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).