Books by James Crumley
The Right Madness
When a close friend asks him to help locate a cache of stolen confidential psychoanalysis files, ex-army officer turned Montana private investigator C. W. Sughrue becomes increasingly baffled as the case's suspects begin dying violently. By the author of The Last Good Kiss.
Copies
No copies available.
The Right Madness
James Crumley is one of the most revered practitioners of post-Chandler crime fiction, praised by the likes of Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly as a major influence. C. W. Sughrue is Crumley's most indelible creation. Now Sughrue is back, in a searing thrill ride of a novel that has the seen-it-all Montana private eye trying to find out which of a small-town shrink's bizarre patients has made off with some highly confidential files. Fast-paced, brutal, melancholy, and ruefully funny, The Right Madness is Crumley at his uncompromising best.
Copies
No copies available.
One to Count Cadence
The time: late summer, 1962. The place: Clark Air Force Base, the Philippines. Sergeant Jacob "Slag" Krummel, a scholar by intent but a warrior by breeding, assumes command of the 721st Communication Security Deteachment, an unsoldierly crew of bored, rebellious, whoring, foul-mouthed, drunken enlistees. Surviving military absurdities reminiscent of those in Catch-22 only to be shipped clandestinely to Vietnam, Krummel's band confront their worst fears while finally losing faith in America and its myths.
Powerful, scathingly funny, and eloquent, One to Count Cadence is a triumphant novel about manhood, anger, war, and lies.
Copies
No copies available.
The Wrong Case
An extraordinary detective story from one of the great American crime fiction authors.
Milo once had a thriving divorce-case business in the small town of in the Pacific Northwest, but because of liberal new divorce laws he has taken to drinking and staring out the window. He's up to his third drink of the morning when an attractive young woman walks into his office and asks him to find her brother. He takes on what seems a routine missing-person case in hopes of getting to know her better, but finds himself involved in what is most definitely the wrong case. Everyone is a victim, one way or another, of a crime that took place long before the novel begins.
Copies
No copies available.
Dancing Bear
Detective Milo Dragovitch spends too much time boozing until he gets caught up in a case involving two-bit criminals and an old lady on the run.
His friends call him Milo. No one has ever called him Bud except his father, long dead, and now Sarah Weddington, stirring painful memoires and offering him his first case since he abandoned his private practice and took a job marking time on the night shift for Haliburton Security. The case seems almost too easy, hardly worth the large fee, just to satisfy this old woman's curiosity. But things are soon exploding all over the place and Milo is turning up grenades, machine guns, a kilo of marijuana and a bag of coke . . . and suddenly Milo is on the run.
Copies
No copies available.
The Last Good Kiss
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • One of the most influential crime novels ever written, by a legend of the genre.
Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America's sleaziest nightmares.
Copies
-
$16.00
The Final Country
Milo Milodragovitch is back in Texas, running the bar of his dreams and trying to do a little private investigating on the side. His relationship with his woman is on the rocks, especially since he had an overnight fling with Molly McBride, the classy dame with the taste for single malt scotch. Now, Molly's persuaded Milo to help her search for and bring to justice the lowlife who raped and murdered her sister. What appears to be a simple stakeout turns hideously violent when it's discovered that Molly's prey is no ordinary miscreant, but a whirl-wind of brutality with major political connections. Soon Milo is calling on connections of his own, including shady computer geniuses, taciturn bodyguards, underground crank manufacturers, and his old pal C.W. "Sonny" Sughrue, in a plot that takes him from sweaty, dusty Mexico to the subzero mountains of Montana.
Copies
No copies available.
The Mexican Tree Duck
Ex-private eye C.W. Sughrue has been depressed, jobless and living in the basement of a morgue, but now a job has come up. He sets off on an odyssey of liquor, sex and gunplay to find a missing woman who has eluded the FBI and cocaine dealers.
Copies
No copies available.
Bordersnakes (Milo Milodragovitch)
C.W. Sughrue has been gut-shot and left to die and is, for the first time in his life, actually scared—which makes him angry. Milo Milodragovitch has been robbed of his three-million dollar inheritance by a pipsqueak banker and a butch lady poet; he’s not scared at all, just pissed. In a spiffy suit and a red Cadillac, Milo trails his thieves to the Mexican border, where the community consists of “three kinds of drug smugglers, six different breeds of law dogs, and every kind of criminal ever dreamed up”—that is, bordersnakes. When Milo and Sughrue cross paths, they head off together on a dope-smoking, trash-talking, hard-drinking, blood-spattering roadtrip across the West.
