Sughrue is about thirty-eight, with a drinking problem he learned how to handle after he woke up in Elko, Nevada, with a job cleaning toilets. Crumley has worked material from a novel about his own South Texas boyhood into The Last Good Kiss, and the result is a detective shaped less by the tradition of hard-boiled murder fiction than by ambiguities of will and self-control, compassion, blown chances, and rage. Sughrue himself is not your run-of-the-mill sleuth. There is, in fact, only one, and it has a sting far worse than Stone was able to put into any of his.Ĭ.W. Dog Soldiers was taken as a “real novel,” but there are fewer murders in The Last Good Kiss. Crumley doesn’t give in to a yearning for resolution through apocalypse. Crumley’s America is as sordid as Stone’s, maybe more so, but he has no need to overdramatize it. The Last Good Kiss shares this milieu with Dog Soldiers, but Crumley seems more intimate with its details than Robert Stone, and it shocks him less. None of it reads as if it came out of the pages of Newsweek. His subject is the long hangover the Seventies have had to suffer for the failure to face up to the conflicts of the Sixties: bad dope, hippie whores with pimps twice their age, small-time mob pornographers, spiritual retreats, instinctive flight and wasted questing. Sughrue, is at once rooted in a real past and brutally up-to-date. The backdrop of Crumley’s book, and the world of his detective, C.W. As I sat down, they glanced at me with the narrow eyes of country people, looking me over carefully as if I were an abandoned wreck they were planning to cannibalize for spare parts. The dust bowl Thirties and a rattletrap, homemade Model-T truck heading into the setting sun. Their knotty faces and nasal accents belonged to another time, another place.

Neither of them bothered to glance at me as I slipped onto a stool between and the only two other customers in the place, two out-of-work shade-tree mechanics who were discussing their lost unemployment checks, their latest DWI conviction, and the probable location of a 1957 Chevy timing chain.

This passage, a bar scene from the first page of The Last Good Kiss, is not only a true strike into bedrock American vernacular, it’s typical of Crumley: Crumley is close to a natural writer, if he wants to put fear, fury or hilarity on the page, it goes on and stays on. Macdonald’s web-of-deceit plotting, no matter how brilliant, has always been subverted by weaknesses of style: an epidemic of tortured similes, dialogue no one would ever speak, witless caricatures in place of living characters, and an almost complete lack of humor.

James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss (Random House, 259 pp., $8.95) carries more weight than any private-eye story since Ross Macdonald‘s The Chill.

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley