Il caso sbagliato

Milo Milodragovitch #1

by James Crumley, Marcello Jatosti (Translator)

Fino a qualche tempo fa, Milton Chester Milodragovitch terzo, Milo per gli amici e anche per i nemici, non se la passava poi male. Tallonare coniugi infedeli gli rendeva quanto bastava a pagarsi da bere al Mahoney's, il suo bar preferito.
Poi la legge sul divorzio è cambiata, lasciarsi è diventato facile, e Milo si è ritrovato a ingannare la noia guardando le montagne dalla finestra del suo ufficio. Finché, naturalmente, non bussa alla sua porta una donna.
Helen Duffy, goffa e bellissima. Suo fratello è scomparso. Un bravo ragazzo, uno studente modello che non farebbe male a una mosca. Milo non crede ai bravi ragazzi, però comincia a indagare. Per portarsi a letto Helen; senza immaginare che l'indagine sul fratello sarà tutto fuorché routine.
Fra drink e anfetamine, criminali dilettanti e professionisti, Milo dovrà scavare nel fango per portare alla luce radici e ragioni dello spaccio di droga, della corruzione sempre più capillare, di una città che pare senza speranza e senza redenzione.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Noir, Hard Boiled, Mystery Thriller, The United States Of America

287 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

James Arthur Crumley was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as "one of modern crime writing's best practitioners", who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel"and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson.His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as "the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years."

Crumley, who was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, where his father was an oil-field supervisor and his mother was a waitress.

Crumley was a grade-A student and a football player, an offensive lineman, in high school. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship, but left to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1961 in the Philippines. He then attended the Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship, where he received his B.A. degree with a major in history in 1964. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1966. His master's thesis was later published as the Vietnam War novel One to Count Cadence in 1969.

Crumley had not read any detective fiction until prompted to by Montana poet Richard Hugo, who recommended the work of Raymond Chandler for the quality of his sentences. Crumley finally picked up a copy of one of Chandler's books in Guadalajara, Mexico. Impressed by Chandler's writing, and that of Ross Macdonald, Crumley began writing his first detective novel, The Wrong Case, which was published in 1975.

Crumley served on the English faculty of the University of Montana at Missoula, and as a visiting professor at a number of other colleges, including the University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

From the mid-80s on he lived in Missoula, Montana, where he found inspiration for his novels at Charlie B's bar. A regular there, he had many longstanding friends who have been portrayed as characters in his books.

Crumley died at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana on September 17, 2008 of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases after many years of health problems. He was survived by his wife of 16 years, Martha Elizabeth, a poet and artist who was his fifth wife. He had five children – three from his second marriage and two from his fourth – eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 3 out of 5]

L’ULTIMO BUSCADERO


”Gun Crazy – La sanguinaria” di Joseph H. Lewis, 1950.

James Crumley è considerato tra i migliori nel suo genere.
Il genere è quello dell’hard boiled.
A giudicare da questo romanzo mi verrebbe da dire che è opinione fin troppo generosa. Ma dato che a sostenerlo è gente che leggo e ascolto con interesse, dovrò insistere e leggere altro.
Andre Dubus era suo amico, lo stimava molto, gli ha dedicato un racconto (La terra dove sono morti i miei padri) ed era attratto da questo genere di letteratura al punto da voler introdurre elementi di mistery in qualche suo racconto (come cerca di fare proprio in quello dedicatogli, che io ho iniziato a leggere stanotte).
Un gemellaggio che mi lascia basito: non riesco a pensare a due scrittori più diversi.


Missoula, nel Montana, che Crumley rinomina Merywether.

The Wrong Case - Il caso sbagliato, come dicevo, è in pieno territorio hard boiled. Come spesso (sempre?) in questo genere di letteratura la trama è complicata, perfino arzigogolata.
Ma questa volta il problema è doppio. Perché la trama è anche improbabile, alquanto inverosimile, e direi perfino ingenua sia nella costruzione che nello sviluppo e ancor più nella risoluzione.
Ma nell’hard boiled trame complicate, e magari anche scombiccherate, sono sempre esistite. A cominciare dai padri e maestri del genere, Hammett e Chandler. Ma nelle loro storie si cerca, e trova, altro: atmosfera, personaggi, umori, rami laterali di narrazione, un protagonista affascinante, un tono che avvince.


Merywether è circondata da montagne.

Qui, però, non c’è nulla di tutto questo: la trama è davvero il clou del romanzo.

