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From a beloved master of crime fiction, Free Fall in Crimson is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
He was rich, mean, and slowly succumbing to cancer—until someone hastened the inevitable by beating him to death at a Florida truck stop. Now Ellis Esterland’s son wants Travis McGee to find out who killed his estranged father. The why seems obvious: Esterland’s multimillion-dollar estate.
“The Travis McGee novels are among the finest works of fiction ever penned by an American author.”—Jonathan Kellerman
Though he had been reassured that he would receive a substantial inheritance, Ron Esterland was disowned by his wealthy father years ago. But upon dear old Dad’s conveniently timed murder, the family fortune winds up in the hands of Ellis’s ex-wife instead.
The quest to recover Ron’s money takes McGee from Hollywood to the Midwest, where he confronts prostitution rings and drug deals gone wrong. In the haze of violence surrounding him, McGee starts to lose sight of who he really is. But one thing remains crystal clear: McGee is on the trail of a killer conjured from his worst nightmares.
Features a new Introduction by Lee Child
MacDonald's literary career began accidentally. While he was still in service, he wrote a short story, purely for entertainment. He mailed it home to his wife, who sent it to a magazine without his knowledge. The story was accepted. When MacDonald was discharged, he decided to try his luck at writing for a living. After dozens of submissions and rejections, he finally sold a story to Dime Detective, one of the popular pulp magazines of the day.
For several years, MacDonald made a decent living writing mysteries, Westerns, crime stories, and science fiction for the pulps. Then, in 1950, just as the demand for paperback books was increasing, he made the crossover to full-length fiction with The Brass Cupcake, a classic hardboiled detective novel featuring mobsters, corrupt cops, and a disaffected loner who falls for a beautiful woman. The writer had found his niche!
During the 1950s and '60s, MacDonald specialized in hardboiled crime novels -- mostly set in Florida, where he and his wife had moved after the war. For a long time, he resisted the siren call of series fiction. Then, in 1964, he succumbed -- introducing his legendary amateur sleuth Travis McGee in The Deep Blue Goodbye. A cynical knight errant and self-described beach bum who lives in Ft. Lauderdale on a houseboat named "The Busted Flush, McGee went on to star in 20 more adventures. His influence as a "type" can be clearly seen in the writing of several contemporary crime writers, including Carl Hiaasen, Lawrence Block, and George Pelicanos.
Throughout his long, prolific career, MaDonald would alternate the McGee books with standalone novels, nonfiction, and short story collections. As a genre stylist, he is without peer; yet most critics agree that his literary skills transcend the limitations of genre. Perhaps the novelist Kurt Vonnegut said it best when he made this shrewd assessment: "To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."
Several of MacDonald's novels have been adapted for movies -- most famously his 1958 novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice as Cape Fear.
Carl Hiaasen wrote this in the introduction to the 1994 reissue of The Deep Blue Goodbye: "Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty."
Overview
From a beloved master of crime fiction, Free Fall in Crimson is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
He was rich, mean, and slowly succumbing to cancer—until someone hastened the inevitable by beating him to death at a Florida truck stop. Now Ellis Esterland’s son wants Travis McGee to find out who ...