JAMES CRUMLEY – The Mexican Tree Duck. C. W. Sughrue #2. Mysterious Press, hardcover, September 1993; reprint paperback, October 1994.

   What can you say about James Crumley that hasn’t been said before? No writer in the field has garnered so much critical attention for just three books, and a respectable number of respectable critics have lauded him as the best of the private eye writers.

   While considering him to be a powerful writer, I never shared that opinion, and in fact found it ludicrous. Nevertheless, I looked forward to reading this. I thought the first C. W. Sughrue book, The Last Good Kiss, was the best of his first three.

   C. W. hasn’t changed a whole lot, other than being middle-aged, now. He’s still rough as pine bark, and he’ll still have a drink or do a line with you, or whip your ass if it needs it. He’s hired by twins who own a fish store, overweight weapons freaks, to get their fish back from an outlaw biker that’s stiffed them on a check.

   In the process of doing that, he gets hired by the biker to find his mother. At least he thinks she’s his mother. Sound humorous? Not really. She’s a Mexican national married to a Texas oilman, and she’s been kidnapped.

   Before it’s over it’s turned to politics, drugs, and money, and Sughrue has hooked up with some Viet Nam buddies, taken on two or three governments, waged his own private war, fallen in love, and been in on the spilling of more blood than you could wipe up with a bale of tissues.

   Crumley’s prose is powerful, though I think not so much as in his earlier books. The characters are mostly of a type: the women crude, loving. tough, and ready, and the men cut from the same cloth as Sughrue himself — tough, violent, and abusers of any substance that’s inert enough to be abused.

   The improbable plot was just a framework, not terribly important to Crumley in comparison to what he had to say. Plotting never was his thing.

   This isn’t a detective novel. It’s a war story, or perhaps a paean to the brotherhood of warriors. It seems to me a book written by a man frozen in time, one not able to leave behind the world of war, drugs, and whiskey.

   There’s little here that speaks to me. To someone tortured by Crumley’s own demons it may be a fine novel, but to me it was just a sad waste of talent, not redeemed by the prose.

   The only message I got was that whiskey, drugs, and fighting are good, government and business are bad, and a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. In the end, I tired of the macho posturing and the gunfire, and there wasn’t much else to it.

      The “Milo” Milodragovitch series —

The Wrong Case (1975)

Dancing Bear (1983)
Bordersnakes (1996) [with C. W. Sughrue]
The Final Country (2001)

      The C. W. Sughrue series —

The Last Good Kiss (1978)
The Mexican Tree Duck (1993)
Bordersnakes (1996) [with Milo Milodragovitch]

The Right Madness (2005)