commentary still relevant today.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid entry in the McGee series. Not as much social commentary as in some of the previous books but also missing is the slightly offensive remarks about women & sex that sometimes appear; that is a trade-off I can live with!

[JoAnna Spring · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a self-loathing fiction snob. Cliched characters, bad dialog, unbelievable plots...these things make me crazy and chip away at the limited resolve I have to venture away from non-fiction. I want to love novels. I really, really do. But it doesn't often work. As a result, most of my reading is heavy - non-fiction or classic, proven novels, such as cheery Ethan Frome or Jane Eyre.

But sometimes a girl needs a break! A book for the beach! For this, I am so glad to have found John D. MacDonald and the Travis McGee series. Light, but not too light. Sex, guns and murder written for people with brains. I. Love. It.

Travis McGee describes himself as a "salvage consultant." He works to get back stuff that was taken from people. Typically his clients were fleeced legally and Trav works outside the law to earn retribution. He gets to keep half of whatever he reclaims.

But the plot of these 22 books is the least of the reasons to love them. Though they were written from the 60s to the 80s, the books feel very contemporary (with only the occasional reference to state-of-the-art tape decks). Trav and his best bud Meyer are intelligent, thoughtful, stand-up guys who also happen to live on house boats and be beach bums. Their observations of the world and people are timeless and refreshing. This, from Dress her in Indigo, sums it up nicely:

Old friend, there are people - young and old - that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-jumbo by a young one, or loud lessons from the scripture by an old one. We are all comical, touching, slapstick animals, walking on our hind legs, trying to make it a noble journey from womb to tomb, and the people who can't see it all that way bore hell out of me.

There is a plot, however, to Free Fall in Crimson, and I imagine you'd like me to get on with it...

There is this dude, Ron, you see, and his very wealthy dad was killed, presumably by a mugger, at a rest stop. The police investigate and determine it was random. Ron isn't so sure and asks Travis to investigate. There were technicalities with the dad's sizable estate that cast suspicion on a few swarthy folks. The trail entangles Travis with biker gangs, the movie industry and a bunch of hot air ballonists. There is a porn ring and a small town mob. The story keeps the book moving quickly and many interesting characters get to play, including Lysa Dean, the sexy, shallow movie star Travis worked for in A Quick Red Fox.

Free Fall in Crimson is a late McGee - written in '81 - and there are only two stories left in the series. It is obvious Trav (and MacDonald) are getting older. The last few books have hinted at Trav's retirement or demise and he is obtaining an unattractive arrogance and detachment to the mayhem he consistently invites.

Throughout the series, however, Travis and Meyer have been consistently lovable and the books have been reliably good. A great, semi-mindless read. I'm nervous that I am coming to their end. If you haven't read these books, I'd recommend giving them a go. Lovers of Carl Hiaasen and USA's Burn Notice will find many similarities.

There are always a handful of observations worth dog-earing the pages for in every McGee. I leave you now with my favorite bit from the book - Meyer relating an encounter on the beach:

There was a gaggle of lanky young pubescent lassies on the beach, one of the early invasions of summer, all of them from Dayton, Ohio, all of them earnest, sunburnt and inquisitive. They were huddled around a beached sea slug, decrying its exceptional ugliness, and I took a hand in the discussion, told them its life pattern, defensive equipment, normal habitat, natural enemies, and so on. And I discovered to my great pleasure that this batch was literate! They had read books. Actual books. They had all read Lives of a Cell and are willing to read for the rest of their lives. They had all been exposed to the same teacher in the public school system there, and he must be a fellow of great conviction. In a nation floundering in functional illiteracy, sinking into the pre-chewed pulp of television, it heartens me to know that here and there are little groups of young-uns who know what an original idea tastes like, who know that the written word is the only possible vehicle for transmitting a complex concept from mind to mind, who constantly flex the muscles in their heads and make them stronger.

[Sunhawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fifth of these in a year. I have read these when I have run out of library books, and in order (as they're collected in a big tome) and so have gotten a more concentrated diet of Travis than when I was reading MacDonald's more varied oeuvre while work-dancing before finals in college. I have remarked before how I enjoy the way he seasons his narrative with lengthy, pithy, pissy commentary about what's happening to Florida and, by extension, to the rest of the US. His characterizations are enviably deft; read with the eye of a story-teller and wannabe writer, I always learn about balance and thrust from this master of the easy-reading book. I need more!

[Harv Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the better Travis McGee novels, in my opinion, although I am sometimes surprised to find that a GoodReads reader I respect trashes a McGee novel I absolutely love while also praising to the skies another McGee novel that just barely worked for me.

Tastes vary.

Books I love may be books you will hate; the way around this, I think, is to find GoodReads readers with tastes similar to your own. That way, you know if they ★★★★★ a book that at the very least you will find it tolerable, and you may just find it a thrill.

Robert B. Parker used a shrink/girlfriend for Spenser to put a PC spin on everything he was doing and thinking, as they talked about his cases. The weakness in the Travis McGee series is, first that John D. created Travis in the Sixties era of Hugh Hefner, and second that although Meyer softens Trav, there is no way to make Travis McGee politically correct by any decade’s standard other than the Sixties.

John D. was by now (FREE FALL is ©1981) responding to this sexist backlash. Slightly. I think John D. was also on the final stretch of his run, and had recovered his second wind.

--

From CRIMSON:

She dipped a finger in her remaining half inch of Moselle and drew a slow circle on my chest. “Hmmm,” she said.

“Hmmm what?”

“I guess everybody has heard that ancient joke about how do porcupines make love.”

“Very very carefully,” I said.

She reached and set her empty glass aside. Her eyes danced. “So?”

I gathered her in. “Let me know if it gets to be not carful enough.”

--

Actually, my favorite part of this puppy is when Trav jumps out of a hot air balloon to avoid being killed.

This resonates with me because I’ve done a bit of hot air ballooning. First off, did you know that Hot Air Ballooners have to file a flight plan? This has always seemed absurd to me, and maybe it is no longer necessary, it’s been awhile since my last ride. On my last balloon ride, there was a Velcro-failure on the third group: there were no deaths, since it happened at a low altitude, but the riders were pretty banged-up, and some of them may have gone to the hospital. Actually, I think that because of this near disaster, and others, Velcro-strips may have been eliminated from Hot Air Balloons. An Internet search is showing an improved balloon circa 2013 without a Velcro strip. Now, apparently, the pilot has an on/off valve at the top of the balloon to dump out hot air on an as-needed basis: Much Better! On my rides the pilots had a cord to pull that would open a Velcro strip in the side of the balloon to quickly dump the air out to make landings safer in the event of high wind. Otherwise the wind would drag the basket along, banging the passengers around. Problem was, if the pilot used the Velcro strip on the first or second trips, he would have to re-assemble and re-inflate the balloon from scratch, which would take time and expend propane. The second ride banged the balloon around quite a bit, which apparently loosened but didn’t quite break the Velcro strip. Until the flight of the third group. I watched them go up slowly…I turned away and was talking to a friend who stopped and suddenly pointed…I turned and saw the balloon going down quickly on the other side of a hill…I didn’t see it, but the basket hit an angled soft dirt hillside. I remember watching an earlier balloon being assembled and inflated, on my first ride ever, and worrying out-loud about the Velcro: “Velcro? This thing is held together with Velcro??” That pilot told me: “I’ve never had a Velcro failure. I’ve never even heard of a Velcro failure.”

--

Anyway, Travis McGee takes on a Biker Gang, Hollywood Power Players, Stuntwomen, and possibly the most frightening creature imaginable: an actress Superstar. @hg47

[Nik Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this 19th novel, McGee is tasked with finding out who murdered the millionaire and cancer-riddled Ellis Esterland. His enquiries take him into the macho world of outlaw bikers, the crazy lives of film producers and actresses, and the dangerous pursuit of hot-air ballooning. This time around, his female companion is the luscious Anne Renzetti, ex-secretary of the murdered tycoon. Sometimes, his prose is hard-nosed and at other times, it’s lyrical, viz: ‘… moving in that sweet silence across the scents, the folds, the textures of the soft green April country’ when describing McGee’s first air-balloon journey.

