The Book You Have to Read: “Dancing Bear,” by James Crumley

(Editor’s note: This is the 176th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
If the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson needed the services of a private investigator, or the company of a steady-handed drinking/coke-snorting buddy who also happened to be proficient with firearms and could handle himself in a tight spot (preferably a guy who could satisfy all four of those qualifications at once), the fictional Milton Chester “Milo” Milodragovitch III would probably be his first choice. Violent only if provoked and hard-partying under any pretense, Milo might in fact be anyone’s first choice.

There are many authors in one’s reading life whose writing style influences their tastes in hard-boiled fiction (Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, and Ross Macdonald, for instance), but fewer who have also created a series protagonist with an assured fidelity to his job and a heart that is genuine and believable. For me, James Crumley is such a writer, and Milo—his first Meriweather, Montana, P.I—is just such a character. For readers new to Milo, Crumley’s second book about him, Dancing Bear (1983), should convince them to make this guy part of their team.

As the novel begins, Milo is in a holding pattern until he reaches the age of 52, when he is set to receive an enormous family inheritance. A self-pitying Korean War vet and sometime gumshoe (though he’s currently employed as a security guard), he has five ex-wives and possesses his “father’s taste for aimless sloth,” which means he likes to drink, fly-fish, and chase women. Things are upended, though, when Sarah Weddington, an elderly former flame of his father’s, contacts him with a new case. It seems silly, she admits, nothing more than “satisfying an old woman’s curiosity,” but the money she hands him—to identify the man and woman who meet every week at a park in sight of her mansion—is considerable.

Soon afterward, Milo is introduced to Carolyn Fitzgerald, who queries him about a land-swap arrangement involving the several thousand acres he owns in Montana. The relevance of that approach, however, is only made evident later in this yarn.

First and foremost on Milo’s mind are the motives of Cassandra Bogardus, the female of the pair Weddington has asked him to observe. Why did Bogardus give him the slip when he was trying to tail her? And what of the gent in the other car, who was meeting her at that park? Milo winds up following him across America’s northern plains … until a car bomb suddenly takes the man out! Luckily for our hero, in the wreckage of that vehicle he finds guns, ammo, plenty of dope, and enough cash to further finance his latest adventure. Maybe enough to protect his life, as well, for it doesn’t take long before Milo recognizes that he’s on to something much bigger than a nosey old lady with money to burn. The pursuer has become the prey.

There’s sometimes an interminable section in noir novels (and in whodunits, police procedurals, and the rest), where the author struggles to balance as many subplots or red herrings on the head of a pin (or the nib of a pen) as he or she can. To some extent, that happens in Dancing Bear. But when the distractions are finally dispersed, Milo finds himself facing down a avaricious multinational corporation that has its fingers in every dirty pie it can find, from dope smuggling to disposing of hazardous waste. And wouldn’t you know it? Some of Seattle, Washington’s finest citizens are involved in those shenanigans. After Milo’s house is torched, and he has nowhere to go, he spreads the word that he perished in the blaze, which allows him again to work unimpeded.

(Left) Dancing Bear’s back cover.

Our man Milo may have skin tougher than shoe leather, but he also boasts a heart of gold and a distinct predilection for strays. As this story winds along, he brings into the case a randy retiree called Abner and another guy by the name of Simmons, the latter being a security guard who survived an armored car robbery that Milo helped break up early in the book. Too many good guys die in Dancing Bear, some with families, and Milo ultimately arranges for the criminals to make amends to the survivors of people who perished helping him solve this case.

James Crumley died in 2008 at age 68, with eight crime novels to his credit. One of those, The Wrong Case (which introduced Milo Milodragovitch in 1975), won a Falcon Award from Japan’s Maltese Falcon Society, while another, The Mexican Tree Duck, picked up the 1994 Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. In addition to his three Milo tales (the last of which was 2001’s The Final Country, recipient of the British Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger commendation), Crumley penned a second, parallel series featuring C.W. Sughrue, who The Thrilling Detective Web Site describes as a “redneck good ol’ boy demon-child private eye,” and who debuted in 1978’s regularly heralded The Last Good Kiss. Other authors of no minor prominence have praised Crumley’s fiction, among them George Pelecanos and Ray Bradbury (who named a detective in three of his novels Crumley).

Like Milo, he was wed five times and lived a knock-around life. Novelist, fisherman, and Montana cowboy Thomas McGuane is quoted as saying, in Men’s Journal magazine, that James Crumley “did cocaine six days a week. Ate five times a day. Drank a bottle of whiskey every day. He said, ‘This is how I like to live. If I live 10 years less, so what?’” Although he’s now long gone, Crumley lives on through his stories. The writer’s influence has outlasted his bones. There is even a watering hole in Missoula, Montana, where Crumley’s favorite barstool was “set aside” in his honor.

