James Crumley

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. Crumley was a grade-A student and a football player, an offensive lineman, in high school. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship for about a year before leaving to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1961; during his service, he was assigned to the Philippines. He then resumed his higher education at the Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship, where he received his B.A. in history in 1964. He earned an M.F.A. degree in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1966. His master's thesis was published as 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. Crumley had not read any detective fiction until prompted to by Montana poet Richard Hugo, who recommended the work of Raymond Chandler for the quality of his sentences. Crumley finally picked up a copy of one of Chandler's books in Guadalajara, Mexico. Impressed by the oeuvres of Chandler and Ross Macdonald, Crumley began writing his first detective novel, The Wrong Case, which was published in 1975. Crumley died at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula on September 17, 2008, of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases after many years of health problems. According to longtime friend and fellow writer Thomas McGuane, "He did cocaine six days a week. Ate five times a day. Drank a bottle of whiskey every day. He said, 'This is how I like to live. If I live 10 years less, so what?'" He was survived by his fifth wife of 16 years, Martha Elizabeth, a poet and artist. He had five children (including three from his second marriage and two from his fourth), eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. 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. ==Response==

None of the books that Crumley wrote ever became bestsellers, but he had a cult following devoted to his writing and received frequent critical acclaim. 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," 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. 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'". 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 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 Maltese Falcon Society of Japan for the best "hardboiled" novel published in that country. 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. 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". 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. He worked on a number of drafts of the screenplay for the film adaptation of the comic strip Judge Dredd (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 2002 English-language French film ''L'esprit de la route'' by Matthieu Serveau. 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!" ==Works==

has a bar stool dedicated to James Crumley. • 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==

• The James Crumley Papers are housed at the Wittliff Collections, Texas State University in San Marcos. ==External links==