MacDonald’s McGee crime books are hardboiled. Along the way, his first person narrative reveals the flawed American Dream.

Surprisingly, times haven’t changed – some 31 years later. As one character says, ‘But lots of terrible things are happening everywhere, I guess. Why is everybody getting so angry?’

Today, lack of driving standards is bemoaned. Nothing new there, then: ‘growling traffic, the trucks tailgating, the cowboys whipping around from lane to lane, and the Midwest geriatrics chugging slowly down the fast lanes, deaf to all honkings.’

Craftily, MacDonald uses Meyer to write about things that irk him, such as declining literacy. The Mayer speech is too long to reproduce here, but this is a taster: ‘In a nation floundering in functional literacy, sinking into the pre-chewed pulp of television, it heartens me to know that here and there are little groups of younguns who know what an original idea tastes like, who know that the written word is the only possible vehicle for transmitting a complex concept from mind to mind, who constantly flex the muscles of their heds and make them stronger… Nor will these children be victimized by the blurry nonsense of the so-called social sciences. The muscular mind is a cutting tool, and contemporary education seeks to take the edge off it.’

Yes, he breaks the rule about characters spouting long swathes of speech, but he seems to get away with it. Because he’s good, very good.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started off liking this 19th book in the Travis McGee series as it quickly delves into solving the mystery of why a guy dying of cancer gets beat to death at highway rest stop. McGee's investigation takes him to a biker bar run by an old war buddy in search of a lead, which he finds. And then he's off to Hollywood and Lyssa Dean, an actress he helped in The Quick Red Fox, to track down the Director and some bikers/actors from a biker-movie. She steers him to Iowa and the set of movie about hot air ballooning. After that it just felt like the energy left the book even though there is a formidable villain. The problem is we mostly hear about this bad ass second-hand, instead of seeing him live an in action. At least until the ending, where he shows up in the flesh. Doesn't have MacDonald's trademark rollercoaster sequence of climactic scenes as do so many of the McGee books. Instead we have a quick confrontation, with a partially recycled device from, I think, Bright Orange for the Shroud, and an older, wiser McGee (not a spoiler) survives again.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the "Travis McGee" adventures that I've read, so far this was the most gruesome, and cleverly written with the big bad guy on the loose!

Ronald Esterland went to visit Travis McGee asking a favor to look for his father's killer. The millionaire Ellis Esterland who was beaten up to death in Citrus City, on River County. McGee as a good salvage consultant get a lead on the two bikers Dirty Bob (Desmin Grizzle), and the Senator (Curley Hanner)whom both works for Peter Kasner writer/director/producer.

While McGee working as a fake consultant in "Take Five Productions" in the employ of Lysa Dean the queen of the game shows. Travis, followed Peter Kesner in Des Moisne to nail down the corrupt group. He also found out that they're in violation on Interstate transportation with obscene material. He then realized that these organization are dangerously beyond madness just to get to produce their movie "Free Fall".

[wally · Rating 3 out of 5]

27 jun 15
#52 from macdonald for me, the 19th travis mcgeee story. check out macdonald's other stories a rich lode of story well worth the read. before this i read The Green Ripper, a so-so story

28 jun 15
finished. good story. i liked it. in this one, mcgee is asked to discover what happened to ron esterland's father...and from that point the story follows a number of branches...to iowa, to los angeles, to a biker hangout called the oasis, and there is also a sideline, annie over in naples running a hotel now. there's some linkage to another mcgee story or two. The Quick Red Fox, for one and another story in which a hidey-hole behind a mirror on the busted flush plays a part...can't remember the name of that story. anyway, call it 3.5 stars. there's been a growing sense that mcgee is ready to hang up his cleats, the past few stories, the idea is expressed, questioning his ability to react, his timing...and in this one, he enlists a couple baddies to make the day. also, in this one, there is the first instance of mcgee referring to a stewardess as a "flight attendant". all other stories where a plane figures in the setting, it has been "stewardess". perhaps mcgee is becoming as politically correct as the rest of us! alas! high karooombugga! also...mcgee does not refer to his old blue rolls as "miss agnes" as much as he had done so in the past. and also, mcgee considers working for another, going to ron brown's boat yard. there is also a 40' leap from a balloon and all we get is a bum knee. ummmmmm. feel the force...ummmmmmm.

