If you want the facts, go to the New York Times obit; it hits the high points and is both fair and honest.
But if you want to know why Crumley will be remembered, pick up The Last Good Kiss
(or possibly Dancing Bear
, or The Wrong Case
), and read the man that took the Chandler hero and tarnished him out of all recognition, who sent that hero across a vaster and less forgiving landscape that Chandler ever expected, and who knew damn well what kind of world this was, and who peopled it.His later novels are lesser, and I've never managed to find time for his early Vietnam novel, One to Count Cadence. But those three detective novels, from the '70s and early '80s, are as good as anyone's novels of America get. If you haven't read them, now is a good time.
And I'll hoist a glass in memory of him, the next time I'm drinking more than one.
1 comment:
At Confluence (in Pittsburgh) David Hartwell sold me a copy of The Last Good Kiss. What an opening line:
"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."
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