James Crumley, a revered and influential crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for both their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. He was 68.
Crumley died of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases Wednesday at a hospital in Missoula, Mont., said his wife, writer and artist Martha Elizabeth.
A self-described “bastard child of Raymond Chandler,” Crumley wrote seven crime novels featuring two detectives that were set not in the mean streets of Los Angeles but in what he called “my twisted highways in the mountain West.”
Crumley’s private eyes, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch, were, as Dallas Morning News writer Jerome Weeks wrote in 2001, “sullen, violent men whose drug use and carnal antics would stagger a rhino.”
To tell his two detectives apart, Crumley suggested remembering that “Milo’s first impulse is to help you; Sughrue’s is to shoot you in the foot.”
The opening line to his 1978 Sughrue novel “The Last Good Kiss,” which many consider his masterpiece, is considered classic — and fans would often recite it to him at book signings: “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.”
Otto Penzler, the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and founder of the Mysterious Press, has called “The Last Good Kiss” the greatest private-eye novel he ever read.
“It’s true,” Penzler said Friday. “It had a poetical quality that I don’t think anybody else ever achieved. I revered Raymond Chandler, but there was something about the beauty, the elegance of the prose that I think is the most important thing about Crumley.”
And, Penzler said, “although his series character (Sughrue) was a drug-abusing alcoholic, he still had a romantic vision about doing the right thing.”
That was true about all of Crumley’s work, said Penzler, who published the second novel featuring Sughrue, “The Mexican Tree Duck,” which won the 1994 Dashiell Hammett Award for Best Literary Crime Novel.
Although he never had a best seller, Crumley developed a large cult following and received tremendous critical acclaim.
Penzler said that those who didn’t know the large and bearish Crumley might not understand, “but this is a man who had a gigantic heart and loved the world and loved life.
“He had a curmudgeonly sort of manner about him, but if you looked into his eyes, you could quickly see that his eyes could look into your soul because he understood everything.”
Crumley also spent 10 years in and out of Hollywood writing unproduced screenplays and working as a script doctor. He co-wrote, with Rob Sullivan, the screenplay for “The Far Side of Jericho,” which debuted at the Santa Fe Film Festival in 2006.