this story begins
we talked past midnight, sat in the deck chairs on the sun deck of the busted flush with the starry april sky overhead, talked quietly, and listened to the night. creak and sigh of hulls, slap of small waves against pilings, muted motor noises of the fans and generators and pumps aboard the work boats and the play toys.

"i don't really know how the law works," ron esterland said. "but i would think that if you arranged someone's death, even if he were dying already, you shouldn't inherit."

time place scene setting
* april, the busted flush, travis mcgee's 52' barge-like houseboat, slip f-18, bahia mar marina, fort lauderdale, florida
* a rest stop along the highway, seldom used, somewhat remote, where ellis esterland was beat to death
* eden beach, a hotel in naples, florida, 2nd floor single
* a motel west of the city limits, groveway motel
* beef 'n' it...restaurant
* river county sheriff's office...macdonald creates his own florida, at times using real names, real places, other times creating new counties, river county, although there is a real, indian river county, i don't think he means i.r. county...possible...ummm.
* annie rensetti's cabana, where travis and her meet, do the bump and grind
* the caper, ellis esterland's boat where annie & ellis spent time
* palmer hotel, naples, where esterland was last seen alive
* a dark bar of the palmer called the office
* dining room of the palmer
* a hospital where tim passes
* time's passage is noted with phrases, "friday morning"...a "fine april saturday"
* eden beach, 2nd floor single, naples, florida
* des moines, iowa, late monday night
* rosedale station, iowa tuesday morning
* the rosedale lodge, room 39 for mcgee, rooms 24-25 for some of the movie making folk
* rented pasture land near rosedale for the balloon launches
* coldwater canyon drive, near los angeles, home of lysa dean, the famous movie star
* the oasis, biker bar/restaurant, parts store, tattoo parlor
* the john meynard keynes meyer's cruiser
* sunday, june 21st...wednesday the 24th, thursday the 18th
* a twenty-four hour chicken
* a burgerboy
* sneads funeral home, bonahatchee, florida, everglades
* an el-1011, miami to los angeles
* story ends on an august afternoon snake river below naples, annie and travis, taking the long talked about cruise

a quote from the story
* the primary objective is to laugh.

characters major
* travis mcgee, 1st-person eye-narrator, our hero, salvage consultant, bachelor, veteran of a war
* meyer, friend of travis, neighbor at bahia mar
* ron esterland, painter, 34-year-old
* anne rinzetti, in naples, running a hotel, one of travis's women, and she had been ron esterland's father's secretary and spent time with the old man on his boat
* lysa "lee" dean from The Quick Red Fox...the former lee schontz, 1610 madison street, dayton ohio, now a big movie star
* dirty bob (and the senator) outlaw bikers, actual name, desmin grizzel...the senator is curly hanner
* joya murphy-wheeler, one of the balloonists, from ottuma, iowa
* preach...outlaw biker turned businessman, amos wilson by name, has a business called karma imports
* josephine laurant, movie star, in the balloon epic
* peter gerard kesner, made a couple biker films that were a smash but has failed since, is doing it all now genius that he is, on a balloon epic
* tim blaylock, travis mcgee's war-time friend, in poor healthy, runs owns operates manages the oasis, a biker bar-restaurant-parts store-tattoo parlor
* mits, female friend of tim blaylock, helps run the oasis, some seminole this that the other, full name, millicent waterhawk
* freaky jean, a dark-haired young girl, jean norman, on the scene of the balloon movie

