And in The Last Good Kiss, Crumley uses it to explore the battered bars and small towns of seventies post-Vietnam War American.
And, Christ knows, there is certainly a lot of boring PI crime novels out there.īut done well, the private investigator is a terrific vehicle to explore society and its underbelly. A lot of people think it’s said everything it can say, that it’s boring and derivative. PI crime fiction gets a bad wrap these days. It’s a pointless case and Sughrue is not sure why he is doing it. There are rumours she may have been involved in porn films, got tangled up with the mob, ended up in a remote commune, no one knows. Sughrue and Traheane end up looking for the girl together.
She and her boyfriend where driving around the city one afternoon, they stopped at a red light and she just opened the door, stepped out and was never seen again. One job leads to another when the owner of the bar with the bull dog asks Sughrue to find her daughter, who has been missing in San Francisco for ten years. In my business, you need a moral certitude that I no longer even claimed to possess and, every time, when I came to the end of the chase I wanted to walk away.”
The process was fine, but the finished product was always ugly. This was the saddest moment of the chase, the silent wait for the apologetic parents or the angry spouse or the law. “Whenever I found anybody, I always suspected that I deserved more than money in payment. His thoughts upon locating his quarry are worth repeating in full. He tracks Traheane for weeks down endless stretches of black top and numerous dead end bars, almost entering a dream like state, before finally finding him. The Last Good Kiss starts off with CW Sughrue being paid to search for an alcoholic, larger than life, Norman Mailer-type writer called Abraham Traheane. I was determined to mark the most memorable passages but gave up by page 30.
The story is a terrific piece of distilled hard-boiled noir, and Crumley is such a fine writer. It’s certainly the best one I can remember reading, and I’ve read a lot. Second, it may very well be the best piece of private investigator fiction written. Whatever the case, I came away from the book thinking two things.įirstly, it probably has the greatest opening line of any book I’ve ever read. It was maybe my third or fourth time, I’m not sure. I recently re-read James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss. “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma California, drinking the heart out of a fine spring afternoon.”
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