James Crumley died Wednesday in Missoula. I love his novel The Last Good Kiss. From NYT today:
James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 68 and lived in Missoula.
No single cause of death had been identified, his family said. Mr. Crumley had been in declining health with kidney, vascular and other problems in recent years.
If Mr. Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson had collaborated to produce a literary offspring, Mr. Crumley would unquestionably have been the result. In just seven private eye novels he carved out a genre that might properly be called gonzo gumshoe, set mostly in the back alleys, seedy bars and wild, forbidding countryside of Montana.
Mr. Crumley had two private eyes. The first, Milton Chester Milodragovitch, known as Milo, is a multiply divorced, hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting womanizer. Introduced in “The Wrong Case” (Random House, 1975), he reappeared in “Dancing Bear” (Random House, 1983) and “The Final Country” (Mysterious Press, 2001).
The second, C. W. Sughrue (“ ‘Shoog’ as in sugar, honey,” the detective explains, “and ‘rue’ as in rue the goddamned day”), is a former Vietnam War criminal and hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting womanizer. Introduced in “The Last Good Kiss” (Random House, 1978), he also starred in “The Mexican Tree Duck” (Mysterious Press, 1993) and “The Right Madness” (Viking, 2005).
Milo and Sughrue tackle a case together in Mr. Crumley’s 1996 novel, “Bordersnakes,” published by Mysterious Press.
For readers who found it hard to tell the two detectives apart, Mr. Crumley offered a reliable guide: “Milo’s first impulse is to help you,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 2001. “Sughrue’s is to shoot you in the foot.”
We had the honor at the review of publishing A Story and A Poem.
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