LoveReading Says
Crumley, the much-revered US author who died in 2006 brought a new vigour to the crime novel and reinterpreted the tropes of Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald with his disillusioned bruised masculinity and rambling sense of American disconnect. With a new introduction by an admiring Ian Rankin, THE LAST GOOD KISS is Crumley at his best, hardboiled to perfection, cynical, written like a clockwork mechanism where every sentence is quasi-perfect and boasts one of the most memorable opening sentences in the history of crime fiction. When private eye C.W. Sughrue ('as in rue the fucking day'...) catches up with Abraham Trahearne, a runaway writer on a three week binge, he also comes across his alcoholic bulldog in a California bar and the scene is set for a profane journey in search of the landlady's missing daughter that will take him to San Francisco and his own version of hell. Profane, gripping, in the shadow of the horrors of the Vietnam war and paradoxically poetic, a crime novel as fever dream and one for the ages. We can only hope Crumley's other books will soon dutifully follow in new editions. They are classics that should not be allowed to ever go out of print.
Maxim Jakubowski's May 2016 Book of the Month.
Maxim Jakubowski
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James Crumley Press Reviews
'Crumley writes like an angel on speed' Time Out
'The poet laureate of American hard-boiled literature, superior even to James Lee Burke in his ability to evoke extreme melancholy, gruesome violence and an acute sense of landscape' Guardian
'ReadingCrumley is like hurtling through an assault course...funny, salty and ruthless...one of the marvels of contemporary crime writing' Literary Review
'Like James Ellroy, he is a master of American vernacular, turning tough-guy slang into something like poetry' Independent
'James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe' New York Times
About James Crumley
James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas and spent most of his childhood in South Texas. He served three years in the US Army before teaching at University of Texas at El Paso, University of Montana and University of Arkansas. He passed away in 2008. His private eye novels featuring Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue are regarded as masterpieces of contemporary crime fiction, praised by Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin and George Pelecanos. He was awarded the Dashiell Hammett Award for Best Literary Crime Novel and the CWA Silver Dagger Award.
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