Per il resto, il protagonista, anche lui quanto mai improbabile, è piuttosto irritante: niente romanticismo, niente disincanto, come in Marlowe, Spade, Archer, questo Milo Milodragovitch III (anche il nome sembra una burla), investigatore privato, è fatto di puro cinismo. La sua storia familiare, che dovrebbe costruirne la base, è altrettanto cinica e poco interessante.
Beve, beve, beve. Nonostante mal di testa, vomito, nausea e quant’altro, beve, beve, beve. Di conseguenza tende a parlare troppo e in modo sconclusionato.
Quando non beve, s’impasticca di tutto quello che capita. Se è sobrio e relativamente low in chimica farmaceutica, fuma canne.
E, ovviamente, se le porta tutte a letto.



Anche l’ambientazione appare fasulla e stonata: un paesotto del Montana assediato da turisti, hippy e mafia della costa est. Il cui nome, come quello della geografia circostante, più che inventato, è composto da luoghi, strade, fiumi, monti che stanno invece o in Georgia o in California o chissà dove.

Gran peccato, perché il personaggio della femme fatale (sì, c’è anche lei, come si conviene a un autentico hard boiled), Helen Duffy, bella, ninfomane che arrossisce, timida e riservata e bugiarda matricolata (ai limiti della schizofrenia), avrebbe potuto essere ben più affascinante di come lo tratteggia Crumley.



Dal mio punto di vista, tuttavia, i veri problemi sono che Crumley spinge troppo sul tono del sarcasmo fino a sconfinare nel comico. E se la prende troppo comoda, insiste, rallenta, riempie le pagine di parecchie parole inutili.

PS
Dimenticavo: questo è il primo di una serie di quattro con lo stesso protagonista. Ecco, credo che con questa serie mi fermerò qui.


Da sinistra a destra: Max Crawford (Lords of the Plain), la poetessa Tess Gallagher (futura moglie di Carver), Raymond Carver, James Crumley, Chuck Kinder, e Mike Koepf (The Fisherman’s Son).

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Crumley's first detective novel isn't quite as good as "The Last Good Kiss," but it is very good indeed. Detective Milo Milodragovitch's neurotic wistfulness is less engaging than C.W. Sughrue's manic rage and joy, but he can drink just as much and has just as keen an eye for the flaws and foibles of human nature.

This book is colorful in language, absorbing in plot, and vivid in its character vignettes. In addition, it is--with the possible exception of "The Iceman Cometh"--the most touching and sincere elegy to habitual drunkenness in American Literature. ("Drunkenness" is the proper term here, not "alcoholism": "I'm not an alcoholic," Crumley's character says, "I don't go to fucking meetings.")

[John Culuris · Rating 4 out of 5]

★ ★ ★ 1/2

The first thing that strikes you not even a page into The Wrong Case is that this book is not following a hero, which may come as something of a surprise. Milo Milodragovitch is your traditional private detective--just not your traditional literary detective. You know: honor-bound, tenacious, justice-at-all-cost. Milo, like most real-world P.I.’s, makes his living catching cheating spouses in the act. As the novel opens, his state has just amended the law to where citing irreconcilable differences is sufficient grounds for divorce. Proof of infidelity no longer needed, neither is Milo. In response he decides to get drunk. To some this may be understandable--until you realize that Milo’s answer to everything is to get drunk.

The next thing the reader realizes is that there is not going to be a story here, at least--again--not in the traditional literary sense. Yes, a client does walk through Milo’s door, an attractive woman yet, but the session ends when in lieu of payment he proposes “my days for your nights.” Rejected, Milo falls back on his favorite response, this time at his neighborhood bar. We are promptly introduced to his friends, who are mirror images of himself. These are not social drinker or quiet alcoholics or people in any way lying to themselves, at least in terms of how they live their lives. They are drunks and they know it. We will spend awhile with them.

Then is there something recommendable about this book? Yes. It is the power James Crumley’s prose. Eloquent thoughts and musings through a crude and indifferent man that doesn’t ring false. And characters so real that you wouldn’t mind knowing them, or at least knowing--some of them, anyway--through the safety of the printed page. Also, the woman and her case do come back into Milo’s life, where this time he accepts the job against his own advice to the client. Blunt honesty is not a quality he lacks. As the title suggests, this is the wrong kind of case for him. He knows every inch of his Montana town of about 50,000 people; finding adulterers is not a problem. But he had resigned as a police deputy long before he’d ever learned a thing about actual investigation. Lucky for Milo, he knows everybody involved in the case, or failing that he knows of them. Lucky for the reader too, as character interaction is Crumley’s strong suit.

