The Last Good Kiss

'The last good mystery' Rolling Stone

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

Reading Crumley is like hurtling through an assault course...funny, salty and ruthless...one of the marvels of contemporary crime writing

Like James Ellroy, he is a master of American vernacular, turning tough-guy slang into something like poetry

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

Crumley is the singular reason that a lot of today’s forty-something writers headed straight into crime fiction

Crumley is a brilliant purveyor of dialogue and a master of melancholy loneliness.

'As sweetly profane a poet as American noir could have asked for' Ian Rankin 
 
'A friggin' masterpiece' Dennis Lehane 
 
'The stunner that reinvigorated the genre and jacked up a generation of future crime novelists' George Pelecanos 
 
Meet Private Detective C. W. Sughrue. 
 
Private detectives are supposed to find missing persons and solve crimes. But more often than not Sughrue is the one committing the crimes – everything from grand theft auto to criminal stupidity. All washed down with a hearty dose of whiskey and regret. 
 
At the end of a three-week hunt for a runaway bestselling author, Sughrue winds up in a ramshackle bar, with an alcoholic bulldog. The landlady’s daughter vanished a decade ago and now she wants Sughrue to find her. His search will take him to the deepest, darkest depths of San Francisco’s underbelly, a place as fascinating, frightening and flawed as he is. 
 
Welcome to James Crumley’s America.

Bordersnakes

'Crumley is the singular reason that a lot of today's forty-something writers headed straight into crime fiction' Laura Lippman

Wild, wicked, sweet, painful, courageous, outrageous and obscene

A cocaine-fuelled enterprise which proves absolutely that Crumley's Texas...is the place to be

Crumley writes like an angel on speed... Indispensable

Blistering, breakneck narrative shared by Crumley's two great private eyes... Heartstopping stuff, fuelled by drugs, booze and willing women in which violent action is actually the coverall for high romance... Reprehensible and irresistible. The ultimate adventure'

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.

‘Crumley in scintillating form: an anarchic, savagely violent and brilliantly written lament for a vanishing past’ Evening Standard 
 
James Crumley is the king of hard-boiled noir, credited with inspiring the next generation of crime writers – including Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly – and best known for his two private detectives, Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue. He brought them together for one wild, pulse-pounding ride. This is that story. 
 
Someone shot Sughrue and left him for dead, and someone stole Milo’s $3million inheritance. And they’re not the kind of men to let it go. They’ve joined forces in El Paso and they’re set for a wild ride across America. They’re out for revenge… 
 
‘No one in American crime fiction writes sharper, more authentic dialogue, nor more exciting action, nor, beneath the tough façade, has a greater feel for the values and mores that really matter’ The Times

Dancing Bear

'Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald have been looking for a successor. Now they have him' Boston Phoenix

The first-person style, the author's sound, is bigger than life, satirical, and it lets Crumley get away with murder'

Completely unnerving...intelligent, despairing, moving

A classic from a legend of American crime writing. ‘Crumley writes like an angel on speed’ Time Out. 
 
Milo Milodragovitch isn’t exactly an upstanding citizen. He’s more than likely to be drunk, and leaves heartbreak in his wake; five ex-wives to be precise. In fact, ‘his forte is self-destruction’ (Elmore Leonard). 
 
When an elderly lady offers him a handsome fee to satisfy her curiosity he thinks it’s an easy job, a quick win. Every Thursday she watches a couple arrive at the same spot at the woods opposite her house, in separate cars. But finding out who they are and what they’re doing is far from straightforward and before he knows it Milo is in a world of trouble, complete with machine guns, grenades, and a bag of coke. Never a dull day...

The Final Country

Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award, 2002. A classic from a legendary crime writer whose fans include Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly.

This complex thriller is so hardboiled it makes Ellroy and Connelly read like Simon and Garfunkel… it’s good. Very good

Combines the spare tautness of the best private eye novels with lyrical descriptions of an almost vanished West

This is an extraordinary double-barrelled blast from a lost era. It’s a two-fisted epic of Texan treachery, packed to the gunwales with sex, drugs, booze and guns…

Lyrical, liberal, exciting and humane. Sexy, too, with a generosity that transcends taste and as violent as needs be

‘This complex thriller is so hardboiled it makes Ellroy and Connelly read like Simon and Garfunkel… it’s good. Very good’ Time Out 
 
Settling – and calming – down is never easy. Especially not for Milo Milodragovitch. He’s set up a bar, and found a woman he thinks he may love, but he can’t leave his work as a private investigator behind entirely. 
 
