James Crumley

• Born: October 12, 1939
• Birthplace: Three Rivers, Texas
• Died: September 17, 2008
• Place of death: Missoula, Montana

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; private investigator

Principal Series: Milo Milodragovitch, 1975-; C. W. Sughrue, 1978-

Contribution

Compared with the output of many mystery-fiction authors, James Crumley’s publications were limited. After the publication of his first novel, One to Count Cadence, in 1969, he produced only two or three novels per decade. However, Crumley has had an immense impact on the genre of detective fiction.

Perhaps partly because Crumley’s first novel was a mainstream book about the military, his detective novels have been afforded the critical respect and reception more typically associated with literary fiction. During the 1980’s Random House printed his books in the Vintage Contemporaries line, dedicated to showcasing rising literary talents like Richard Ford, who later won a Pulitzer Prize, and short-story writer Raymond Carver. As a result, Crumley developed a serious readership beyond the ranks of mystery aficionados. Furthermore, his mystery novels managed to both update and subvert the genre parameters within which they were operating. His detectives abused drugs and were respectful to women but also libidinous; the increased level of violence, and occasionally the absurdity of its abundance, in his books reflected a new take on the genre.

Biography

James Crumley was born in 1939 in Three Rivers, Texas, and was raised in south Texas, largely in the town of Santa Cruz. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship; however, in 1958 he dropped out of college and served a three-year tour in the United States Army. Like his character C. W. Sughrue, Crumley was reluctant to submit to military discipline and often found himself in conflict with his commanding officers. After his Army discharge, he attended Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship; despite taking time off occasionally to work, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1964. He then pursued a master of fine arts in creative writing in the writing program at the University of Iowa, where he worked with novelists such as Richard Yates and R. V. Cassell. His thesis was eventually published as One to Count Cadence, his first novel.

Crumley became a professor at the University of Montana in Missoula. However, when One to Count Cadence was well received, he left and held a series of writing professorships. From 1969 to 1984 he worked briefly for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville; Colorado State University; Reed College in Portland, Oregon; Carnegie-Mellon; and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Crumley made the move to detective fiction after his friend, the poet and novelist Richard Hugo, loaned him several novels by hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler. Taken with Chandler’s ability to create a memorable character in brief strokes and his character Philip Marlowe’s adherence to a code of integrity, Crumley crafted his own detective novel, The Wrong Case (1975).

In 1975, Crumley married Judith Anne Ramsey. After divorcing her, he married Bronwyn Pughe in 1979, whom he later divorced. He had five children, three from his second marriage and two from his fourth marriage. He was married to his fifth wife, Martha, for sixteen years until his death in 2008.

Crumley moved to Montana in the mid-1980’s, but his wanderlust appears in his novels; a number of them (The Last Good Kiss, 1978; The Mexican Tree Duck, 1993; and Bordersnakes) send his characters on road trips about the West.

In the mid-1980’s Crumley began to spend less time in academic settings and worked as a full-time writer, not only producing magazine pieces but also venturing into film. He wrote a screen adaptation of his novel Dancing Bear (1983) and a screenplay called The Pigeon Shoot (1987), which was released as a limited edition publication. He worked on screenplays for the science-fiction comic book film Judge Dredd (1995) and wrote a screen adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel The Big Nowhere (1988). In 2006 a film was made from the screenplay he wrote with Rob Sullivan, The Far Side of Jericho. Crumley died at a hospital in Missoula, Montana on September 17, 2008.

Analysis

James Crumley did not begin his career as a detective novelist. However, many of the elements that define his detective novels are present in his first novel, One to Count Cadence: elevated violence, a countercultural perspective, and rebellious characters who refuse to conform to the mainstream. Crumley’s main inspiration and primary literary antecedent, as Crumley often states, is Raymond Chandler. Like Chandler, Crumley is a high stylist, who always writes in the first person and relishes the well-turned phrase, particularly apt description, and judicious use of original similes. Just as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is a lone private investigator who works outside the official channels of law enforcement, Crumley’s Milo and Sughrue are characters at odds with the authorities, whether they are corrupt police departments or government agencies. Like Marlowe, Sughrue and Milo make up in persistence, endurance, and toughness what they lack in Sherlock Holmesian levels of intellect.

As great as Crumley’s debt is to Chandler, however, the plots of his novels follow directions that may have been unimaginable to Chandler. Members of the generation of baby boomers who came of age in the 1960’s, Milo and Sughrue are familiar with the counterculture and its politics, with drug users and dealers, the sexual revolution, gay rights, and feminism. Crumley’s detectives are more familiar with the down-and-out people in their society than they are with the respectable elements. Their friends are drunks, drug dealers, burned-out veterans, and bartenders. Both detectives drink too much and are willing to snort both cocaine and methamphetamine. Crumley’s detectives rarely find themselves at odds with everyday criminals. In the latter novels, particularly, Sughrue and Milo tend to engage in conflicts with corrupt senators, billionaires, corporations, and upper echelon Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents.