Presumably he learned these traits from Raymond Chandler. It was reading Chandler--and then Ross MacDonald--at the suggestion of a friend that inspired Crumley to try producing a detective novel. Apparently the part on how to close out your story eluded him. Even a stumbling drunk has to quit bouncing from one point to another and eventually start heading towards something, particularly as this haphazard journey eventually gains a specific and personal purpose. I understand the point. Milo is trying to use skills he never learned and is only reassured by the fact that the person he is hunting is an amateur, as he puts it, “someone dumber than me.” That’s why Crumley lets us figure out who’s behind everything before Milo; more character development. But the disclosures have to start coming at some point and in a more smooth and interesting way than presented, especially as there is no lack of clues. In fairness, there was one brilliantly played deduction that comes from Milo reliving his past, and the final twist is also satisfying. But the rest of it is revealed in a stuttering and faltering manner.

Though inspired by two of the three founding fathers of the hardboiled detective novel, most seem to consider Crumley a child of the third, Dashiell Hammett. It is easy to see why: the morally-challenged protagonist. Unfortunately, Crumley forgot to add any redeeming qualities. Early on Milo admits that “I wasn’t above taking advantage of women . . . even drugging them to have my way.” And twice he uses what has become known as the N-word. The second time is acceptable because he is reading a whole slew of racial epithets off the wall of a public restroom. The other is more disturbing. In a first-person narrative it is used to make a comparison to shoveling sh*t. This is clearly not the author’s thoughts but meant to show more of Milo’s layers, exposing an inherited subconscious prejudice that is immediately disregarded when he knows a member of any particular group on a personal level. To prove this point we meet Milo’s sort of surrogate son who is black, and he treats him as respectfully as Milo knows how to treat any person. Also, when the case eventually involves a gay character, there’s no degradation there either. Evidently Crumley stood by his use of the word. Published in 1975, my copy was reprinted in 1986 and obviously it was not removed or rewritten.

I will continue reading Crumley’s work. I enjoyed a lot of The Wrong Case and, having read The Last Good Kiss, I know he improved at denouncements. But clearly his type of protagonist is not for everybody. Some can accept the dispassionate and uninvolved detective who merely tells the story. Most seem to need heroes with flaws, or flawed people who find heroism within themselves, or fallen souls who slowly climb their way back. Milo Milodragovitch is a fallen man who is quite content to stay where he is. I can understand why some readers would not want to go there with him.

[carol. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was this a mystery? Nominally. Was this an extended bender through the days of Milo's feeble attempts to distract himself from the drunken ennui of his life? Most definitely.

"Age and sorrow, those were my only assets, my largest liabilities.
But like most men who drink too much, I had spent most of my life considering my dismal future, and it had stopped amusing me. So I had another drink and walked over to the north window to look down on the happy, employed folk of Meriwether."

Helen Duffy is the classic beautiful dame walking into the solitary PI's office, looking for help finding her missing brother. It takes us through a tour of Milo's seedy life, his estranged co-worker, Jamison; his sort-of-fence and sort-of-son, Muffin; his best bar-friend, Simon, and then through choices places of the town.

"Most of Meriwether's freaks, dopers, hippies and assorted young folk lived on the north side of town in an old blue-collar neighborhood, which the earlier residents had deserted in favor of take developments on the south side of town, but the neighborhood was still pleasant in a small-town way--inexpensive but fairly well-built houses that aged nicely, like a handsome woman, the yards shaded by old trees and overgrown with evergreen shrubbery and flowering bushes."

Milo is an alcoholic first, and a half-hearted investigator second, and the story feels like its more about his alcoholic aspirations towards a decent woman (who would be wife #3) than a gumshoe mystery.

Crumley can write, there's no doubt. But this is 1975, in a slummy northwest town with growing pains: tourists versus locals, hippies and freaks versus the old guard, heroin and coke versus alcohol and pot. There's a commune, more or less; the tiniest awareness of gay issues; free love; but mostly lots of alcohol and passed out drunks. This is very time period, very barfly and very non-sensitive. Even more disheartening, though Milo is aware of his shortcomings, he'll continue to choose the booze every time. It is a time and character portrait, but is as depressing as only a dead-end bar can be.

Given a choice between watching an dysfunctional alcoholic careen through bars and slums in a feeble effort to find a missing brother, all in the hopes of getting laid by a beautiful woman, or following a functional alcoholic as he attempts to help a beautiful hooker leave her john (Scudder, Eight Million Ways to Die), I know which one I'd choose. 