The Robust Rise of the “Regionals”

Today marks my long-overdue return to CrimeReads, after a few months of being distracted by other editorial projects and helping to open a new Seattle bookshop. My subject under consideration this time is the forgotten rise of regional American detective fiction during the 1970s and ’80s. As I recall in the piece:

That’s when a restless new generation of detective-fictionists decided the field—grown stale after a mid-century deluge of male-oriented works formulated around cynical peepers, amorous female clients, and epidemic gunplay—needed a serious shaking-up in order to maintain relevance and readership. One result of that effort was a broader, updated perspective on what sorts of offenses could and should be addressed in these books: not just larceny, abductions, and choreographed slayings anymore, but also environmental injustices, endemic racism, human trafficking, right-wing extremism, domestic abuse, and child-custody disputes. Another way the genre diversified was by expanding its storytelling stage beyond familiar urban hubs, to rediscover the value of literary regionalism.

Included among the people responsible for that era’s crime-fiction expansion were authors ranging from Robert B. Parker and Tony Hillerman to K.C. Constantine, James Crumley, Karen Kijewski, Jonathan Valin, Richard Hoyt, Linda Barnes, and William J. Reynolds.

Again, click here to find that whole CrimeReads piece.

A Grab Bag of References

I’m overdue to compile one of my mammoth “Bullet Points” posts, but that will have to wait until I have more free time. For now, here’s a smattering of crime-fiction links worth your attention.

• With the brand-new fourth season of Bosch set to debut on the Amazon TV streaming service come Friday, April 13, Criminal Element is asking all readers to vote for their favorite novel in Michael Connelly’s long-running Harry Bosch series.

• Have you been watching TNT-TV’s The Alienist, based on Caleb Carr’s 1994 historical thriller of that same name? If so, you will probably be interested in The Bowery Boys’ photograph-filled look back at what New York City was really like in 1896.

• I reported last September on plans to create a TV series inspired by James Ellroy’s 1990 crime novel, L.A. Confidential, and the 1997 film already produced from Ellroy’s tale. Now, Deadline Hollywood brings word that the producers of that prospective CBS drama have recruited Walton Goggins (late of Justified and Vice Principals) to fill a lead role. “Goggins will play one of [three principal homicide] detectives, Jack Vincennes,” according to Deadline. “All swagger and flash with a movie-star smile, Jack knows how the system works and uses it to his best advantage, including some corrupt shakedowns on the side. The role was played by Kevin Spacey in the movie that premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and went to on score nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and two wins.”

• Also from Deadline Hollywood comes news that “Mel Gibson, Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne, and Mike Medavoy are teaming on Dancing Bear, an adaptation of the hard-boiled crime novel by the late James Crumley that is in the early stages at USA Network though Universal Cable Productions.” The site explains that “Crumley’s novel is set in Montana and centers on part-time detective Milo Milodragovitch, who becomes entangled with a cast of unsavory characters in a web of criminal conspiracies, blackmail, land grabs, grizzly bears, guns, and drugs. Said Gibson, ‘It’s basically Chinatown set in a 7-11 in Montana in the ’70s with a whole lot of cocaine.’” Now, I have great respect for Towne, and I remember enjoying Crumley’s Dancing Bear, though it’s been years since I read that book. But the involvement in this project of Gibson—whose anti-Semitic and homophobic views have been well documented—leaves me unsettled. I know it’s probably healthy for people to separate the obnoxious behavior of some Hollywood celebs from their artistic contributions, and respect them for the latter. Gibson’s ugly side, though, is so very pronounced, I don’t know if I can do that—as much as I might like to see gumshoe Milodragovitch brought to small-screen life.

• Since I just wrote about the 50th anniversary of Peter Falk’s first televised appearance as Lieutenant Columbo, my attention was easily caught by this item about a brand-new cookbook titled Cooking with Columbo: Suppers with the Shambling Sleuth. The Columbophile explains that it was penned by “London-based Columbo super-fan Jenny Hammerton,” host of the Silver Screen Suppers blog, who “plundered her extensive archives of more than 7,000 movie star recipes to come up with meal suggestions to match every Columbo episode! Featuring favorite recipes from the likes of Peter Falk, Vincent Price, Johnny Cash, Robert Conrad, Trish Van Devere, Dick Van Dyke, and Janet Leigh, there’s inspiration enough to create sensational dinners for one right through to opulent banquets and house parties—including enough chili variations to keep purists happy (although no squirrel chili recipe makes the cut).” It was established early in Columbo’s run that the Los Angeles cop was a chili lover.

