Crumley, James 1939-2008

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 12, 1939, in Three Rivers, TX; died September 17 (some sources cite September 16), 2008, in Missoula, MT. Crime novelist and educator. Crumley was not a prolific author, but his intense crime novels are unforgettable, according to his critics. Crumley saw himself as an illegitimate literary descendant of novelist Raymond Chandler, but he reportedly took his readers into a world of violence, depravity, and profanity that would have stopped Chandler's protagonists at the door. The army veteran claimed that the Vietnam War era changed his worldview profoundly (along with the worldview of his mainly young readers), and the changes were reflected in his writing. Readers were stunned by the unique and jarring combination of lyrical prose emanating from some of the most hard-boiled, dissipated, substance-abusing, brutal detectives to stalk the bars and back alleys as free men. The detective Milo Milodragovich, introduced in The Wrong Case: A Novel (1975), had the redeeming quality of an automatic instinct to help people. C.W. Sughrue, who debuted in The Last Good Kiss: A Novel (1978), was not hampered by any noticeable redeeming qualities, but did retain some obligation to do the "right thing" in the end. Both crime fighters have been described as logical products of the world in which they lived, and which Crumley knew well: the hard-scrabble, rough-edged towns west of the Rocky Mountains. Crumley captured that world in startling detail, writing from his home base in Montana. It was not his plots that lured his readers, but Crumley's eloquent prose and lifelike characters. Crumley won the Dashiell Hammett Award for best literary crime novel from the International Association of Crime Writers in 1994 for the Sughrue adventure The Mexican Tree Duck (1994). In the interludes between novels, Crumley taught English at various institutions, including the University of Montana, Colorado State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and other institutions west of the Mississippi River. According to some sources, his novel One to Count Cadence (1969) is based on his master of fine arts degree dissertation for the University of Iowa on the "violence purely for the sake of violence" that he began to observe during the Vietnam War era. Crumley's shorter works were collected in The Muddy Fork and Other Things: Short Fiction and Nonfiction (1991).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 21, 2008, sec. 4, p. 7.

Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2008, p. B9.

New York Times, September 20, 2008, p. B10.

Times (London, England), September 25, 2008, p. 60.