Sun 14 Jan 2024
An Archived PI Review by Barry Gardner: JAMES CRUMLEY – Bordersnakes.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
JAMES CRUMLEY – Bordersnakes. C. W. Sughrue & Milo Milodragovitch #3 (each, not together). Dennis McMillan, hardcover, limited edition, 1996. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996. Warner, paperback, 1997. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 2016.
The man by whose largess I read this thought this was top-notch stuff. This heartened me less than you might think, because he also liked The Mexican Tree Duck, which I thought was about as thoroughgoing a piece of garbage as I read that whole year. But excelsior …
Milodragovitch has come into his middle-age inheritance — just in time to find that a crooked banker has relieved him of most of it. He’s in a frame of mind for revenge and recovery, and heads to Texas to find his old drinking, doping, and PI buddy C. W. Sughrue to help him.
He finds C. W., all right; scarred, married, and hiding out from people who wanted to kill him and almost did. Together they set out on an odyssey across Texas, hunting for the banker and maybe themselves. They find whiskey, dope, and danger everywhere they tum, and there are more turns than they looked for.
The thing that still bothers me about Crumley’ s books is that the people he writes about are adolescent fantasies of the kind of people it would be cool to be: hard-fighting, hard-doping, romantic idiots who are moved only by their addictions. And that Crumley himself seems to admire this, and to think it’s the way a man should be.
Another reason [to be bothered] is that the plot is a maze of wild, unlikely coincidences; plot never was Crumley’s thing. Balanced against all that, and in the end overcoming it, is the fact that the son of a bitch can write. He can tell you a story well enough to drag you along over the rough spots so fast and enjoyably that you barely feel them until later, much like the bruises from an athletic contest. And while the things his people do may not make much sense at times, the people themselves are real while he’s writing about them, and you find yourself cheering their antics as mindlessly as they perform them.
January 14th, 2024 at 6:26 am
This one was on my tbr—but Barry’s review confirms precisely my worst fears. I’ve read and enjoyed last good kiss, wrong case and dancing bear, but stopped there. It sounds like everything after dancing bear is as Barry describes: an explosion of brilliant words like croutons sprinkled haphazardly in a plot salad.
January 14th, 2024 at 7:36 am
The Wrong Case and The Last Good Kiss, yes. A lot of the later stuff is unreadable to me.
January 14th, 2024 at 11:20 am
Those are the only two I’ve read too. I believe a consensus may be forming.
January 15th, 2024 at 7:23 am
Crumley himself seems in his later books to have been moved only by his own addictions and to write only to feed them. In his earlier novels – the ones Tony recommends – he could look clearly at the addcitions and the alternatives. In later books plot and characterisation were both abandoned. There was always enough brilliance to make you hope he’d go back to writing well, but he never did.
January 15th, 2024 at 8:32 am
Interesting video of penzler discussing crumley. https://youtu.be/noRScoPsC_8?si=ai9RFuLX1fCFHtrO
Penzler says he edited only 1st half of Mexican Tree Duck before selling mysterious press to Warner. He claims you can tell precisely when in the book penzler’s restraints are lifted and crumley goes bananas. Also claims in later books crumley was only writing for $$ to fuel his addictions.