The Last Good Kiss (James Crumley)

August 25, 2007

My first thought when I finished Crumley’s relatively short novel The Last Good Kiss was “how have I never heard of this guy before?” That was followed quickly by “I have to find some more of his books.”

The Last Good Kiss is a private eye novel of the decidedly jaded variety. C. W. Sughrue is a hard-drinking, low-rent private investigator from Montana who spends most of his time repossessing cars (and when times are tough, televisions) and tailing wandering spouses. There’s a bit of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser in Sughrue’s wisecracks and a lot of Chandler in Crumley’s prose, but the result is neither knock-off nor homage, but a whole new and tasty dish made from familiar ingredients.

Sughrue’s milieu (to choose a word Sughrue himself might unexpectedly spring upon someone who needed to get a glimpse of the college educated man beneath the good old boy exterior) is the American West of California, Oregon and Idaho. It’s a seedy, post-happy hippy world of pornography, drugs, and the sullen resentment of large numbers of people for whom the world turned out to be nothing like they expected. It’s the part of the West that follows a straight line to the from The Grapes of Wrath through Chinatown before exploding brightly somewhere in the early 70s.

Sughrue is a complex character whose full dimensions are revealed in glimpses and asides. He’s noble without being saintly, and slyly manipulative when he has to be. The Last Good Kiss starts with Sughrue performing a strange, but lucrative, assignment, searching for a popular author who has run away from home on a drinking jag and, we find out, adopted a beer-drinking bulldog. That assignment leads to an even stranger one, this time a mission that becomes dangerous to Sughrue’s body and heart.

Like the best of the genre’s authors, Crumley’s dialogue and descriptions have distinctive rhythms and poetry of their own. The language is simple on the surface but, when examined– and it can be examined because it is so clear– it runs deep. As an example, here’s the close of a chapter in which Sughrue’s been questioning the last boyfriend of the long-missing Betty Sue Rose. The former boyfriend has admitted to spending years searching for her, going so far as to view every unidentified body that would find its way to the San Francisco morgue, and he is still in therapy trying to deal with the loss. When they shake hands he asks if Sughrue would tell him if the missing Betty Sue turns up:

“Not for love or money,” I said, and took back my fingers.

“Why’s that??” he asked, confused and nearly crying.

“Let me tell you a story,” I said, which didn’t help his confusion. “When I was twelve, my daddy was working on a ranch down in Wyoming, west of a hole in the road called Chugwater, and I spent the summer up there with him– my momma and daddy didn’t live together, you see– and my daddy was crazy, had this notion, which he made up whole cloth, that he was part Indian. Hell, he took to wearing braids and living in a teepee and claiming he was a Kwahadi Comanche, and since I was his only son, I was too. And that summer I was twelve, he sent me on a vision quest. Three days and nights of sitting under the empty sky, not moving, not eating or sleeping. And you know something? It worked.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you are telling me,” he said seriously.

“Well, it’s like this,” I said. “I had a vision. And I’ve been having them ever since.”

“So?”

“You know, when you were telling me about those Jane Does and those rubber sheets, I had another one,” I said.

“Of what?”

“I saw your face all scrunched up in disappointment every time you didn’t find her under that rubber sheet,” I said, and he understood immediately. After two years on the couch he had begun to have visions of his own. “I know you’re a nice person and all that and that you didn’t mean to feel that way, but you did, and if I find her, you’ll never hear about it from me.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” he screamed, but I shut the door in his face. I didn’t have a vision for that yet.

As I opened the outside door, I held it for a thin, lovely woman with fragile features and a brittle smile. She thanked me with a voice so near to hysteria that I nearly ran to my El Camino. No visions, no poetry for her. Just a road beer for me. I sat for a bit, holding the beer from the small cooler sitting in the passenger seat like an alien pet, thinking about my mad daddy and those days and nights sitting cross-legged on a chalk bluff above Sybille Creek, sitting still like some dumb beast or a rock cairn marking a nameless grave. Of course I had visions. At first they were of starving to death, or being so bored I died for the simple variety of the act, then it was maybe freezing to death under the stars or finding myself permanently crippled, locked into my cross-legged stance like a freak on a creeper. Later, though, the visions came: a stone that flew, a star that spoke like an Oxford don, Virginia Mayo at my feet. I guess I wasn’t a very good Comanche; I had seen too many movies, and besides, my crazy daddy had made the whole thing up. But, by god, I had visions. And none of the drugs, or combinations thereof, I had ingested as an adult had ever matched those first ones. But I had never gone back up Sybille Creek to that chalk bluff either. And never would.

I used the dreaded G-word (genre) earlier, but such a categorization is, in this case, simply a shorthand to convey a lot of information about the outermost characteristics of the story. Like Chandler’s work, this is not a book that fits in any convenient container. Crumley’s novel is best called simply a good book, a great read. In some divine bookstore arranged according to my taste it would be filed under the quality catch-all “literature” but in this world such an appellation would drive away more readers than it would entice.

Tags: books, reading log