Book Review

By Derryll White

Crumley, James (2005).  The Right Madness.

        Here’s the right madness on Skye.  Take five days for piper and drum and tell the oxen, start dancing.

        Mail Harry of Nothingham home to his nothing

        Take my word.  It’s been fun.

From ‘The Right Madness on Skye’ by Richard Hugo

C.W. Sughrue, the hard-drinking, womanizing Montana private eye is back from his first appearance in the stunning novel ‘The Last Good Kiss.’  No literary figure has captured my attention in quite the same way Sughrue has.  He is the embodiment of the crazy, thrilling energy Hunter S. Thompson brought to novels such as ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’  I didn’t realize how much I missed C.W. until I picked up ‘The Right Madness.’

James Crumley has a way of writing that mixes poetry with narrative. Even some of the more horrific scenes are beautiful in the way he crafts them.  C.W. Sughrue is more man than the imagination can allow, taking the pain, liquor, drugs and sex that most of us don’t even think of.  I haven’t seen TV in a very long time but he is that crazy pink action bunny whose batteries never run out.

Crumley breaks all the rules and molds.  His dialogue is smoother than Robert B. Parker’s, his scenes are grittier than Raymond Chandler’s, and his grasp of the mid-West’s high lonesome country equals that of Don Winslow.  Crumley takes everything to the limit and then peaks over the edge.  I don’t read anyone who writes like him and I say that with the utmost respect.

If you are going to bless yourself this year with one new writer from the mystery genre, make it James Crumley.

        Life is more important than ideas.

C.W. Sughrue

********

Excerpts from the novel:

FRIENDS – As long as I knew, the first group of men I’d really cared about were the guys in my squad in Vietnam.  So in late middle age making friends was problematic at best.

Women usually make friends talking, by exchanging confidences, and men, traditionally, by working together.

MADNESS – I didn’t want to think about it.  I don’t know, sometimes it seemed that most sorts of madness were simply a convenient way to avoid life.  But then I didn’t know.  When I’d gone mad, I had had good reason: people were trying to kill me back then.

GAMBLING – The retired couples working the machines on a wasted afternoon looked at me as if I were either a crazy preacher or a cop because I hadn’t bellied up to lady luck’s bad little sister.  Maybe they should have felt guilty.  Maybe we all should.  What sort of mistake had been made in their lives that led them to believe the only fun left was stuffing twenty-dollar bills into an empty hole controlled by a computer chip?  Perhaps I only felt sorry for them because they had fallen prey to a vice I had managed to avoid.  Sort of the same way I felt sorry for golfers.

MIGRATION – But so many hungry eyes stared across the desert toward the USA and so many came, trudging  in plastic sandals and cheap cowboy boots, carrying their plastic jugs of water that always ran out, robbed and killed by the coyotes who had promised freedom.  They would not and could not be stopped, and the sorry truth was that the American economy would founder like a horse bloated with green grain without the majado population to do our shitwork.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

Article Share