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.