characters minor, with names, without names, scene/setting type characters
* ron esterland's father, ellis esterland
* the wives of the father
* gavin and donnie, two bikers sent by preach to assist travis
* alpha, joya's sister, alan, her husband
* bruno the dog...walked jogged by joya
* the esterland wives of ron's old man:
* connie, ron's mother, wife #1, died when ron was 11
* judy prisco, the dancer, father married when ron was 12, divorced in 6 months
* josephine laurant, also a major figure, married when ron was 13
* daughter of the old man and one of the wives, josephine, romola
* sloane gallery, ron's paintings make a splash
* sarah issom, travis bought one of her paintings, she'd told ron that travis did a favor for her
* a man tending the plantings
* four fat women in shorts
* a very pretty lady behind the reception desk, marie, at the eden beach hotel that annie manages now, where travis stays
* mr luddwick, previous manager of eden beach hotel, annie was secretary to him
* his replacement was in an accident, annie covered, kept the job
* dr prescott mullen, ellis esterland's doc
* marcie jean mullen, prescott's wife, used to be marcie jean sensabaugh
* river county sheriff, milford "fish" hampton, who replaced the previous:
* dave banks, previous sheriff of river county
* the tourists were booming down the big roads
* a thin, middle-aged, weather-worn woman behind the desk
* a female dispatcher (her voice)
* a fat girl in a pale blue uniform, zelda
* a sallow man in baggy yellow slacks & a polynesian shirt, barner "barney" odum
* rick tate, a river county sheriff deputy
* debbie, rick tate's wife, middle daughter of dave banks, six years dead, previous sheriff of river county, they have four kids
* debbie's sister karen
* tidy ladies behind the desk/palmer hotel
* bearded bald bartender/palmer hotel bar, the office
* a young couple off in a corner
* three new customers
* a glum heavy woman
* aggie sloane, owner of byline, comes to florida, cruises with meyer in tow, or on board...and this is how macdonald dispatches meyer to other tasks so travis can get on with the show this is it!
* bellhop
* an angry fellow with a sharp knife
* men were working in the cement floor shed
* three of the brotherhood were on bar stools
* a doughty broad-faced young girl lay on the cot, lissa, getting a tattoo at the oasis, and the tat will blast ol ray right out of his skull
* big bess, previous bartender for time, job now held by mits
* scooter, whisker, stoney, biker names used by potsie, one of the three at the bar
* a very very flashy colombiano pistolero, has big bess stashed down at the hotel mutiny
* the corsairs, another biker gang in florida
* mike, knucks, two bikers at the oasis
* a group of fourteen-year-old ladies
* walter lowery, san francisco attorney, travis knows, uses him to get phone number for lysa dean with whom mcgee had a previous story see link aobe
* forty million dollars from hawaii...an almost for lysa dean, his name louie
* the big money's wife...who developed leukemia and put the keebosh on any plans for the money and lysa dean, her name muriel
* dana holtzer, lady lysa dean & travis know, now dana maguire, 4 kids one in the oven
* annie fired an assistant manager, hired a new guy
* romola was using the house of a woman who was temporarily in london
* cal, a thin brown indian-looking fellow standing by it, smoking, leaning against a tree...provides mits with a ride to hospital, a biker
* cal speaks of a "squad captain"
* past, ted helping a medic slide a wounded man onto a litter...when wounded to become paraplegic
* daviss gudd, a lawyer in west palm, lawyer for tim blaylock
* a nice little old lady in duluth (scamming the system)
* magoo, a biker who appears on scene with preach
* an oriental korean gardener for lysa dean
* a korean maid for lysa dean
* sam...hollywood man
* a tall thin old lady behind the oak registration desk...at the rosedale lodge, rosedale, iowa
* puss, skeeter, glory, cindy, pidge, cathy, heidi, gretel, annie, lysa...travis mcgee's women
* resident faa spook
* townie girls, townie dudes...rosedal, iowa
* eight balloon teams left...30 teams at one time
* a godawful little ferret-faced man to watch every cent spent
* chief cameraman, second unit director, script girl, lighting technician, some actors, some balloon people
* kitty, josie with tiger, fellow from joya's balloon, jake, mercer, linda...mercer is a camerman, linda harrigan is a stunt double lesbian, walter with the flu brought to des moines...all on the balloon movie set
* people trotting back and forth from chore to shore
* two men hopped out
* george (balloon crew)
* another man climbed into the basket
* david and ed, joya's balloon crew
* children ran & waved at us
* little sue...the balloon search/chase car
* fifteen-year-old karen hatcher, the rape movie sideline of the minions, killed in a car accident with another:
* james revere, seventeen-year-old
* forgan, f.b.i. agent sent to investigate the balloon movie minions...doesn't do much, acts stupid, leaves apparently
* a plump girl gave me the paper bag (burgerboy)
* lady at the lodge, only sister's grandson was jamie revere
* a member of that team who had broken his hand
* the pilot was a lean man with a deeply grooved face
* fifty or so young men came piling out
* two beefy blonde men cam running
* ted/search car guy
* benny, wicker killed a little old guy (mercer), davis--one of the high school guys, len
* a rumpled old man with a harelip...gave travis a ride
* a very fat woman in a van, gave travis a ride
* a young officer (cop), billy, his brother one of the high school seniors, in jail
* twelve high school seniors locked up, two dead (good/bad/ugly) in field, three in the hospital
* vennerman, a doc travis sees about his knee
* anthony allen...score
* diana fossi, girl from team of balloonists from shenandoah
* distributor of the rape tapes, x-lips label
* an attorney woeking on a pardon for grizzel
* a gaggle of lanky pubescent lassies on the beach/meyer...expounding on lives of a cell, a book apparently, that they read
* a lanky lady stalked by wearing a string bikini
* demon grizzel's mother, killed in a midnight brawl
* boone waxwell...seen his name in another story...and in this one, his size is compared to grizzel's size

