James Crumley

Infobox Writer
name = James Crumley


imagesize = 175px
caption = Crumley at Bouchercon
Chicago, 11 September 2005
pseudonym =
birthname = James Arthur Crumley
birthdate = Birth date|1939|10|12
birthplace = Three Rivers, Texas, U.S.
deathdate = Death date and age|2008|9|17|1939|10|12
deathplace = Missoula, Montana, U.S.
occupation = author
nationality = American
ethnicity =
citizenship = American
education = Master of Fine Arts
"(creative writing)"
alma_mater = University of Iowa
period = lty|1969–lty|2005
genre = hardboiled detective crime
subject =
movement =
notableworks = "One to Count Cadence"
"The Last Good Kiss"
"The Mexican Tree Duck"
spouse = Martha Elizabeth
"(married c.1992)"
four previous marriages:
Sandra "Charlie" Crumley
Maggie Crumley
Judith Ann Ramey
Bronwyn Pughe
partner =
children =
relatives =
influences =
influenced =
awards = awd|Dashiell Hammett Award|lty|1994|The Mexican Tree Duck|


website =
portaldisp =

James Arthur Crumley (12 October lty|1939 - 17 September lty|2008)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] Fox, Margalit [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/books/20crumley.html?scp=1&sq=crumley&st=cse "James Crumley, Crime Novelist, Is Dead at 68"] "New York Times" (19 September 2008)] 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the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays.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", who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel" and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. Although his books were not bestsellers, 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, including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane.

Crumley's first published novel was lty|1969"s "One to Count Cadence", which was set in Vietnam, and which he began as the thesis for his master's degree in creative writing. 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."

Life

Crumley grew up in south Texas, where his father was an oil-field supervisor and his mother was a waitress. Crumley was a grade-A student and a football player in high school. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship, but left to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1961 in the Phillipines. He then attended the Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship, where he received his B.A. degree with a major in history in 1964. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1966. His master's thesis was later published as the Vietnam War novel "One to Count Cadence" in 1969.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. [“Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” January 30, 1968 "New York Post"]

Crumley served on the English faculty of the University of Montana at Missoula, and as a visiting professor at a number of other colleges, including the University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. From the mid-80s on he lived in Missoula, Montana, where he found inspiration for his novels at Charlie B's bar. A regular there, he had many longstanding friends who have been portrayed as characters in his books.

Crumley died at St. Patrick HospitalSullivan, Patricia [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/18/AR2008091803667.html "James Crumley; Inspired Generation of Crime Writers"] "Washington Post" (19 September 2008)] in Missoula on September 17, lty|2008 of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases after many years of health problems.McLellan, Dennis [http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-crumley20-2008sep20,0,1931721.story "James Crumley dies at 68; author of gritty but poetic crime novels"] "Los Angeles Times" (20 September 2008)] He was survived by his wife of 16 years, Martha Elizabeth, a poetMcCumber, David [http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/archives/149229.asp "Writer Jim Crumley: A remembrance"] " [{Seattle Post-Intelligencer] " (20 September 2008)] and artist who was his fifth wife. He had five children – three from his second marriage and two from his fourth – eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Response

Described as the literary offspring of Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson, none of the books that Crumley wrote ever became bestsellers, but he had a cult following devoted to his writing, and received critical acclaim. David Dempsey in the "New York Times" called Crumley's debut novel, "One to Count Cadence", set during the Vietnam War, "...a compelling study of the gratuitous violence in men. ... It is a story of bars, brawls, and brothels—and I don't know of any writer who has done it better." In lty|1993, Marilyn Stasio, reviewing "A Right Madness" in the same publication, wrote: "Characters as memorable as [Crumley's] don't come blazing down the interstate that often. Neither do writers like Mr. Crumley. Treasure them before they burn themselves out—and take the flame with them."Stasio, Marilyn [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE6DF1E3BF932A05753C1A965958260&scp=32&sq=crumley&st=cse "On the Road to Nowhere"] "New York Times" (31 October 1993)] Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described Crumley's work as being about "a violently chaotic world that can be seen as a legacy of Vietnam, of which his characters are nightmare-haunted veterans," [Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE6DC103EF933A15751C1A965958260&sec=&spon=&&scp=36&sq=crumley&st=cse "Mystery and Suspense from Three Old Hands"] "New York Times" (20 December 1993)] while Ron Powers called it "

