Thu 6 Jan 2022
A 1001 Midnights PI Review: JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[11] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss. S. W. Sughrue #1. Random House, hardcover, 1978. Pocket, paperback, 1980. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, paperback, 1988.
Since the death of Ross Macdonald and on the basis of just three novels, James Crumley has become the foremost living writer of private-eye fiction. Carrying on the Macdonald tradition in which the PI is no longer macho but a man sensitive to human needs, tom by inner pain, and slow to use force, Crumley has moved the genre into the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era.
His principal setting is not the big city as in Hammett and Chandler, nor the affluent suburbs as in Macdonald, but the wilderness and bleak magnificence of western Montana. His prevailing mood is a wacked out empathy with dopers, dropouts, losers, and loonies, the human wreckage of the institutionalized butchery we call the “real world.” Nobility resides in the land, in wild animals, and in a handful of outcasts-psychotic Viet vets; Indians, hippies; rumdums; and love-seekers-who can’t cope with life.
Crumley’s detective characters have one foot in either camp. Milo Dragovitch, the protagonist of The Wrong Case (1975) and Dancing Bear (1983), is a cocaine addict and boozer, the child of two suicides, a compulsive womanizer like his wealthy Hemingwayesque father; a man literally marking time until he will tum fifty-two and inherit the family fortune, which his pioneer ancestors legally stole from the Indians.
Sughrue from The Last Good Kiss has a background as a Nam war criminal and an army spy on domestic dissidents and he’s drinking himself to death by inches. Yet these are two of the purest figures in the history of detective fiction, and the most reverent toward the earth and its creatures.
Crumley has minimal interest in plot and even less in explanations, but he’s so uncannily skillful with character, language, relationship, and incident that he can afford to throw structure overboard. His books are an accumulation of small, crazy encounters, full of confusion and muddle, disorder and despair, graphic violence and sweetly casual sex, coke snorting and alcohol guzzling, mountain snowscapes and roadside bars.
When he does have to plot, he· tends to borrow from Raymond Chandler. In The Wrong Case, Milo Dragovitch becomes obsessed by a young woman from Iowa who hires him to find her missing brother, a situation clearly taken from Chandler’s Little Sister (1949). The Last Good Kiss, perhaps the best of Crumley’s novels, traps Sughrue among the tormented members of the family of a hugely successful writer, somewhat as Philip Marlowe was trapped in Chandler’s masterpiece The Long Goodbye (1954).
In Dancing Bear, which pits Milo Dragovitch against a multinational corporation dumping toxic waste into the groundwater, the detective interviews a rich old client in a plant-filled solarium just like Marlowe in the first chapter of Chandler’s Big Sleep (1939).
None of these borrowings matter in the least, for Chandler’s tribute to Dashiell Hammett is no less true of Crumley: He writes scenes so that they seem never to have been written before. What one remembers from The Last Good Kiss is the alcoholic bulldog and the emotionally flayed women and the loneliness and guilt. What is most lasting in Dancing Bear is the moment when Milo Dragovitch finds a time bomb in his car on a wilderness road and tosses it out at the last second into a stream and weeps for the exploded fish that died for him, and dozens of other moments just as powerful.
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Bibliographic Note: As good as this book is, there were only two followup novels with Sugrue, those being The Mexican Tree Duck (Mysterious Press 1993) and Bordersnakes (Dennis McMillan 1996). The latter is a crossover with Milo Milodragovitch, who was in two solo adventures.
January 6th, 2022 at 10:10 pm
There was too little Crumley but what there was was “cherce” to quote Spencer Tracy in PAT AND MIKE. He brought a kicking and screaming human private eye into the genre, not a tarnished knight so much as a flawed wounded tragi comic wanderer.
Milo and Surghue shuffled out of a semi apocalyptic post Atomic post Vietnam America beyond trench coats and fedoras and blazing .45’s, his characters sadly not becoming the new model for the genre because few could recreate his skill and complex poetry.
In a sense his hero are the bastard children of Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane forged by the Sexual Revolution, the War on Drugs, Vietnam, and the cultural diaspora of the Seventies and strained through a Willie Nelson vibe.
No one wrote like him. No one picked up his fallen flag. I fear no one will with the genre as it is today.
A few of the series set against a Western background reflect something of his milieu of burned out eccentricity, but nothing has really recreated his ability to laugh, cry, cringe, and celebrate something uniquely American about the genre.
January 6th, 2022 at 10:16 pm
Wonderfully said, David.
I hope I remember this correctly, but as I recall there was some controversy at the time as to where Crumley was taking the PI story. He did, but as you say, he didn’t, because his was an act that no other writer has been able to follow.
January 6th, 2022 at 10:55 pm
I tried creating some film/ televison interest in this project, but not even a whimper.
January 7th, 2022 at 2:05 am
Now that’s a project I wish had gotten somewhere.
January 7th, 2022 at 8:38 am
One of the best opening lines of a book ever.
January 7th, 2022 at 11:45 am
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
January 7th, 2022 at 3:06 pm
Steve,
Those are the definitive lines.
January 7th, 2022 at 7:00 pm
I came across Crumley’s work when i was reading Chandler/Hammett for the first time a couple of decades ago. Having come to the end of the books I had managed to buy, all their major works, I went looking around for similar authors. Crumley’s name came up and I went about getting a book.
When I got it, I knew I had just read a great novel, one that happened to use a crime story as a backdrop to tell the story of people on the fringes of society. Mordantly apt that such characters were created by a writer who himself ended up on the fringes of the detective genre. I wish he had written more.
January 7th, 2022 at 11:25 pm
He may have been one of those writers who say what they needed to say and for whatever the reason decided that once said he didn’t need to say more.
January 9th, 2022 at 10:24 am
I think you’re right, Steve, except that he wrote on regardless. The Mexican Tree Duck and Bordersnakes were self-parodies. In the last Sughrue and Milodragovitch compete to be more preposterous. Crumley’s early books stand up, though, and The Last Good Kiss introduced me to the wonderful poetry of Richard Hugo.
January 12th, 2022 at 12:03 am
This particular novel blew me away upon first reading, for all the reasons cited above in the warm, redolent review at the top of this page; and for some of my own. ‘Kiss’ is very much that kind of personal, make-it-your-fave kind of read. The way a Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen song is, in popular music.
Ever since the experience, I’ve humbly lauded Crumley as the heir –in his era –to Chandler. I say ‘humbly’ because even as a neophyte reader I can see that there have been other heirs-to-Chandler before Crumley came along. And they’ve all been good too.
But damn, Crumley sure is wonderful. It’s a pleasure to see him appraised and applauded in the commentary above.