Two-and-a-half brews

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

So save your money. If you want somebody to look for your little brother, go to the police.The bastards are corrupt but they’re cheap. I’m expensive and corrupt. And not very good at my job. I can find a naked woman in a dark room, but not if she runs – Shit ...,” I said, trying one of her sighs and discovering that I was standing up, leaning heavily on my desk, shaking slightly like a man who needed a drink more than he needed frankness. So I reached in the drawer and had one.

A beautiful, shy woman walks into a dinky detective office. She is looking for her missing brother and the drunk, rumpled gumshoe behind the desk is her last hope.
What could be more classically noir than this opening gambit?

Well, maybe the fact that this is the second scene in the novel. To set the mood right, the femme fatale entry is preceded by another scene witnessed from the high window of the same office, a pointless and brutal death of a nameless street thug that steals a purse from an old lady only to be run over [twice] by speeding cars as he tries to get away across main street.

Welcome to Merriwether, a once prosperous town somewhere in the Western deserts that has decayed into a haven for alcoholics, drug addicts, second-rate mobsters, corrupt cops and politicians, flower-power leftovers and every other kind of natural born losers you can imagine. But it’s mostly alcoholics and your tour guide through the town’s numerous bars is the hardest drinker of them all:
Milo Milodragovitch, scion of one of the founding families of Merriwether, the last of his breed, has just lost his main source of drinking money when the county lawyers changed divorce laws to make it easier for spouses to go their own way. Milo drowns his sorrows with a little help from the bottle he keeps for emergencies in his desk, when the lady in distress comes knocking at his door.
Looks like his private investigator business is back on its two unsteady feet!

>>><<<>>><<<

I thought I had a handle on this genre, that I have become a little jaded at the usual combination of dismal setting, hardcase lowlifes and smartass running commentary.
James Crumley sets out to prove me wrong, that the Continental Op or Lew Archer or even Philip Marlowe are babes in arms compared to our boy Milo when it comes to sleaze and self-hate. It is my private conviction that Crumley pulls this off and creates one of the most disgusting yet memorable anti-heroes in modern noir. As many of his peers from the seventies noticed, Crumley didn’t achieve large recognition or big selling numbers for his stories, but his influence on a younger generation of formidable authors is acknowledged by most of the critics and authors. He sure isn’t a cheery bastard though.

The novel is as fascinating as a train wreck happening in slow motion, witnessed by a man that spends literally 100 percent of the proceeds in an alcoholic haze. You may think that Milo can sink no lower than the gutters where he spews his guts out, but I was unpleasantly surprised time after boozy time. The investigation follows well-trodden paths in the noir canon, betrayals and false witnesses and bare-fisted scruffs as Milo tracks a consignment of heroin that leaves a stream of dead bodies behind, some of them friends of his who are trying to help. Milo tries to throw the towel in the ring and to give up several times as the case uncovers police and mob connections, but he might score in bed with his employer, so I guess the game is on.

There are no redeeming qualities about the man or about his opinions about work, women or lawlessness. I cannot think right now of a more repugnant, more depressive lead character in noir, yet there is something in Milo that can only be described as poetic, as instantly recognizable as those Edward Hopper paintings of despair and loneliness.
Something happens when Milo starts to describe the bars where he goes every night , where he is instantly recognized and accepted as one of their own. There is an undercurrent of comfort in misery, a brotherhood of the misfits that have tried to wrestle with life and had been knocked down hard. Life still knocks them down, some of them terminally so, but the rest gather in front of the pictures behind the bar and toast their lost friends.
There’s also a sense of belonging when Milo talks about his home town, about his immigrant grandfather who took down a stagecoach bandit or about his adopted coloured son who deals in stolen property. One suspects that there might be a last core of integrity and loyalty in the gumshoe’s heart, but one is never certain.

I am inclined to agree with Crumley’s literary peers that he is a true master and an inspiration in the genre. I already thought so after reading “The Last Good Kiss” and decided to read everything else he wrote.
“The Wrong Case” came at a bad time for me when I needed a pick-me-up, easy escapist story instead of one who forced me to confront depression and a cynical world view, but the quality of the prose is undeniable.
Four well-deserved stars.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some might be put off by Milo Milodragovitch, a perennially drunk sad sack of a detective. He's melancholic, tired, wistful, antagonistic and possesses motives that seem contradictory at times and obscure at best. Yet beyond pathos there's something alluring in Crumley's portrayal of Milo, with his wistful reflections on the human flotsam and jetsam in which he finds himself afloat, his opining on and affection for drunks and drunkenness, and his self-acknowledged naive hopes of salvaging his miserable life through the love of a lady client he's only just met.

