The Madness of King Jim

I somehow managed to miss seeing, until now, Craig McDonald’s interview with author James Crumley, which was posted at the Hardluck Stories site earlier this month. Fortunately, the thing is still online. So go read it. Today.

Although I was not as impressed as several critics were by Crumley’s latest novel, The Right Madness (2005), McDonald draws some terrific stuff out of the writer himself, on subjects ranging from his frightening illnesses, to Crumley’s perpetually unfinished (and 880-page) Texas novel, to his aborted plan to kill off P.I. Milo Milodragovitch, and why he hasn’t put up his own Web site (“I don’t know that my fans are interested in sitting down in front of a computer ... I’ve often thought most of my fans were in jail, or should be ... on the lam or in the slam.”).