The private-eye characters, the first-person, wisecracking narrative, the pacing, and the violence in Crumley’s novels clearly place them within the hard-boiled category of detective fiction. However, violence in Crumley’s novels—particularly the latter ones—tends to be simultaneously more extreme and more complicated than in earlier hard-boiled novels. In Dancing Bear, Milo shoots more men during the climactic showdown than Philip Marlowe does in his entire series; on the other hand, the violent death of a friend and drunk in The Wrong Case sends Milo on an alcohol and cocaine bender that almost kills him.

Crumley’s novels also differ from those of other hard-boiled detective writers because they are not essentially urban tales. Although parts of the novels are set in the small town of Meriwether, Montana, and other small cities, the narratives are largely set in the open West, from Montana in the north to Texas in the south. Crumley’s detectives do not lose tails by dodging in and out of taxis or subway cars but by following National Forest Service maps onto logging roads. The corruption of humankind and civilization is made even starker when juxtaposed with the mountain forests of Dancing Bear and the desert Southwest of The Mexican Tree Duck and Bordersnakes.

The Wrong Case

The Wrong Case, Crumley’s first detective novel, introduces Milton “Milo” Milodragovitch. The great-grandson of a Russian Cossack émigré to the old west, Milo is a thirty-nine-year-old private investigator, a Korean War veteran (having enlisted at the age of sixteen), and a former corrupt deputy sheriff whose business has dried up because of the relaxing of Montana divorce laws. Milo’s father, while wealthy, had become a drunk and a philanderer in the years before his suicide; Milo’s mother (also an alcoholic and, eventually, also a suicide) placed the family fortune into a trust that Milo will not inherit until he turns fifty-three. Milo’s life is further complicated in that his oldest friend, Jamison, is also his oldest enemy; after serving in the Korean War together, Jamison became a police officer with Milo and went on to become a detective lieutenant. Jamison even married Milo’s former wife and is raising Milo’s son.

The Wrong Case clearly reveals Chandler’s influence: Helen Duffy’s request that Milo locate her missing younger brother is reminiscent of Chandler’s The Little Sister (1949), and the brother is similar to a minor character in The Long Goodbye (1953). Milo, however, is no Philip Marlowe. Whereas Marlowe is a character almost without a past, Milo is weighed down by the past everywhere he turns: his dead father’s clothes, donated to thrift stores, appear on homeless men and drunks.

The case turns out to be one that is wrong in every way. The missing brother is an aggressive homosexual junkie with a fetish for cowboy clothing. Everything Milo thinks he knows about Helen Duffy is wrong, and their budding romance quickly falls apart. Even the inadvertent villain of the story turns out to be a local bar owner with ties to organized crime who hopes he can sell enough drugs to become important. The only lesson that Milo can learn from the chaos is that the two main things a man has to learn to do are to survive and to forgive.

The Last Good Kiss

The Last Good Kiss is Crumley’s first novel with C. W. (for Chauncey Wayne) “Sonny” Sughrue. Sughrue is a former Army sergeant who committed a war crime while in Vietnam. After a month in the bush without sleep, he dropped a grenade into a hideaway hole in a village and killed the hidden women and children of a Vietnamese family. To avoid prosecution, he worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in San Francisco, infiltrating hippie culture. However, he came to identify with the hippies more than with his superiors. Sughrue is a more formidable detective than Milo and more in control of his emotions and actions. While perhaps harboring even fewer illusions than Milo, he is in some ways more of a romantic.

Like The Wrong Case, The Last Good Kiss owes a large debt to Chandler. Just as Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is about Marlowe being hired to protect a drunken and suicidal writer, The Last Good Kiss begins with Sughrue being hired to locate poet and famous novelist Abraham Trahearne, a World War II veteran and alcoholic who has gone on a drinking binge. The novel departs from The Long Goodbye’s plot, however, when Sughrue is asked by an aging bar owner to locate her runaway daughter, Betty Sue Flowers. With Traherne in tow, Sughrue begins searching for Betty Sue and soon runs afoul of a mob-connected pornography ring.

Widely regarded as Crumley’s best novel, The Last Good Kiss brings together many of the author’s trademark themes and qualities. The plot goes through several dizzying changes of direction; the dialogue is understated and clipped; Sughrue rebels instinctively against authority, whether it is in the form of law enforcement or social class; minor characters have depth and personality (as well as surprises to reveal); loyalties and alliances shift; and the violence is swift, bleak, rendered in bloody and exquisite detail, and has surprising ramifications for the characters. Like Milo, the novel ends with Sughrue having nowhere to find peace except in his own ability to survive and endure.