The case never takes on all that much urgency, beyond Milo's own compulsion to see it through in a vain effort to stay relevant to the lady. Yet the character sketches Crumley lays out are enthralling and genuine, an odd melange of Milo's drinking buddies, former law enforcement colleagues, hippies, freaks, thugs and ex-cons. Generally easy going, his temper flares on occasion, propelled by alcohol and drugs, providing surprising bursts of tension. But overall the story develops at a languid pace - drink after drink, bar after bar, bender after bender, beating after beating - as Milo attempts to drag himself along, balancing a fine edge between numbness and perception, assembling all the jagged pieces of events into a picture even an alcohol addled, barely competent divorce detective can grasp.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I liked The Wrong Case more than The Last Good Kiss. LGK is considered to be Crumley's best work and it is probably a more solid novel than WC, but I think the brevity and sticking to one locale helped me get a better feeling for this book than LGK.

I've been meaning to review LGK for some time now, and as I get farther from when I read the book I find myself being less likely to ever review it. Part of my problem with writing the review is that I just don't feel like I enjoyed the book as much as other people, but I don't think I really have anything negative to say about why I didn't like it so much. My problems with Crumley are just little irksome things that get to me. I think if I had read him when I was in my early twenties I would have loved him, but now I get some enjoyment out of the books but I find myself just saying 'eh' to some parts and wincing at others.

Part of my problem is the books feel too much like if Henry Chinaski were to become a private investigator. There is the unreal (to me, I know people really do drink like this though) amounts of drinking. And then the baffling number of women that seem to want to throw themselves at a soused sarcastic / wise-cracking nihilist. At one point I would have said, cool, gritty realism but now I think wishful fantasies (even though this could be all true, it's maybe too macho for my brain to comprehend). On a similar topic, part of what I liked in WC is that the wise-cracking wasn't as amped up as it would become in Crumley's later novel. There is only so many quirky one-liners and self-deprecating jabs I can take in one book. At times they are amusing but after awhile I start to think that they are a crutch for the writer to not have to engage the characters in real dialog, and in a way not have to develop certain parts of the characters. They just become too much of the PI noir stereotype.

Crumley's novels seem to me to fit uncomfortably in between two of my favorite writers, Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. There are certain tropes that he uses that bridge the gap between the two writers, but he also misses something of the atmosphere that Chandler and Ellroy bring to their novels. Too often when I was reading both of these novels I would be reminded of things I really liked in the other two writers but it was like a slightly weaker version of what I liked. Maybe, for me, it's the insane amount of drinking always going on that makes the protagonists in Crumley's novels feel more cartoonish to me, or that kind of blurs the pathos of the characters behind a haze of alcoholism.

I'm being overly critical and I really do like these two novels. I'm just trying to figure out why Crumley isn't moving me the same way Chandler and Ellroy do.

This isn't much of a review, and it doesn't hold a candle to this one. But it's the best I've got right now.

[James Thane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Milo Milodragovitch is decended from a family that was once very rich and once very prominent in the small northwestern town of Meriwether. When he turns fifty-three, Milo is scheduled to come into a large sum of money left in trust for him by his grandfather, but the odds of him ever reaching that birthday seem rather small.

While he waits, Milo is scraping along, working as a private investigator doing marital work. His other occupation is drinking, and when the state amends the divorce law to make it much easier for couples to split, he's basically reduced to just drinking.

Milo is in his office one morning, working pretty hard on the office bottle, when the proverbial good-looking woman walks through the door looking to hire his services. But at least Helen Duffy is a redhead and not a blonde. She wants Milo to find her younger brother, Raymond. Raymond is a graduate student, studying western history at the local university, and he dropped out of sight three weeks ago. Helen is worried, but Milo really has no interest in taking the case, and he tells Duffy that in the rudest possible way, suggesting that he will trade his services for the oportunity to sleep with her.

Of course he eventually will take the case, otherwise there would be no novel. The search takes Milodragovitch into the seedy underbelly of this small town, which is in transition. It's the middle 1970s; there's conflict between tourists and the locals and among the locals themselves. Hippies are moving in; the drug culture is taking off, and suddenly there's an epidemic of heroin in Meriewether. Milo will have to sort through all of this as he pursues the investigation.

