James Crumley: The Right Madness

For the Spring 2006 Borderland Noir issue, guest editor Craig McDonald sat down with James Crumley — the Montana novelist whose book The Last Good Kiss is, by common consent among crime writers, the benchmark of the modern hardboiled novel. The interview, conducted as Crumley published The Right Madness, became one of the zine's defining pieces. This page preserves its substance and significance.

The Most Famous Opening in Hardboiled Fiction

The interview opened where every Crumley conversation must: with the first paragraph of 1978's The Last Good Kiss, in which the narrator finally catches up with Abraham Trahearne, drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonora, California — drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. The crime fiction cognoscenti have committed that paragraph to memory. As Dennis Lehane told McDonald's research, speaking for himself and fellow writers George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly: it's funny we all hold the same book in a certain high regard — there's the benchmark, let's go after that. A book, Lehane said, that stands head and shoulders above any concept of genre fiction. The novel takes its epigraph from Richard Hugo's poem Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg — you might come here Sunday on a whim; say your life broke down; the last good kiss you had was years ago — and earns it.

The Unlikely Road to Crime Fiction

Crumley came out of the hyper-literary Iowa Writers' Workshop; his first book was the Vietnam novel One to Count Cadence. Struggling for a follow-up, he was introduced to Raymond Chandler's novels by the poet Richard Hugo, shortly after moving to Missoula, Montana — where he made his home for the rest of his life. The result was The Wrong Case, the watershed novel that introduced private investigator Milo Milodragovitch, followed by The Last Good Kiss and its sometime-PI, sometime-bartender C.W. Sughrue. With those two books — buttressed by George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard — Crumley changed the terrain of contemporary crime fiction: plot was subordinated to character, and language came front and center. A poet's sensibility had been brought to bear on the mystery novel.

The Conversation

McDonald's interview ranged across the whole career: the long gaps between books, the border novel Bordersnakes, the alternating Milo and Sughrue series, the legendary bar-stool hospitality that made Crumley a pilgrimage destination for younger writers passing through Missoula, and the then-new The Right Madness. What emerged was a portrait of a writer constitutionally incapable of compromise — commercially costly, artistically priceless — and of the American West as noir country: not mean streets but long highways, where the trouble drives out to meet you. McDonald, himself soon to be an Edgar-nominated novelist for a book built from his author interviews, treated the conversation as oral history, and it reads that way now — Crumley died in 2008, two years after it ran, and firsthand interviews of this depth are scarce.

Borderland Noir's Centerpiece

Placing the interview in the Borderland Noir issue was a curatorial argument in itself. McDonald's theme gathered stories set along the Texas-Mexico line — Ken Bruen, Manuel Ramos, and Mike MacLean among the contributors — and Crumley, whose Bordersnakes had mapped that country a decade earlier, stood behind the whole table of contents like a patron saint. Issue, interview, and the accompanying essay on Orson Welles's border film Touch of Evil formed a single editorial statement: that the American borderland is noir's native landscape, and Crumley its laureate.

The Legacy

Crumley's influence is everywhere in the fiction Hardluck published: the damaged investigators, the poetry smuggled into hard sentences, the conviction that crime novels can carry literary weight without losing their nerve. The interview ran alongside the craft essay Lessons in Noir in the same issue — together they form the zine's clearest statement of its aesthetic. The issue's full contents are in the Archives, and the zine's other landmark conversation, with Ken Bruen, makes the natural companion read.