“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 Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
–James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
It is one of the greatest opening lines in crime fiction. Jim Crumley was the king of the outlaw detective novel, the crime novelist read by other crime novelists.
You don’t read Crumley for plot,” wrote Patrick Anderson in a Washington Post review. “You read him for his outlaw attitude, his rough poetry and his scenes, paragraphs, sentences, moments. You read him for the lawyer with ‘a smile as innocent as the first martini.’ ”
In 2003, Dennis Lehane told an interviewer that he and George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly all revered Crumley. “I think it’s funny we all hold the same book in a certain high regard,” aid Lehane, “which is James Crumley’s Last Good Kiss. I think that’s the thing we’re swinging for — ‘there’s the benchmark, let’s go after that.’ That’s a book that stands head and shoulders above any concept of genre fiction.”
His prose was poetic, elegant, acrobatic. He wrote sentences that took off at risky angles, flew a few impossible loops against the blue of the sky, and then cruised lightly to earth as if on a runway of satin.
Crumley died on Wednesday at 68-yearsold in a hospital in Missoula, Montana.
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(This has not been a good month for the literary world—speaking of which, four David Foster Wallace stories are now available here at the NewYorker website.)
For those of us who served in the Army Security Agency Crumley will always be remembered for his first Novel – “One to Count Cadence- based on his experiences as a “ditty” in the Phillipines.
“Fuck ’em all
Except for nine:
Six for pallbearers
two for road guards
and one to count cadence.”
Great work with this one, nicelly done!
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CSU 1972 creative writing….life changing!