This is a tough, gritty novel, populated with a lot of undesireable characters, not the least of whom is Milo Milodragovitch himself. There's a fair amount of violence, a lot of unpleasant behavior and the plot sort of meanders all over the place. But it is a beautifully written book; Crumley definitely knew his way around the language. The Wrong Case will definitely not appeal to everyone, and I don't think it's the equal of The Last Good Kiss, which is generally considered to be the author's masterpiece. But for those readers who enjoy hard-boiled, noirish crime novels, it's definitely worth seeking out.

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in the mid-‘70s and in some ways, it seems like its set on a different planet, not just a different era. This was that odd time when all of America decided that being a drunken redneck was the thing to aspire to. (See the movies Smokey & The Bandit and Every Which Way But Lose for further examples of this phenomenon.) And Milo Milodragovitch fits that mold nicely.

He’s a boozer from a family of boozers and after his rich father’s death, his mother put his vast estate into a trust that Milo can’t touch until his early fifties because she thought he’d drink himself to death. So Milo hangs around the small Montana city he grew up in and spends most of his time in bars and is on a first name basis with every wino in town.

He used to be a deputy sheriff who quit when he got tired of scraping accident victims off the road. Milo had recently been working as a small-time private detective specializing in messy divorce cases while he impatiently waits for the trust. Unfortunately, the state decides to loosen up the rules about granting divorces so Milo’s services are no longer in demand.

When a beautiful but naïve woman named Helen tries to hire him to look for her missing brother, Milo knows that he doesn’t have the skills or the soberness to be a real detective, but he eventually does start asking about the guy. Despite spending most of his time drinking, Milo eventually stirs up a hornet’s nest involving a local drug ring that leads to several violent encounters.

James Crumley is a crime writer that never reached a mass audience during his life but he’s got a pretty loyal cult following, including me. His books have been described as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson, and I’d agree with that. Crumley created his own style of redneck noir that also reminds me a bit of Joe Lansdale at times. He should be included in any conversation of the best of the hard boiled crime writers.

The Wrong Case is his first novel, and while it’s pretty entertaining and sets the tone nicely, it’s not the best work he did. The relationship between Milo and Helen is just too bizarre to be believed, even for the ‘70s. And while Crumley’s characters would always like to pull a cork, Milo’s constant drinking in this one makes it hard to believe that he’d be able to do anything but check himself into rehab.

It’s an entertaining and better than average crime novel, but it’s not my favorite Crumley book.

[Aditya · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Crumley's The Wrong Case is as good or even better than his most well known book - The Last Good Kiss. Both have drunken PI s taking on a case they are ill equipped to handle and where the writing is way better than the plot. Crumley's first foray into noir stars Milton Milodragovitch, even more fond of the bottle than The Last Good Kiss' Sughrue and as a result even more inept.

Milo is a alcoholic washout who has failed at jobs, marriage, parenting, drinking and everything else in life. The sort of lady, prim at first glance and promiscuous later, that have been walking into offices of noir detectives since the genre was founded asks Milo to find his missing brother. It is the wrong case for him as he would rather sleep with her than solve it. And so far he has only handled cases that involved snapping pictures of adulterous spouses for clients looking for divorce.

Crumley has mentioned being inspired by Chandler. It is most evident here as he uses a lot of metaphors and does exactly what Chandler did in his best books - say something interesting in an entertaining manner. The writing reminds me of Chandler but the protagonist is out of a Hammett novel - tough and amoral. Milo solves the case mainly out of a drunkard's idle curiosity, an alcoholic's indignation at being condescended to and a boozer's penchant for taking bad decisions.

Most other hard-boiled heroes are brooding and bitter at being out of sync with the rest of the world. But Milo revels in being some sort of a punchline to a cosmic joke. For such a cynical narrative, the wisecracks made me laugh a lot. The writing really nails the feeling that values and institutions are wasting away while people get more and more tired. Sample: He couldn't hide the fatigue of a long life of being nobody, a fatigue I understood more than I wanted to.

The few crime authors like James Lee Burke or Lawrence Block who write about alcoholism with any depth approach it from the perspective of a card-carrying AA member. They focus on booze being as seductive and destructive as the siren call. Crumley drunk himself to death and is one of the only crime authors I have read whose focus on booze seems to be borne out of a genuine love for it. He really captures the feeling of how the first drop is like a salvation to the addicts. Crumley writes about Milo's regular watering hole with such unparalleled warmth and realism, that I will read a whole book set there. Everybody in that bar is tired of everything bar the booze. Also look out for Milo's father's advice about trusting people who don't drink. It is too long to write here but it really is brilliant.

