|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Cash, Drugs, and Firepower
| Article
# : |
11811 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
1,784 Words |
| Author
: |
John Braeman
John Braeman is professor of history at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. |
THE MEXICAN TREE DUCK
James Crumley
New York: Mysterious Press, 1993
220 pp., $19.95
The book dealer displays at a recent convention for mystery writers and fans indicate that James Crumley's new work, The Mexican Tree Duck, is expected to be one of the hits of the season. Crumley started out as what the literati are pleased to call a "serious" writer. His first novel, One to Count Cadence (1969), was a much-praised, grimly realistic depiction of the pre-Vietnam Army. Strongly reminiscent of James Jones' picture of the pre-World War II Army in From Here to Eternity, it is a pioneering account of the later conflict. Next, Crumley turned to a novel about growing up in south Texas, but writer's block led him to try his hand at detective stories. Those works have attracted a growing, almost cult, following. In a 1985 survey of the mystery field, Newsweek hailed Crumley as probably "the best regionalist going."
The Wrong Case (1975) featured Milton (Milo) Chester Milodragovitch, a private investigator in Meriwether (Missoula), Montana. Milo reappeared in Dancing Bear (1983). The Last Good Kiss (1978), rated by historians of the genre as "maybe the finest private eye novel written in the 70s," introduced part-time PI, part-time bartender C.W. Sughrue. Crumley originally planned to make Milo the protagonist of The Mexican Tree Duck, but he decided that the nervous, nonheroic, alcoholic, and cocaine-addicted Milo, who has "enough ex-wives to start a basketball team," had become too old and despairing. "I don't like that sad turn at the beginning," he told an interviewer. "Sughrue seems to love what he is doing most of the time but he's kind of mean about it."
Although his debt to the hard-boiled tradition represented by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald is evident, Crumley differentiates himself from the earlier writers. "Chandler and MacDonald see a higher moral order, and they want their detectives to play a part in enforcing that order," he says. "I'm just not able to make those large moral judgments." Crumley's own youthful model had been Mickey Spillane. "All that . . . adolescent sexuality," he recalls, "and all that wonderful violence and moral breadth--a set of moral precepts that seemed flexible--and so I loved him."
His name, Sughrue explains to a sweet young thing, is pronounced "`Shoog' as in sugar" and "`rue' as in rue the goddamned day." Baptized Chauncey Wayne
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
