Like his protagonists, Mr Crumley understood in his bones the open, take-it-as-you-find-it ethos of the American West. Modern city-dwellers, for all their professed open-mindedness and literalism, rarely socialise with people markedly different from them; but Mr Crumley’s novels feature alcoholic poet-hunters talking to one-legged down-on-their-luck Okie bartenders who somehow wandered out to California while on the run from their scuba-diving ex-wives. Sometimes the poets drink with dogs, as in Mr Crumley’s most famous novel, “The Last Good Kiss”, which features one of the most perfect opening lines in American crime fiction: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts at a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
RIP James Crumley
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themanintheseersuckersuit
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RIP James Crumley
James Crumley rated a obit in The Economist, so I though I would post it
Suitguy is not bitter.
feels he represents the many educated and rational onlookers who believe that the hysterical denouncement of lay scepticism is both unwarranted and counter-productive
The problem, then, is that such calls do not address an opposition audience so much as they signal virtue. They talk past those who need convincing. They ignore actual facts and counterargument. And they are irreparably smug.
feels he represents the many educated and rational onlookers who believe that the hysterical denouncement of lay scepticism is both unwarranted and counter-productive
The problem, then, is that such calls do not address an opposition audience so much as they signal virtue. They talk past those who need convincing. They ignore actual facts and counterargument. And they are irreparably smug.