real people, famous, fictionally famous
* laurens van der post, the night of the new moon, a quote before story begins.
* john leonard, private lives in the imperial city, a 2nd quote before story begins
* red baron
* hell's angels
* bandidos, western motorcycle gang
* fantasies, floridian motorcycle gang
* green bay packers (macdonald was a cheese-head!)
* fred allen
* amos & andy
* l.l. bean
* donquixote, implied
* gary bang pistons
* weber carb
* bergman/taylor
* manson (murders)
* charlie manson
* lord god
* sellers (being there)
* j edgar hoover
* jung (jungian)
* miss piggy
* bob hope
* jesus christ
* bogart
* ben franklin
* hefner
* jesus jumping h christ
* lord god
* burt reynolds
* disney elf
* muhammed ali
* mother of moses
* tom wolfe
* jay gould, diamond jim brudy, john ringling
* jimmy hoffa

[J.D. Frailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first Travis McGee/John D. MacDonald book, roughly 40 years ago, a hardback at a garage sale. I knew two people who were Travis McGee fans, both women, and both of them had read all 21 in the series.
A large part of the book centers around hot air balloons, and I would have sworn on my mother‘s grave there was a fight to the death inside an airborne balloon basket at the Albuquerque balloon festival, but no such thing occurred and the balloon action was in Iowa. Rereading the book was a nice trip down memory lane even though my memories were far off from reality. I will even bet I read it again someday 😉

[Henri Moreaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Free Fall in Crimson we have a dead millionaire, biker gangs, a hollywood movie set, pornography ring and Travis realising he's getting older and isn't as nimble as he previously was.

We commence the tale with the millionaires son coming to Travis to investigate his fathers mysterious death at a roadside rest stop far from his home and from there he slowly becomes tangled up in other schemes.

One of the better books of the series, everything since Tan and Sandy Silence has been good to really good and this one was no exception. Plot lines wound up well at the end and overall there was a good pace to the story line and a few throw backs to earlier books which is always a nice touch.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Another great McGee novel.

This is the first time I could tell that Trav was getting older. I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

What else is there to say? John D MacDonald was a really good writer.

This book did end in a way that leads directly to the next book and I'm really looking forward to it.

[Gu Kun · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much of a plot. Too much small talk.

[Victor Whitman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the best in the Travis McGee series. John D got even better with age.

[Bill Jenkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

The final balloon ride was exciting.

