To provide content for this journal, I am strip-mining my file of brief detective-novel reviews. (I’ve been writing these little squibs for several years now.) This one covers a fine, fine work that I read a couple of months ago.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978).
Crumley hits a series of notes that another virtuoso of the hangdog-noir style had sounded a quarter-century earlier. The Last Good Kiss, like The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece from 1953 (note the valedictory wistfulness in both titles), builds an array of cockeyed triangles around an alcoholic writer, a woman who seeks to “rescue” him, and a sad-sack shamus whom the woman hires for that purpose. 
Yet in numerous ways Crumley charts new territory for the hard-boiled genre. Part of what’s new, in fact, is actual territory: C.W. Sughrue, part-time detective to the wealthy and degenerate, part-time bartender to their poor and equally degenerate brethren, calls Montana home. For him, dirt roads and an endless ream of black highway replace the mean streets of urban noir; instead of clipped wisecracking, he offers parched country wit, too dry even to be called sardonic. Sughrue is also distinctly a man of his moment, the tail end of the burned-out 1970s, a time when bitter memories of the Vietnam War and the acrid odor of the ’60s counterculture still hung low and thick over the land. Across that land, from Cauldron Springs in Montana to Colorado and Oregon and other points west, he drives an El Camino pickup—a halfling monstrosity, neither quite a truck nor quite a car, and a fitting emblem for a period when no one seemed to know which shape to take. In its plotting, too, Sughrue’s adventure departs from its precursor. Where Chandler typically scored his work with a regular drumbeat of killings, Crumley inserts a murder only in the final movement of his story. A pure quest narrative for much of its length, the story follows Sughrue’s search for the long-lost daughter of a woman who runs a watering hole in Sonoma, California, where Sughrue has tracked down the errant author. The daughter disappeared a decade earlier, first into a commune, then into the porn industry, and then presumably into some other false utopia. Even after the hero locates this damsel, she faces threats from a boorish ogre and a cruel, jealous crone. But which ogre, and which crone? Sughrue, on his Interstate odyssey, encounters multiple candidates for both roles.