One thing that bothered me was that Milo is ambushed and a goon says that he is supposed to carry more money with him. There are only a couple of guys who could have known how much Milo is supposed to carry but he never follows up on it. It is easy to chalk down the problems with the plot as a failure of Milo's booze addled brains to follow simple clues. The mystery is average, I guessed the identity of the killer. It is still the best ending to a Crumley book I have read. As it is predictable but consistent rather than shocking but nonsensical that will often be the case with his Sughrue books. I will settle for the first over the second any day.

Crumley will never write a perfect book, his plots will never live up to his prose. His excessive focus on drinking, snorting and fucking will be a tough sell to many. But his prose made me laugh and reach for another drink, I have called people friends for less.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

Introduction

I had never heard of James Crumley (or his character, Milo Milodragovitch), until a GoodReads friend sang the author's praises, and I started to look out for second-hand copies of his hard-boiled crime novels. (1) I've since found two, and read one. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Time

This novel was published in 1975, but there is no express mention of the year in which it is set. The first chapter gives a little context, from which you can make some deductions. No fault divorce has just been introduced in several states of America, which suggests that it could be around 1970-1972.

There are still hippies and freaks around, the Mafia drug trade has just begun to infiltrate the city, and the police are worried about the increasing level of heroin consumption by the city's youth. Amusingly, the people's knowledge of Mafia operations is based on popular culture (the 1969 book and 1971 film, "The French Connection", and the 1969 book and 1972 film, "The Godfather"), rather than any direct first-hand exposure or awareness.

Surprisingly, there is almost no mention of Richard Nixon or the war in Vietnam. Anybody referred to as a veteran fought in Korea. It's a benevolent mix of Richard Brautigan and Kinky Friedman, only less drug-fueled. There's even a hint, or a twist, of "Chinatown".

Place

The novel isn't set in the Chandler or Hammett territory of LA or San Francisco. It's set in a small city of 50,000 people in Montana called Meriwether. Until the events that unfold in the novel, it was a relatively innocent place made up of good, law-abiding people. Once again, its only exposure to crime, whether organised or not, was through popular culture. Few people would have owned or seen a hand gun.

Character

Milo is an ex-deputy turned private investigator. With the introduction of no fault divorce, his business has dried up and he's turned to drink. He's added "fifteen or twenty pounds of whiskey flab". Now, he prefers to spend his time "in a mellow bar hustling cocktail waitresses".

Milo divides the world into hippies, crooks, cops, "home folk", and drunken bums.

"My name is Milton Chester Milodragovitch, the third, and I'm a drunk. Thank God."

He feels out of depth in his job, even before he gets a case to investigate:

"My major problem, of course, was going to be the fact that I had neither training nor experience as a detective, no matter what it said on my licence. For God's sake, I didn't even read mystery novels because they always seemed too complicated."

The counter-culture is still something of a novelty. It's really only just starting to dabble in sex and drugs (mainly dope and hash, only recently pills and speed) and rock 'n' roll at this stage. Things haven't got really good or bad yet. Milo's more of a (50's) drunk/ alcoholic than a (60's) doper or (70's) junkie. The pub is where everybody gathers for company. They discuss things that matter - over a drink (or many).

Romance

Milo seems to be more interested in real love than free love. His intentions are honourable, but by nature, he's flawed (and so are they). He's a family man - without a family. After three divorces, he still wants to have a wife (even if she's someone else's), mainly so they can stay in bed until lunchtime and share each other's hangovers. He doesn't simply get seduced by femme fatales, he falls in love with women he considers suitable for marriage (and parenting children), even if sometimes they're the worse for wear.

Milo's primary love interest is Helen Duffy ("the most beautifully confused woman I had ever seen"), who's hired him to prove that her brother's death was a murder (rather than a suicide or accidental drug overdose). When Milo's severely bashed in an alley, but still manages to get home to Helen, she remarks the morning after that he's the ugliest man she's ever woken up next to. She's still the most beautiful he's slept with, even if he can barely see through his swollen eyes. Two mornings later, unchanged however, she now looks "haggard and perplexed".

Helen's the daughter of an inquisitorial and protective femme fatale, and for a while (in the last chapter) I thought she (the mother) was going to seduce Milo. The dialogue is crackling. When you marry the daughter, you marry the mother. Equally, were you to divorce the daughter, you would have to divorce the mother. Be warned. You don't know how cut up she might get.


James Crumley on his favourite place for a bum (Source)

Description

There is a consistently high standard of writing and sentence construction in the novel:

"The sun wasn't high enough over the east ridge to reach the creek or the house, but the tops of my tall blue spruces shimmered like blue flames above the cool, shaded air. Inside, I drew the drapes to capture the shaded morning."

