James Crumley

James Crumley (born Oct. 12, 1939, Three Rivers, Texas, U.S.—died Sept. 17, 2008, Missoula, Mont.) was an American writer of violent mystery novels whose vivid characterizations and sordid settings, amid the natural splendour of the western United States, transcend the conventions of the genre.

Crumley was reared in Texas and attended Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas Arts and Industries University (B.A., 1964), and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1966). His U.S. Army service (1958–61) provided experiences for his Vietnam War novel One to Count Cadence (1969); after that, apart from occasional journalism and short stories, collected in The Muddy Fork and Other Things (1991), he wrote detective novels. His down-and-out detective protagonists, Milo Milodragovich and C.W. Sughrue, live in the fictional mountain city of Meriwether, Mont. Both are also alcoholics and cocaine addicts; both are divorced war veterans who are fond of firearms, military tactics, and fistfights over small matters; both are loyal to moral codes at odds with those of conventional society; and both endure existential crises in the course of events.

The other characters in Crumley’s novels are also notable. They include the academics, skid row denizens, and mountain hippies whom Milo meets in The Wrong Case (1975). Sughrue and a windy novelist with writer’s block drink their way through the West while hunting a missing pornography actress in The Last Good Kiss (1978). A demented Vietnam War veteran helps Milo destroy a conspiracy to pollute the Northwest in Dancing Bear (1983); an Indian mother, a quartet of environmentalists, and a lustful cocaine dealer are among the women they meet. Sughrue hunts the mother of a vile-tempered drug dealer in the especially violent The Mexican Tree Duck (1993). In Bordersnakes (1996) Milo and Sughrue, former partners, reteam to hunt for missing money. Later novels include The Final Country (2001) and The Right Madness (2005). While the plots of Crumley’s novels are as conventionally complicated as any in the genre, the quality of his writing, his recurring comedy, the social strata of his stories, and his emphasis on cataclysmic climaxes are unique.