I'm taking a step back from the Travis McGee series again but I want to finish the series. I only have two novels to go. All the things I don't like about John D MacDonald's writing and his idea of what a Travis McGee novel should be came flooding back.

The first thing I dislike about MacDonald's McGee stories is his rambling writing. At the end of chapter seven is a good example; you can find a full six paragraphs of what I'm talking about. Just after McGee gets off the phone with Annie (a new character), McGee goes off thinking (MacDonald goes off writing):

..."Annie had been totally now. An immersion. So vital and hungry I had no need to be the man in the wings. I turned on the handy projector in the back of my head and ran through a box of slides, of still shots of her in the underwater green of the towel over the bed lamp, when she was biting into her lip and her eyes were wide and thoughtful, and she was shiny with the mists of effort. Being the neurotic that Meyer believes I am has the advantage of giving me a far narrower focus of pleasure than if I did not truly give a damn."...

So for me, I skim through this crap to get to the dialog or descriptions of what is going on.

The second thing which I dislike are the extremely evil characters in these novels. In this novel MacDonald describes a particularly evil sadistic killer. (There usually is one). Toward the end of the novel, there is a climatic scene that takes place which is exciting (reference my intro). In this action sequence most of the bad guys are done away with except one dude. This guy then goes on a rampage raping, mutilating and killing until McGee is the last man standing.

As the story unfolds, McGee goes way beyond what he was asked to do in the first place. It's like he keeps swatting a hornet's nest. He should have noted the hornets and then called in an exterminator. Instead he goes on swatting!

I've talked about the McGee novel formula in the past. You can see my reviews of previous McGee novels for this, particularly The Long Lavender Look. MacDonald in these later novels is straying from the formula. In particular regarding how much McGee gets injured, how lucrative the job is and how many women he bangs.

McGee is still pining after Gretel who was killed two novels ago. Because he's still in mourning, he's not horny. He does find a new woman in this novel who seems to be a keeper (in other words, she'll probably show up in the next installment).

Here are some quotes from the novel:

"I always figure a tattooed man either got so sloppy drunk he didn’t know what was happening, or he needed to have a tattoo to look at to reassure himself he was manly." Dated but perhaps accurate regardless of gender.

"Their brown leaping bodies and half-formed breasts and hips instilled in me such a wistful lechery" Offensive. McGee is describing some preteens on the beach.

"The laws of motion state that a body falls at thirty-two feet per second,,," Incorrect. Gravity's effect on an object is an acceleration, not a velocity. It's 32 feet per second squared (or second per second). MacDonald is obviously ignorant of physics. There is a thing known as terminal velocity however.

The title of the novel is not found in the novel. The title refers to the movie "Free Fall".

[MisterLiberry Head · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a general rule, a mystery series is on half-way to dog-tired when the author starts combining unlikely elements and gimmicky background in an effort to freshen things up. Hot-air balloons and motorcycle gangs, an unlikely enough combination, are added to independent movie-making as the improbable setting for this 19th Travis McGee caper. Our boat-bum Lancelot starts out literally bouncing with vim and vigor, eager to get a “salvage” job underway after a long period of pointless odd jobs, ennui and private mourning. So, he’s not very picky about what dragon he’ll take a run at with his “busted lance.” McGee sets out to learn why a disagreeable, terminally-ill multimillionaire was beaten to death at a roadside rest stop and who profited most from Ellis Esterland’s violent demise. The job leads our modern-day “knight of the windmills” (p70) to revisit a major character from Book Four, talk his way onto a doomed movie set in Iowa (!) and become the target of a psycho biker with serial murder on his tiny, drug-addled mind. The middle-aged McGee, to his credit, doesn’t go solo with a homicidal nut-case stalking him. Sensibly, he calls in younger, professional backup. FREE FALL IN CRIMSON includes a lot of unpleasant violence--some of it, thankfully, happening off-stage. But the scene I had the most trouble getting out of my head was one of “wistful lechery” in Chapter Nine, when ol’ Trav played Frisbee on the beach with a pack of “comely maidens all” (p98) who are about fourteen years old. Ick.

