Kent suggested, very kindly, re. Crumley
> Bill, see if you can find a copy of John Williams'
Into The Badlands and
> read the chapter titled Missoula, Montana: Saturday
Night at Charlie's
Bar.
> Perhaps John, who is on this list, could expand upon
his visit with
Crumley.
Well I'm not sure , over a decade later, that I can add much
to the account of a lost weekend in Missoula that appears in
Badlands, but if anyone wants a copy I have a whole pile of
them here, so contact me off list and I'll sort something
out.
FWIW though here's a review I wrote for Crumley's latest
book, The Final Country, which includes a brief overview of
his career
John
James Crumley - The Final Country (HarperCollins)
Twenty-four years ago James Crumley wrote a book called The
Last Good Kiss, now widely considered to be the finest
private eye novel ever written. At the time of publication,
though, it was little noticed, coming as it did from way out
in left field. Back in the late seventies the crime novel
looked to be a dead form - its great years, the Hammett and
Chandler years, were long gone, and the hot news in American
fiction was all feminism or experimentalism.
And James Crumley was an unlikely figure to revive it. He was
a Texan Army veteran who'd made it to the great creative
writing school at Iowa in the early sixties, where he played
poker with Nelson Algren and drank with Richard Yates and set
his sights on the literary hall of fame. His first novel, One
to Count Cadence - a Vietnam tale, hard-boiled in tone maybe,
but definitely literary - had got him some part of the way to
that goal. But then his second novel didn't work out and an
introduction to the work of Raymond Chandler, plus a famously
turbulent personal life, set him on course to write a crime
novel as a way to make some quick money.
The result was called The Wrong Case and featured a Montana
P.I. called Milo Milodragovitch. Not entirely successful, it
still showed that Crumley was on to something more than a
cash-in: the P.I., the cynical, hardbitten, investigative
loner, turned out to be the hero America needed in the
seventies, as the fallout of Vietnam and Watergate made the
country turn in on itself.
With The Last Good Kiss, Crumley got it right from the first
paragraph (one of those few that sticks in the memory in full
- '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 of Sonoma,
California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring
afternoon'. On one level this is a classical Chandlerersque
PI novel, following the search for a missing girl - on
another level it's an extraordinarily vibrant portrait of
America at a turning point, as sixties idealism and the
subsequent national disillusion were about to turn
ugly.
Crumley followed up with another classic PI novel, Dancing
Bear. Then came a long layoff, while he turned his back on
crime fiction and tried to write the great Texas literary
novel. Meanwhile The Last Good Kiss inspired many of his
literary contemporaries to make the opposite journey -
Charles Willeford, James Lee Burke and James Hall to name but
three. The great Texas novel never worked out though and in
the nineties Crumley returned to the fray with two more - to
be honest slightly below par - crime novels The Mexican Tree
Duck and Bordersnakes.
And now, after another long gap, we have The Final Country.
This is an extraordinary double-barrelled blast from a lost
era; a two fisted epic of Texan treachery, packed to the
gunwales with sex, drugs, booze and guns to a degree that
seems utterly alien to these rehab times when nine out of ten
fictional 'tecs are in AA, and the tenth only drinks vintage
Merlot.
The Final Country sees Milo Milodragovitch coming up to sixty
and trying to adjust to a new life in Austin, Texas, far away
from his Montana roots. Milo is rich now and bored and gets
embroiled in chasing a fugitive from a murder rap, whose
crime clearly has its roots in the Texas of twenty years
before, the Texas of the Last Good Kiss era, when Austin was
a southern hippie Mecca, awash with pure cocaine and impure
sex, a wide open city full of moneymaking opportunities (the
Texas, it might be noted, in which George W Bush sowed his
wild oats and Kenny Lay started up Enron).
What follows is a bloody picaresque as Milo's quixotic search
for justice reveals layer upon layer of violence and deceit.
At the heart of it all is the frazzled, Falstaffian figure of
Milo himself - sixty now, and feeling every second of it (in
stark contrast to the Peter Pan like detectives of other
writers, for instance James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux).
Milo spends most of the book getting beaten up then self
medicating with unwise doses of cocaine and codeine. This is
a wildly readable, berserkly enjoyable, amphetamine rush of a
novel, as a private eye and his creator rage furiously
against the starbucking of America and the dying of the
light.
John
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