Dancing Bear

Published five years after The Last Good Kiss, Dancing Bear features Milo. The intervening eight years have not been kind to Milo. His practice has failed, and he is employed as a security worker for an older veteran who helps out hard-luck cases. Milo is hired by an elderly woman, a former lover of his dead father, ostensibly to discover the identities of young lovers she has watched from her porch. Again, the plot darts in directions not anticipated by the reader, and before long, Milo’s life is in danger when he discovers that a gigantic corporation, with both underworld and corrupt government connections, is illegally disposing of toxic waste.

Milo’s persona as the “antidetective” is revealed again when he is followed while tailing a subject of his investigation, and as a result his subject is killed. Also, he understands too late what seems clear throughout—that he has been set up by his employer. The end sequence of the novel is patterned somewhat after the rescue sequence in The Last Good Kiss. Milo and his confederate burst into a conference, armed and loaded, but hoping that the meeting will not end in bloodshed. Someone reaches for a gun and mayhem ensues. Although this confrontation in Dancing Bear is, like the one in The Last Good Kiss, tightly written, exciting, and vicious, it does create the formula for the novels to come.

Later novels

Ten years separate The Mexican Tree Duck from Dancing Bear. In The Mexican Tree Duck, Sughrue seems in some ways to bear a resemblance to a more dangerous incarnation of Milo, with his constant use of cocaine and amphetamine as well as alcohol, than he does the laconic and determined narrator of The Last Good Kiss. In The Mexican Tree Duck, Sughrue—now as out of work as Milo—is hired to find a drug-dealing biker’s mother, who turns out to be the wife of a senator and drug lord. Sughrue gathers together a disparate crowd of Vietnam War veterans to lead assaults on drug cabals dealing in cocaine. Multiple encounters with incompetent and corrupt DEA and FBI agents are counterbalanced with gunfights fueled by automatic weapons. Crumley’s Bordersnakes picks up on the hints dropped in earlier novels by reuniting former partners Sughrue and Milo. Like The Mexican Tree Duck, the novel quickly dissolves into a tangled plot punctuated by episodes of bloody and horrific violence. The Final Country (2001) follows the mode of the earlier novels as Milo is betrayed by the woman with whom he falls in love, the climax coming in a hail of gunfire. The Right Madness (2005) finds Sughrue betrayed by his employer as he ferrets out a trail of corruption.

Principal Series Characters:

• Milton “Milo” Milodragovitch is a sometimes private eye, sometimes security worker in Meriwether, Montana. A Korean War veteran, a former deputy sheriff, and the son of a former drunken scion of the town who eventually committed suicide, Milo is counting the days until his fifty-third birthday, when he will inherit the family fortune. A heavy drinker and cocaine abuser in the early novels, Milo often identifies with the very members of society he was once paid to police.
• C. W. “Sonny” Sughrue , a native of Texas, is a part-time private eye and part-time repo man and bartender based in Meriwether, Montana. A Vietnam War veteran, Sughrue is a more controlled, physically capable, and confident investigator than Milo. Bordersnakes (1996) uses both characters as narrators; earlier novels had hinted that the two characters had once been partners in a private-eye firm.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Contains a discussion of Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss that notes the writer’s lyrical prose and outlaw attitude.

Crumley, James. “Noir by Northwest: Fictional Madness, Greed and Violence Are Alive and Kicking—Mysteriously, so Is Literary Tough Guy James Crumley.” Interview by Ed Murrieta. The News Tribune, August 21, 2005, p. E01. Examines Crumley’s history and how his personal life interacts with his literary creations.

Kaczmarek, Lynn. “James Crumley: Poet of the Night.” Mystery News (August/September, 2001). An interview and commentary about Crumley as a writer poised between detective fiction and literary fiction.

Newlin, Keith. “C. W. Sughrue’s Whiskey Visions.” Modern Fiction Studies (Autumn, 1983): 545-555. A discussion of alcohol and drug abuse in Crumley’s early fiction.

Scaggs, John. “Sex, Drugs, and Divided Identities: The Detective Fiction of James Crumley.” European Journal of American Culture 22, no. 3 (2003): 205-214. Considers both the influence of Western novels and films on Crumley’s works as well as how Crumley’s detectives go through a process of identification with their suspects.

Silet, Charles L. P. “James Crumley.” In Talking Murder: Interviews with Twenty Mystery Writers. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Contains an interview with Crumley by Silet, who has published interviews in Mystery Scene and Armchair Detective.