[Rog Pile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travis McGee is approached by a young artist whose millionaire father was beaten to death in a lay-by a couple of years before. The old man had been dying of cancer, with only a couple of months left to him, and there’s a suspicion that he might have stopped in the lay-by to buy illicit drugs to help him through his last weeks. Travis is hired to find out the truth.

His search takes him into the world of motorcycle gangs, and to a film director who made a couple of cheap cult biker movies years before and is now engaged on a seemingly doomed project making a film about hot air balloons.

Travis spends a lot of time weaving between bikers, druggies and a long-clawed Hollywood sex-kitten; and a new lady comes into his life in the shape of the lovely Anne Renzetti. We don’t see too much of Meyer after the opening chapters, but there’s a lot going on here all the same, and the final confrontation with the killer is truly frightening. I liked it.

[Mateo Tomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tight when it needs to be, loose to set the cast and story and changing circumstances.


Anne Rinzetti is a likeable love interest for Travis and fleshed out; as Meyer has his own love interest with a business magnate and seasonal lover and who also stands as character named Aggie.

What starts out with McGee looking into a death that happened 18 months ago turns into uncovering depraved and violent subculures.

And the return of Lysa Dean from "The Quick Red Fox", whos collection of pornography and sex toy is something the usually flip McGee ruminates on for more than a few scenes.

JDM creates a sad action story here. I mean that in the best way.

Murder, Action, Pathos and Bathos in bundles. And Bikers and Balloons.

And the last paragraph with Travis talking to Anne about his relationship to his friend, their dynamic ...forshadowing Meyers redemption in the penultimate book "Cinnimon Skin" ?, was the best dialouge for me and a pleasure to re read.

[John Mchugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been years since I read my first and only John D. MacDonald novel. I believe it was the first book in his Travis McGee series, The Deep Blue Goodbye. So when I recently renewed my Scottsdale Library card, it seemed like a good time to dip back into that world. And I'm glad I did. Credible characters and deft dialogue, as expected, plus MacDonald's amazing ability to capture the flavor of life in Florida as some of its more interesting inhabitants do what they do day after day after day. Very easy, enjoyable reading.

Read this again in 2020, as it was the last selection in Five Complete Travis McGee Novels I was gifted in 2020. Not the best of the five, but quality entertainment nonetheless. Like most of of my favorite writers, MacDonald cares more about characters, people, than about plot.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travis McGee goes after an inheritance that leads him to Hollywood and an auteur making a movie about hot-air balloons. The author skewers art films and the blowsy intelligensia that accompanies art films. The author categorical rejects film as art and relegates them with television as mass media.
Travis now has Meyer as a full and lippy partner and has to rely on unsavory characters – drug dealing, motorcycle gangs – to finish off the bad guys. It is a way of saying the world has become a darker, harder place.
The style holds up, but the fun and playfulness have been replaced by an old man cranky pants voice.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mystery fiction, I've noticed, took a turn for the worse beginning around the mid 60s. I guess the breakdown of so-called barriers let entertainment, including detective fiction,as well as movies, use lazy sniggling references to dope and sex as deep thought and plot devices. Nothing really raunchy, more of a prurient PG-13 view of the world that looks and reads pathetically dated.

This book, despite a publication date of 1981, falls into the category. The collection of short stories I just read by MacDonald, from the mid-50's were much much better.

Very thin plot, cardboard characters, that polyester culture background, it all adds up to a Waste of Time.

[Checkman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good solid late Travis McGee entry. Ties in with one of his earlier cases (The Quick Red Fox) and therefore has a sense of nostalgia (at least in my opinion). Also ,as always, there are the sharp criticisms of America and the usual curmudgeonly pessimism that is so entertaining and thoughtful. The intelligent world weariness of Travis McGee and Meyer. Always entertaining if slightly depressing, but in a good way.

[Liz V. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a handful of the Travis McGee series back in the 80s but, when I went to add them to Goodreads, I couldn't remember which ones I had read. There was a certain formula and I recall them as becoming increasingly violent, so I stopped reading the series.

A friend recently gave me this book. An okay mystery, but won't be searching out more.