• In the wake of last Wednesday’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—during which 17 people were killed and others injured, allegedly by a crazed teenage gunman wielding an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle—more than one person has brought up the concern that a generation of America’s youth will now associate the name “Marjory Stoneman Douglas” with senseless brutality … instead of with the pioneering environmentalist, journalist, and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner who gave her name to that school. Oh yes, and the original Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) also happened to be an early contributor to Black Mask magazine. Among Douglas’ papers, currently archived at the University of Miami, is a 1924 Black Mask yarn titled “White Midnight,” which has been described as “a novella about sunken treasures in the West Indies.”

• Speaking of that Florida student massacre, A. Brad Schwartz—the co-author, with Max Allan Collins, of a forthcoming non-fiction book titled Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago (Morrow)—points out in this New York Times op-ed piece, that it took place exactly 89 years after the Windy City’s notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Schwartz adds that said butchery, which claimed just seven victims, led to profound changes both in Chicago’s political foundations and in the nation’s response to increasing gun violence of the time. “We should be ashamed,” he concludes, “that the killing of criminals 90 years ago could help spur such change, while the repeated slaughter of children prompts little more than ‘thoughts and prayers’ from lawmakers today. The story of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shows how public outrage can create meaningful reform when the political and economic costs of inaction outweigh the inertia preserving the status quo.”

• As mentioned previously, funeral services for the late mystery novelist Bill Crider took place this last Monday afternoon in his hometown of Alvin, Texas. I haven’t heard a great deal about the event, but one attendee did recall, on Facebook, that it was a “lovely memorial service …, complete with mentions by each speaker of those precious not-so-little-anymore VBKs” (aka Crider’s three Very Bad Kittens, who now have their very own Facebook fan page).

• Meanwhile, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine editor Janet Hutchings wrote a very nice remembrance of Bill Crider in her blog. And Robert S. Napier, a longtime friend of Crider’s, shares in his own blog the contents of the final e-mail message he received from that 76-year-old Lone Star State author, which contained this lament:

I can’t believe what’s happened to this country, which was the greatest in the world at one time. I don’t think that’s true now, and I really resent it that I’m going to die in a country that’s going downhill so fast. I don’t know how many years I have left, but even it’s ten or fifteen, I can’t see us recovering. I try not to think too much about it for fear of falling into despair.

• OK, you can consider me jealous: On behalf of New York magazine’s pop-culture Web site, Vulture, Sarah Weinman recently interviewed playwright-author David Mamet, whose fourth novel, the 1920s-set crime story Chicago, is due out next week from Custom House. During their exchange, Mamet more or less characterizes his drive as an artist this way: “I’m basically nuts. I sit by myself every day, most days, eight hours in this little room. It feels like either a torment or an adventure. The only way I can still the torment or appreciate the adventure is to write it down.”

• Finally, The Secret Agent Lair reviews M, Dynamite Entertainment’s latest James Bond comic-book spin-off, this one starring 007’s superior and the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6). “M is very much a decent spy thriller that does not involve nor even feature the character of James Bond, anywhere,” the blog opines. “Starring in a title of his own, M proves that he is a very worthy spymaster who can think on his feet and outsmart the opponent using the skills of a master strategist he acquired over the years, isn’t afraid to apply his use of variable types of combat on his enemies, and holds [up] his own rather well without the need of any agent or a bodyguard in his disposal, which is why it makes the character worthy of the spin-off he was given.” The Secret Agent Lair goes on to say that “M is supposed to be collected in a [hardcover volume] of one-shots entitled James Bond: Case Files Vol. 1, which also includes Moneypenny as well as titles starring Bond: Service and Solstice.” That omnibus is due out in mid-July.

Ripley on Crumley

I was speaking with UK crime novelist and Shots magazine columnist Mike Ripley this last Saturday about how much we were both saddened by the loss of James Crumley. Much has been written about that author’s passing in the States, but there’s been comparatively little from our side of the Atlantic.

So Ripley decided to even the score a bit.

The sad fact is that Ripley has penned several obituaries of late, and in each instance he muses on the legacy that great crime/mystery writers have left behind. Ripley met Crumley at the Bouchercon convention held in Nottingham, England, in 1995. Despite his having led a sometimes complex life, Crumley reminds us in his obit for The Guardian that James Crumley was well respected amongst his peers in the UK as well as in his home country:

In 1996, he [Crumley] teamed up his two detectives, Milogradovitch and Sughrue, on a violent revenge mission to the Texas-Mexico border in Bordersnakes. If the plotting was somewhat hazy, Crumley’s lyricism and his eye for absurd but always human characters were still much in evidence, and his true return to form came in 2001 with The Final Country, which won the British Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger award.

