James Crumley's Wild Westerner

THE RIGHT MADNESS

By James Crumley

Viking. 289 pp. $24.95

James Crumley's classic 1978 novel "The Last Good Kiss" features an opening line that reflects his love of Raymond Chandler: "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." Crumley claims it took him eight years to write that sentence, and he has fans all across America who can recite it from memory.

Those fans include many younger writers -- Crumley is in his mid-sixties now -- like Dennis Lehane and Laura Lippman, who view him as the patron saint of the pull-no-punches, post-Chandler, post-Vietnam private eye novel. Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Tex., in 1939, served in the Army, worked in the oilfields, almost graduated from Texas A&I, then talked his way into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied under the novelist Richard Yates, a sophisticated Easterner who introduced him to martinis after their first class. In addition to producing 10 novels, Crumley has taught in universities across the West, most recently at the University of Montana in Missoula. In an introductory note to this new novel, he thanks the friends, doctors and nurses who helped him survive a recent illness. Whatever the state of his health, "The Right Madness" is vintage Crumley: beautifully written, often outrageous and, unless you are put off by its violence, more or less unputdownable.

Crumley shares with Chandler not only a gift for lyrical prose, but also a penchant for plots that meander, vanish for long periods, then return to make baffling leaps. If you are sober, of above-average intelligence and willing to take notes, you can probably make sense of the events in "The Right Madness," but my advice is don't bother. Let's just say, for the record, that the novel opens with Crumley's hard-drinking, grizzled Montana private eye, C.W. Sughrue, playing in a softball game in an over-50 league. I take this to be Crumley's joke, since it is the only wholesome event in the novel.

After the game, Sughrue retires to a bar with his best friend, Mac, a psychiatrist, who prevails on him to find some files that have been stolen from his office. Sughrue starts shadowing Mac's patients around Meriwether, Crumley's fictional Missoula, and they start dying violent deaths. After four such deaths, Mac disappears. It isn't clear if he has been murdered, has killed himself or is a fugitive, but Sughrue's search for him leads to far-flung adventures in Washington state, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and finally Scotland. Along the way he encounters two corrupt FBI agents, one male and one female, who rape Mac's coked-out young wife. Sughrue also encounters a legless woman who gets about by donkey cart and tries to kill him with her shotgun, and another woman who torments him with a blacksnake whip. But Sughrue, when aroused, is mean as a snake and twice as lethal, so he kills a few people, solves the mystery, gives several million dollars of their ill-gotten gains to charity and returns to Montana to play with his cats, ingest his drugs of choice and continue his search for the meaning of life.

As I said, you don't read Crumley for plot. You read him for his outlaw attitude, his rough poetry and his scenes, paragraphs, sentences, moments. You read him for the lawyer with "a smile as innocent as the first martini." Or for "I had a handful of drinks, then climbed into the pickup to drift slowly through clear high-altitude night sky, berserk with stars." Or to hear Sughrue, when asked whatever happened to his cowboy father, explain, "Nobody knows. . . . Maybe he just drifted off into one too many sunsets." Or to learn of a gorgeous woman: "She looked as fresh as a rose blooming in a spring shower, a flower with a death beetle hidden so deep in the blossom that it only showed in the soft quiver of her throat."

Or, if your mood is perverse, you might read him for the wife who is "meaner than a tow sack full of drowning cats." Or for the woman who, for no obvious reason, cuts off her hands on the "humming band saw" in her husband's basement shop. Or the rape scene, unprecedented in my reading, when a six-foot Russian beauty overcomes Sughrue, has him "tied naked, spread-eagled, to iron bedposts," makes certain threats to gain at least token cooperation, and proceeds to have her way with him for several hours, whereupon the weary but ever-philosophical Sughrue remarks, "Fear the fantasy that comes to life, my friend, fear it like death."

Or, if you happen to be fond of bars, you might read the novel for Crumley's catalogue of the shadowy, smoke-filled rooms (at least some of them real, I gather) where Sughrue is most at ease: the Depot, the Scapegoat, the Low Rent Rendezvous, the Iron Butterfly, the Phone Booth, Mutt's, Cactus Pete's and the High Country, to name a few.

Here and elsewhere, Sughrue consumes prodigious amounts of beer (Negra Modelo), tequila (Patron), gin (Bombay Sapphire martinis) and Scotch (Lagavulin), as well as the joints (he calls them doobies) and fat lines of cocaine that friends and strangers press upon him. He also uses amphetamines for long-distance driving, and when the woman with the blacksnake whip injects him with LSD, he doesn't really mind -- it brings back sweet memories. If you disapprove of drink and drugs, you could have a problem with this novel. Indeed, it isn't clear just how Sughrue, who seems to be pushing 60 and has only one kidney, survives.

Crumley is not for everyone. Besides Chandler, his novels, with their fierce mix of lyricism and violence, remind me most of Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro series. (Lehane calls "The Last Good Kiss" a masterpiece.) But if you like Crumley's attitude, his cool view of human nature, his love of the drinking life and the West, and his scorn for authority, there's no one quite like him. He takes it to the limit, and "The Right Madness" is a good introduction to an important body of work.