James Crumley
James Crumley | |
---|---|
Dashiell Hammett Award 1993 The Mexican Tree Duck | |
Spouse | Martha Elizabeth (married c.1992) four previous marriages: Sandra "Charlie" Crumley Maggie Brown Judith Ann Ramey Bronwyn Pughe[1] |
James Arthur Crumley (October 12, 1939 – September 17, 2008)[2][3][4] was an American author. He was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as "one of modern crime writing's best practitioners",[5] who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel"[1] and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson.[4] His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as "the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years."[6]
Crumley's first published novel, 1969's One to Count Cadence, which was set in the Philippines and Vietnam, began as the thesis for his master's degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1966. His novels The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck and The Right Madness feature the character C.W. Sughrue, an alcoholic ex-army officer turned private investigator. The Wrong Case, Dancing Bear and The Final Country feature another P.I., Milo Milodragovitch. In the novel Bordersnakes, Crumley brought both characters together. Crumley said of his two private detectives: "Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot."[3]
Crumley had a cult following, and his work is said to have inspired a generation of crime writers in both the U.S. and the U.K,[5] including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane[1] and Craig McDonald,[7] as well as writers from other genres such as Neal Stephenson,[8] but he never achieved mainstream success. "Don't know why that is," Crumley said in an interview in 2001, "Other writers like me a lot. But up until about 10 to 12 years ago, I made more money in France and Japan than in America. I guess I just don't fit in anyplace in the genre book marketplace."[9]
Life
Crumley, who was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, where his father was an oil-field supervisor and his mother was a waitress.[3] According to Crumley, his father was a gentle man, but his mother was a forceful and violent woman. She insisted that Crumley attend church, but did not do so herself because she could not afford clothes decent enough for church.[10]
Crumley was a grade-A student and a football player, an offensive lineman, in high school. He attended the
In 1968, he signed the "
Crumley had not read any detective fiction until prompted to by Montana poet
From the mid-1980s until his death, Crumley lived in
Crumley died at St. Patrick Hospital
Crumley's death prompted an "outpouring of affection" from the citizens of Missoula. Crumley's favorite seat in his favorite bar was put aside to honor him.[10]
Response
None of the books that Crumley wrote ever became bestsellers, but he had a
the Big Sky Country [reimagined] as a kind of hard-boiled Lake Wobegon with bloodstains, a hellscape where all the women are tall ... the men sport pugnacious foreheads, brutal jaws and Indian braids, and all the children are away at camp.[17]
According to Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post, "You don't read Crumley for plot. 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'".[1] Critic Maxim Jakubowski, who was a friend of Crumley, writing after Crumley's death, referred to Crumley's last two books, The Final Country and A Right Madness, as:
...bittersweet adventures in which [Crumley] could evoke the skies over Texas and Montana and the landscapes of America like a veritable angel slumming amid the ferocious gunfire, the betrayals his characters always suffered and the trademark bruised romanticism that only he could conjure up without it sounding maudlin.[5]
A number of writers view The Last Good Kiss as Crumley's best work.[3][4][15] Its opening line is sometimes cited as the best in the genre:[1][3][4]
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 Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
Awards and honors
In 1985, The Wrong Case won a Falcon Award from the
In 2007, the magazine Men's Journal named The Last Good Kiss as number 12 on its list of "Top 15 Thrillers of All Time",[19] and in Newsweek, George Pelecanos, crime author and co-producer of the HBO series The Wire, rated Crumley's The Last Good Kiss as number 3 in his list of the "Five Most Important Crime Novels".[20]
However, despite claims made on a number of websites, Crumley does not seem to have been either a winner or a nominee for a
The detective "Crumley" in Ray Bradbury's trilogy of mystery novels (Death Is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Let's All Kill Constance) is named in tribute to him.[1]
Film
For about a decade, Crumley worked intermittently in Hollywood, writing original scripts that were never produced, or acting as a
Regarding his impression of the film industry, Crumley said: "If you back up into a room in Hollywood with your britches down and something odd happens to you, it’s not their fault!"[23]
Works
- One to Count Cadence (1969) – novel, Vietnam
- The Wrong Case (1975) – novel, Milo Milodragovitch series
- The Last Good Kiss (1978) – novel, C.W. Sughrue series
- Dancing Bear (1983) – novel, Milo series
- Pigeon Shoot (1987) – unproduced screenplay, limited edition
- Whores (1988) – short stories
- Muddy Fork and Other Things (1991) – short fiction and essays
- The Mexican Tree Duck (1993) – novel, Sughrue series, winner 1994 Dashiell Hammett Award
- Bordersnakes (1996) – novel, Sughrue and Milo series
- The Putt at the End of the World (2000) – collaborative novel
- The Final Country (2001) – novel, Milo series
- The Right Madness (2005) – novel, Sughrue series
Quotes
It's done. This may not be my final country. I can still taste the bear in the back of my throat, bitter with the blood of the innocent, and somewhere in my old heart I can still remember the taste of love. Perhaps this is just a resting place. A warm place to drink cold beer. But wherever my final country is, my ashes will go back to Montana when I die. Maybe I've stopped looking for love. Maybe not. Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I'll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.
