A Tale of Two Mysteries

by

Paul Clark

              

For more than 20 years, my favorite opening sentence of any work of fiction has come from James Crumley’s novel The Last Good Kiss—

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Treahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

In the pre-Google and Internet age, one of the pleasures of picking a favorite opening line was that you could write or talk about it under the illusion that you were unique in your choice. Other people may have other favorite lines, but, “Look how clever I am, choosing a line from a non-best-selling-but-beloved-by-some genre writer.” We do live in the Google age, however, and a search using the terms “crumley, opening” reveals that I share my enthusiasm for this beginning with many other people. So much for originality.

Fans of the mystery genre have their favorites and are not hesitant to write about them. I first read Kiss  in a mass market paperback but was so impressed by it that I had some antiquarian bookseller friends find me a signed first edition for which I gladly paid $25 in Reagan-era money. That copy is long gone, but I’ve bought at least two other copies over the years when the urge came to re-read it.

The story is simple—onetime detective, sometime bartender C.W. Sughrue is hired to find best-selling novelist and poet Abraham Trahearne by his ex-wife. The search ends at the beginning of the book, at the aforementioned bar in California, but the mystery unfolds when Sughrue is then hired by the bar owner to find her daughter who ran away as a teen many years before. Sughrue is as intrigued with the missing girl as he is with the wayward Trahearne and all the women in his life—ex-wife, current wife, and mother. The novel is a road book, as Sughrue travels back and forth between northern California and northwestern Montana.

Crumley was living in Missoula, Montana in the late 70s when he met the poet Richard Hugo, probably in one of the bars in and around Missoula that both Crumley and Hugo frequented back then. Hugo directed the creative writing program at the University of Montana and later was editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series. Crumley, who had already published two novels, mentioned to Hugo that he was having trouble working on his next novel. Hugo gave Crumley the collected works of Raymond Chandler to inspire him—and it obviously did. Kiss has a lot of similarities to Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Crumley has referred to himself as “the bastard child of Raymond Chandler.” The friendship between Crumley and Hugo was so close that Crunley took the title of his book from a phrase in a Hugo poem.

Perhaps one of the reasons The Last Good Kiss has stayed with me over the years is that I read it soon after I, myself, had read the complete Raymond Chandler. When I finished my “official” college education, I had to wait three months before graduation. Instead of looking for work during this time, I started on a self-selected reading plan, reading from morning until night for pleasure the books that I thought I should have been exposed to in high school and college, but wasn’t. I remember that the first two weeks of my reading plan I read everything I could find by Chandler, and then everything I could find by Ayn Rand. Chandler continues to influence me, in a positive way, and I return to his books with pleasure every few years. Rand, on the other hand . . . well, while I DID enjoy The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, I also was glad to move on to more reality-based fiction.

When I first read Kiss, I was intrigued by the drinking and the travel and the casual sexual relations between adults; it’s a very 70s novel in that regard. When I read it recently, I realized that I was now older than all but one of the characters, and the overall melancholy of the book, leavened as it is by sharp touches of humor and vivid writing, was what stayed with me.

Before I re-read Crumley’s novel, this week, I re-read Hugo’s only novel, also a mystery. Death and the Good Life was published a couple of years after Kiss and just a year before Hugo died in 1982. It too is set in northwest Montana and features a small town deputy sheriff trying to figure out who is killing local men with an axe.

Both novels share a familiar plot device in mystery novels—family secrets kept hidden for years that explode violently over the course of the novels. But while the plots and locales are similar, the styles of the stories are quite different. Crumley’s novel is rollicking. Even if you are sitting in the living room reading and sipping a Coke, you will get a buzz from the drinking, a sore butt from all the driving, and hold a constant wry grin on your face. Even the sudden violence is leavened with humor.

Hugo’s style is straightforward and contemplative. When he wrote the book Hugo was already dealing with the leukemia that would eventually kill him and keep him from writing the sequel he had started work on when he died.

Crumley has a sharper style—his sentences crackle with description and he does an excellent job of drawing sharp precise portraits of even the most minor characters. His dialogue is thus:

“How do you go about this missing person business?’

“Depends on who’s missing and how long,” I said, “but mostly I just poke around.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a method.”

“If you want method, you hire one of the big security outfits,” I said. “They’re great at method. Straight people don’t know how to disappear, and crooks can’t because they have to hang around with other crooks.”

“And where do you fit in?”

“I’m cheaper,” I said “ and my clients usually still believe in the small independent operator. They’re usually romantics.”

“You must be working all the time,” Trahearne said with a chuckle.

“And every year I have to tend bar more often,” I said.

When Crumley and Hugo knew each other in Montana, I imagine they sat together and drank the heart right out of many a fine spring afternoon, telling lies, trading stories and thinking about family memories.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it