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. [Powers, Ron [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/books/review/08POWERSL.html?scp=3&sq=crumley&st=cse "'The Right Madness': Montana's Evil Side"] "New York Times" (8 May 2005)]

"You don't read Crumley for plot," according to Patrick Anderson in the "Washington Post", "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'" . Critic Maxim Jakubowski, who was a friend of Crumley's, writing after his death, referred to his 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.Jakubowski, Maxim [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/23/jim.crumley.crime "Goodbye to Jim Crumley"] "The Guardian" Book Blog (23 September 2008)] ]

A number of writers view "The Last Good Kiss" as Crumley's best work. Its opening line is sometimes cited as the best in the genre:

"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."

Awards and honors

"The Mexican Tree Duck" won the 1994 Dashiell Hammett Award, given by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers for the best literary crime novel, and his last novel, "A Right Madness" was a finalist for the 2005 "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller.

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", [ [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2008189248_eye19.html "Odds and Ends: Passages"] "Seattle Times" (19 September 2008)] and in "Newsweek", George Pelecanos, crime author and co-producer of the HBO series "The Wire", rated Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss" as #3 in his list of the "Five Most Important Crime Novels". [Pelecanos, George [http://www.newsweek.com/id/160097 "A Life in Books: George Pelecanos"] "Newsweek" (20 September 2008)]

However, despite claims made on a number of websites, Crumley does not seem to have been either a winner or a nominee for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for "The Last Good Kiss" or any other novel.

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.

Film

For about a decade, Crumley worked intermittently in Hollywood, writing original scripts that were never produced, or acting as a script doctor. In that time he co-wrote with Rob Sullivan the screenplay for the Western film "The Far Side of Jericho", which debuted at the Santa Fe Film Festival on 10 December fy|2006 and was released on DVD in the United States on 21 August fy|2007. [imdb title|0463984|The Far Side of Jericho] He worked on a number of drafts of the screenplay for the film adaptation of the comic strip "Judge Dredd" (fy|1995), though none of his ideas were used in the final film. His commissioned but unproduced screenplay for the film "The Pigeon Shoot" was published in a limited edition. Additionally, Crumley provided the commentary for the fy|2002 English-language French film "L'esprit de la route" by Matthieu Serveau. [imdb title|0456064|L'esprit de la route]

Works

*"One to Count Cadence" (lty|1969) - novel, Vietnam
*"The Wrong Case" (lty|1975) - novel, Milo Milodragovitch series
*"The Last Good Kiss" (lty|1978) - novel, C.W. Sughrue series
*"Dancing Bear" (lty|1983) - novel, Milo series
*"Pigeon Shoot" (lty|1987) - unproduced screenplay, limited edition
*"Whores" (lty|1988) - short stories
*"Muddy Fork and Other Things" (lty|1991) - short fiction and essays
*"The Mexican Tree Duck" (lty|1993) - novel, Sughrue series, winner lty|1994 Dashiell Hammett Award
*"Bordersnakes" (lty|1996) - novel, Sughrue and Milo series
*"The Putt at the End of the World" (lty|2000) - collaborative novel
*"The Final Country" (lty|2001) - novel, Milo series
*"The Right Madness" (lty|2005) - novel, Sughrue series

Quote

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}

References

Notes

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.

External links

* [http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/archives/writers/crumley.html James Crumley Papers] , at the Texas State University-San Marcos
*

;Obituaries and remembrances
* [http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-crumley20-2008sep20,0,1931721.story "L.A. Times" obit]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/books/20crumley.html?scp=1&sq=crumley&st=cse "N.Y. Times" obit]
* [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/18/AR2008091803667.html "Washington Post" obit]
* [http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12327383 "The Economist" obit]
* [http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/thebigblog/archives/149229.asp David McCumber remembrance] "Seattle Post-Intelligencer"
* [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/23/jim.crumley.crime Maxim Jakubowski remembrance] "The Guardian"