Financial problems and poor health, almost certainly due to his love of most things alcoholic, prevented him from travelling to London to collect his award in 2002, and friends and former students from Montana launched an appeal to help fund his medical treatment.

Click here to read Ripley’s full tribute to Crumley. And click here to see a photograph of Crumley, together with Harlan Coben and Laura Lippman, at the 2003 Bouchercon in Las Vegas, Nevada. Even back then, I recall, it was obvious that Crumley’s health was not good.

READ MORE: “James Crumley; Inspired Generations of Crime Writers,” by Patricia Sullivan (The Washington Post); “James Crumley, Crime Novelist, Is Dead at 68,” by Margalit Fox (The New York Times).

James Crumley Dies

What a way to begin this day, with news that Montana crime novelist James Crumley has died. According to The Missoulian (which is getting a lot of unusual traffic this morning, I’m sure), he passed away at age 68 after “many years of health complications.”

When he died, Crumley was surrounded by family and friends, including his wife, Martha Elizabeth, and Missoula author and county emergency services director Bob Reid.“We were friends in the fullest sense,” Reid said. “I admired him for many things. He always kind of had this off-kilter way of looking at things--different than what you would imagine. He had a real hard-nosed exterior, yet at the same time he was patient and understanding of many different things and many different people.”
Missoula author Neil McMahon said of Crumley: “A huge man in terms of his heart and soul. He influenced me greatly and many others. He has a tremendous fan base and admirers all over the world.”Crumley has published 11 novels, taught at universities across the country and worked in Hollywood for several years. Famous for his hard-boiled mysteries, his works include “One Count to Cadence,” “The Last Good Kiss,” “The Wrong Case,” “The Mexican Tree Duck,” “Bordersnakes,” “The Final Country,” and most recently, “The Right Madness.”

One of the earliest detective novels I remember reading--more than once--was Crumley’s The Wrong Case (1975), which introduced alcoholic, sometime private eye Milo Milodragovitch. Had Crumley never written another detective novel in his life, I’d still remember him for that Chandleresque one. But then a few years later, I picked up The Last Good Kiss (1978) and was hooked again by the first short paragraph, a paragraph that has become an inspirational touchstone for later crime novelists:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, 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.

That latter book introduced a second Montana gumshoe, C.W. Sughrue, who was really the flip side of the same coin. (If memory serves, The Last Good Kiss was originally supposed to feature Milo, but some arcane publishing deal compelled Crumley to rename--if not modify significantly--his protagonist.) Over time, however, the two men showed some of their dissimilarities: Milo was a Korean War vet, Sughrue did his service during the Vietnam War and was court-martialed for killing an entire Vietnamese family (the crime was unintentional, of course); Milo was the kinder and smarter of the two, Sughrue the more violent and mean. Crumley once said that “Milo is my good side, Sughrue’s the bad.” But the characters got along well enough that in 1996’s Bordersnakes, they teamed up to go gallivanting around the West and into Mexico in search of an embezzling banker and a hit man. There was always lots of road travel in Crumley’s books, leading critics to conclude (not too brilliantly) that he’d been influenced by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

As Crumley got older, I thought his skills dropped off a bit and his stories became confusing at times. I was saddened by the mess of 2005’s The Right Madness, a Sughrue novel, but in reviewing that book for Amazon.com, I wrote: “Crumley’s detective stories have always been stronger on character development, high-caliber action, literary wit, and lyrical exposition than on meticulous plot construction.” He could put more punch into his storytelling than five other guys, and he had a poetic edge to his prose that wasn’t lost at all on careful readers.

There are plenty of tributes to Crumley appearing in the blogosphere today, including a fine and personal one from Duane Swierczynski. Laura Lippman has posted the transcript of an interview she conducted with Crumley for Crimespree Magazine. Two older pieces to search for are John Williams’ interview from his 1991 book Into the Badlands and an interview journalist and author Craig McDonald conducted with Crumley for Hardluck Stories.

I wasn’t fortunate enough to meet James Crumley, except through the pages of his books, which I think is always the best way to get to know an author, anyway.

Wherever you are now, Mr. Crumley, I hope the camaraderie is generous and the beer is cold.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

READ MORE: “James Crumley,” by Mark Coggins (Riordan’s Desk); “A Toast to the Late Crime Writer Jim Crumley,” by Eddie Muller (San Francisco Chronicle).

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.”).