Copies
No copies available.
The Mexican Tree Duck (C.W. Sughrue)
WINNER OF THE DASHIELL HAMMETT AWARD
One night up in Montana, C.W. Sughrue sets his seedy bar’s pricey jukebox in front of an oncoming freight train. When predictable results ensue, he needs to find a way to make some money and pay back the jukebox company. So even though Sughrue’s officially retired from P.I. work, he picks up one small-time case involving some kidnapped fish. That fishy trail leads to a much bigger case involving a Texas politician's kidnapped wife, a valuable piece of pre-Columbian pottery, and a single mother who packs guns and stolen goods in her infant son's diaper bag.
Copies
-
$20.00
The Final Country (Milo Milodragovitch)
A NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book
It's business as usual for Milo Milodragovitch, watching a relationship go sour and running a bar whose real business is cleaning some dirty money, until he gets sent off to hunt a drug dealer’s killer. Prodded by the twin motivations of his prickly conscience and his tight finances, Milo sets off on a trip to find the promised land. The end of the road will be where he first began: Montana, where a beautiful woman, a dangerous man, and a motherlode of truth are waiting for their favorite son to come home—bringing with him a gun, a plan, and a prayer.
Copies
No copies available.
Lone Star Noir (Akashic Noir)
by Luis Alberto Urrea, James Crumley, Joe R. Lansdale, Milton T. Burton, Sarah Cortez, Jessica Powers
A chilling collection of tales from Texas, a state that, according to coeditor Bobby Byrd, “bleeds noir fiction.”
“What makes Texas noir different from any other noir? Is it just that the gumshoes wear cowboy boots? . . . Akashic Books finally turns its attention to the biggest state in the Lower 48, but all that land just means more places to bury the bodies. As father-son editing partnership Bobby and Johnny Byrd observe in their introduction, this isn’t J.R. Ewing’s Lone Star State. This is the Texas of chicken shit bingo, Enron scamsters, and a feeling that what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico . . . So what defines Texas noir? Who knows, but you better pray that blood doesn’t stain your belt buckle.” ―Austin Chronicle
“Lone Star Noir‘s 14 hard-boiled short stories take readers into life’s ragged edges . . . It reminds how humanity’s darkest possibilities float just beneath everyday life’s thin surface.” ―The Dallas Morning News
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Brand-new stories by: James Crumley, Joe R. Lansdale, Claudia Smith, Ito Romo, Luis Alberto Urrea & David Corbett, George Wier, Sarah Cortez, Jesse Sublett, Dean James, Tim Tingle, Milton Burton, Lisa Sandlin, Jessica Powers, and Bobby Byrd.
From the introduction by Bobby Byrd:
“Seems like everybody who lives in Texas has a snotty attitude about the place where they live. Even if they hate it. Like the bumper sticker from the 1980s, Lucky me, I’m from Lubbock. That was popular the year after Lubbock almost got wiped off the map by a series of God’s worst tornadoes. But what you learn from living in this state is that most of Texas is not Texas. It’s not the stereotype that the rest of the nation carries around in the collective consciousness . . .
"The real Texas hides out in towns and cities like you’ll find in Lone Star Noir, and in that very Texas reality, among the everyday good folks of Texas, you’ll find the hard-boiled understanding of guns and dope and blood money and greed and hatred and delusion that makes these fourteen stories come alive on the page. Sure, you might catch a glimpse of J.R. and old Woodrow Call, like a shadow at the edge of your sight, feel their heat at your back, catch a whiff of the dead flowers which are their Texas dreams. This is basic foodstuff for a Texas writer telling a story, but the story must always stay true to its place and the people who live there. That’s the strength of these stories in Lone Star Noir―the particular place they come from, the language that the characters speak. Yes, they are pieces of the larger puzzle that is Texas, but they are more true to the pieces of ground they reveal.”
Copies
No copies available.
The Mighty Johns: 1 Novella & 13 Superstar Short Stories from the Finest in Mystery & Suspense
by David Baldacci, Dennis Lehane, Mike Lupica, Lawrence Block, Colin Harrison, Tim Green, Brad Meltzer, James Crumley, Brendan DuBois
Offers a collection of 13 football mysteries from top writers in addition to a novella about a college football star who delves into a forty-year old mystery surrounding the disappearance of a star player.
Copies
No copies available.