Descent Into Hell

FREE FALL in Crimson begins:

We talked past midnight, sat in the deck chairs on the sundeck of the "Busted Flush" with the starry April sky overhead, talked quietly, and listened to the night. Creak and sigh of the waves against pilings, muted motor, noises of the fans and generators and pumps aboard the work boats and the play toys.

Reading a John D. Macdonald novel is like going to church: you know what you're going to hear, but you also know it's going to be good for you.

He's almost ridiculously prolific--the author of more than sixty books--including the best-selling Condominium, and eighteen other novels that precede this one in his Travis McGee mystery series. His eighteenth Travis McGee, The Green Ripper, won the American Book Award for Best Mystery of 1979. Yet, people seem anxious to write him off as a hyperactive, but fundamentally unsound producer of escapist fiction.

But, they're wrong: he is a working American moralist. He hates the cheap and the shoddy; the bad values, the bad art, the bad people. His hero, Travis McGee, who hates all of it for him, hates with intelligence, an acuity, and a ruthless wit.

Travis McGee is a romantic--like everyone who remains moral today--and like all the best of American fictional detectives, he is tattered, but never lapses long into cynicism, even though his business forces into the very worst seams and sleazes of the American night. Of his own existence, McGee says:

But you can't cut your life back like some kind of ornamental shrub. I couldn't put the old white horse out to pasture, hock the tin armor, stand the lance in the corner of the barn. For a while, yes. For the healing time.

What makes Travis McGee books so very good is that MacDonald talks to the reader like an old friend--straight. He tells you what's on his mind, and you sense that if you find the conversation dull or commonplace, that is your own fault, not his.

When McGee isn't talking to the reader, he is out talking to people. He doesn't precisely solve crimes, but finds them out by talking to a number of people, each of whom has already solved a small piece of the puzzle for himself. McGee's course is to collect all these smaller solutions and assemble them, fitting the pieces into a triumphant comprehension of crime and evil.

The people he talks to are policemen, bartenders, and, waitresses, generally decent, hardworking people trying to deal with a world that has never, and never will, appreciate them for the best they have given it. He also talks to celebrities, speculators, and hustlers of every variety. These individuals have usually deluded themselves, and though they blend from the delusion, though they cannot understand the pain. At last, McGee confronts, and deals with pure personifications of evil. In the process he relearns the old lesson--that close to the edge of death one is most completely alive.

IN FREE FALL in Crimson the figure of evil is taken on by an outlaw biker Passionate women, Hollywood frauds, greedy do wells, a weird director making a disaster movie, about a hot air balloon meet, the queen of the TV game show circuit, and a selection of wealthy sophiticates--all make appearances. Each plays a role in what is certainly a formula; but the formula is rendered with such simplicity and compassiong and strong prose that Free Fall In Crimson is wholly irresistible.