The Final Country (2001)
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 Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
The Last Good Kiss (1978)
Son, never trust a man who doesn't drink because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They're the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They're usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they're a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can't trust a man who's afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It's damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he's heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.
The Wrong Case (1975)
References
- Notes
- ^ Washington Post(September 19, 2008)
- ^ a b Local author James Crumley dies at 68 url=http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/09/18/news/local/news02.txt date=2008-09-17 accessdate=2008–09=18
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k McLellan, Dennis "James Crumley dies at 68; author of gritty but poetic crime novels" Los Angeles Times (September 20, 2008)
- ^ New York Times(September 19, 2008)
- ^ a b c Jakubowski, Maxim "Goodbye to Jim Crumley" The Guardian Book Blog (September 23, 2008)
- ^ Moe, Doug "Bleak House slashes prices, literally" Archived January 7, 2009, at the Wayback Machine Wisconsin State Journal (December 4, 2008)
- ^ McDonald's character "Hector Lassiter", who appears in his novels Head Games and Toros & Torsos, is "a hard-living crime writer whose private life overlaps with his dark and violent fiction" and was inspired by Crumley. Moe, Doug "Bleak House slashes prices, literally" Archived January 7, 2009, at the Wayback Machine Wisconsin State Journal (December 4, 2008)
- ^ Mergenhagen, Donna "Literary world loses significant authors"[permanent dead link] The Triton (December 26, 2008)
- Dallas Morning News(September 20, 2008)
- ^ a b c Holland, Dick. "The Last Good Detective Writer" The Texas Observer (November 14, 2008)
- ^ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post
- ^ http://gato-docs.its.txstate.edu/jcr:55340db1-6bb0-4d0a-bb13-0026a6bafaed/Crumley_055.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ "Captain Berserko Writes a Better Ending - Men's Journal". Archived from the original on September 24, 2017. Retrieved September 24, 2017.
- ^ McCumber, David "Writer Jim Crumley: A remembrance" Seattle Post-Intelligencer (September 20, 2008)
- ^ New York Times(October 31, 1993)
- New York Times(December 20, 1993)
- New York Times(May 8, 2005)
- ^ "Falcon Award Winners"
- Seattle Times(September 19, 2008)
- ^ Pelecanos, George "A Life in Books: George Pelecanos" Newsweek (September 20, 2008)
- IMDb
- IMDb
- ^ "Always Lookin' For A Book, Lookin' For A Title: An Interview with James Crumley" Contrappasso Magazine (Issue 1, August 2012)
- Further reading
- "James Crumley". Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 226: American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000.
- "James Crumley". Contemporary Authors. Volume 121. Detroit: Gale Group, 2004.
Archival sources
- The James Crumley Papers are housed at the Wittliff Collections, Texas State University in San Marcos.
External links
- James Crumley Papers, at the Texas State University-San Marcos
- James Crumley at IMDb
Obituaries and remembrances