When he crosses paths with ex-con Enos Walker, and as the bullets fly, he’s launched on to a cocaine- and alcohol-fuelled quest to solve a 20-year-old mystery. It’s a journey that will take him racing across Texas, Montana and Mexico, with barely a moment for him – or you – to catch breath… 
 
‘A brilliant achievement, with Crumley returned to his full powers, seeming to say with each assured sentence, “Yeah, I’m an old dog, but I still wag the baddest bone”’ Publishers Weekly

The Mexican Tree Duck

The pleasures of Crumley's writing has always been in the characters, dialogue and incidental delights

It's the journey, with all its wild, wicked, sweet, painful, courageous, outrageous and obscene encounters - which must somehow include those between man and duck - that will stay with the reader after the blood dries'

The pleasures of a James Crumley novel derive mostly from the zing of its characters, the bite of its epigrams, and a restless, almost manic vitality - prose on amphetamines

'A fantastic road trip...wild, wicked, sweet, painful, courageous, outrageous, and obscene' New York Times 
 
Never the most conventional of private detectives, C. W. Sughrue is called in to solve a far from traditional missing persons case. A beautiful woman has vanished, and Sughrue is set to be the next in a long line of people who have tried to find her: the FBI, her well-connected Republican husband, and – most worryingly – a group of South American drug dealers. And his only clue is a hollowed-out sculpture of a duck. 
 
From Montana to the Mexican border, Sughrue embarks on a wild ride, as he finds himself in and out of trouble – and the beds of one or two women. And, as he runs from his memories of Vietnam, he ponders the meaning of loyalty and revenge. This is a journey like no other from the pen of James Crumley, the master of a generation of crime writers.

One To Count Cadence

The powerful debut from one of the legends of twentieth-century fiction, loved by Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos.

A brawling romantic novel about the hell of war, the value of friendship, the difficulties of loving and how to be a man despite it all

Top notch...an imaginative narrative sense, chaotic and even manic, but violently dramatic...excitingly new

A gutting, eloquent first novel with an insistence you won't, you just can't evade

'Crumley writes like an angel on speed' Time Out 
 
Clark Air Force Base, the Philippines. 1962. Sergeant Jacob ‘Slag’ Krummel, wannabe scholar now warrior, is posted to the base to take command of the 721st Communication Security Detachment, perhaps the least committed band of drunken, rebellious and bored soldiers in the US Air Force. With the Vietnam War looming large in their minds, they cannot escape war, fear and the truth about America, overturning the lies they’ve been told about their homeland. 
 
First published in 1969, this is the debut that launched the career of one of the greatest writers of his generation. Crumley’s timeless classic is a stunning exploration of the effects of war, told with his trademark razor-sharp dialogue, dark humour, relentless pace and remarkable set pieces.

James Crumley

An exceptionally good example of the private-eye novel. Crumley writes about damaged people seen through a haze of jaded romanticism

If you like your detective fiction tough and tenacious, you will love James Crumley... No one does it better

Milo Milodragovitch is a once-successful divorce lawyer, who now prefers to spend his days drinking and staring out the window. That all changes when Helen Duffy walks into his office and asks him to find her missing brother. 
 
Though it's not his usual line of work, Milo agrees to help - he needs the money, and he wants to spend more time with this beautiful woman. But this is far from a routine case, and whispers of a long-past crime haunt Milo's every move . . . 
 
'As sweetly profane a poet as American noir could have asked for' Ian Rankin 
 
'Like James Ellroy, he is a master of American vernacular, turning tough-guy slang into something like poetry' Independent

James Crumley

Praise for The Wrong Case

An exceptionally good example of the private-eye novel. Crumley writes about damaged people seen through a haze of jaded romanticism

If you like your detective fiction tough and tenacious, you will love James Crumley... No one does it better

Books by James Crumley

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