"As she slipped through the door I caught a glimpse of the Arabian nightmare within the room. Oriental rugs covered with plush pillows and slight bodies hid the floor, carelessly circled around a brass water pipe. The bodies were caught in the tender mold of pan-sexual adolescence, the faces blank, waiting to be formed out of youth, but the eyes were as dark and empty as burial caves etched into chalk bluffs. A ringlet of smoke curled slowly above the pipe, and the sharp, bittersweet stink of blond Lebanese hash hovered in the cool, heavy air."

Logues, Both Mono- and Dia-

There's no shortage of women in the novel. Women (and marriage) are always on Milo's mind (especially when they're on or in his bed). It's like watching multiple episodes of a reality TV show called "Private Eye Needs a Wife." Here's a sample:

Hildy Ernst:

"'Hello," she said. Hildy had one of those voices that rub women the wrong way and men the right. My knees were suddenly weak."

"Hildy was the sort of woman an older man could fall in love with - if he could keep up. I couldn't."

Mrs Crider:

"As I backed out of the driveway, she stood framed in the saffron glow, a tall woman, her long hair growing lank in the damp air, her strong hands strangling her waist with the cord of the ragged robe."

"Her bare feet had seen rough use, suffered badly fitted shoes and rocky trails, but when they touched the grass and earth, they seemed elegant in their confidence and strength, as certain of their power as were her swaying hips. And she carried her head proudly, as if she were a valuable gift. I felt a terrible pity, not for her, but for the confusion of sex."

Mindy:

"Sweet Mindy sat cross-legged and naked as a jay bird on the roof of my rig, waving gaily at the tourists...She was so casually naked that there didn't seem to be any point in looking the other way. Her legs were long and slim, her perky rump firm, and her breasts were small but looked as hard as green apples..."

"Let's find a sylvan glade."

"What's that?"

"A nice flat spot..."

"I lifted her in my arms, as light as a bundle of dry wood. She smelled of sunlight and stone, her limbs as smooth and limber as green sticks, and her mouth on mine, sun-warm and gentle, as soft as down, drove a stake into my tired heart. I wanted to break the spell, to heave her into the creek, to shout and splash water happily, to find some quick irony with which to resist, but the spell held..."

"'You're crying, you old fart,' she whispered sweetly, forgiving me, almost happy."

Unnamed hippie woman:

"The woman looked so good walking away from me that I was sorry she didn't like me."

"I never knew what to do when a woman ran away, could never tell if they wanted to be alone or if they wanted me to follow. I had tried both ways, but neither worked."

Helen:

"In the confusion of sleep, she finally came to me, on wings in a cool throbbing wind, on her belly sinuous, angel and snake, her hair fire, her hair blood flower blooming, her hands cold, fingers ice, tears hot, her hands holding me again, to her soft breast, rocking and singing, small moans and the sound of a child weeping, hold me, held my face, my head cracked like a fallen egg..."

"Against our flesh, fired in the sun, the sheets were cool, and we were as timid as children, shy and clumsy, graceless, banging noses and clicking teeth, giggling among the aching moans..."

Epigraphs and Aphorisms

In the novel's epigraph, James Crumley quotes Lew Archer, the fictional character of Ross Macdonald (who in turn had quoted Nelson Algren): "Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." Milo doesn't necessarily take this advice. By the end of the novel, the aphorism that comes to mind belongs to Oscar Wilde:

"Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience."

I highly recommend James Crumley for any readers wanting a more contemporary version of Raymond Chandler. Though be warned you will get an unadulterated male perspective.


FOOTNOTES:

(1) Many thanks to my GR friend for drawing this author and novel to my attention.


SOUNDTRACK:

The Eagles - "Doolin-Dalton"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQhzr...

The Eagles - "Witchy Woman"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCcEj...

Hoodoo Gurus - "What's My Scene"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2vjG...

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Charles Bukowski were a private detective trying to earn a living in a small hippie-filled city in the Pacific Northwest, he would be Milo, the hero of the story. This is a hardboiled detective story, containing many of the usual elements, including the down-on-his-luck detective, the sexy siren of a would-be client, her missing brother who was too good to be true. But, Crumley does not stop at giving us a run-of-the-mill private eye story, he sets in in the seventies where there are stoned-out hippies everywhere, even working for the chamber of commerce, and offering up free love like its going out of style. There are also bars seemingly on every corner and barflies everywhere.

Milo solves everything by going on bender after bender and is so unorthodox that he even asks if his client will give him her nights in exchange for his days working. But Milo is ferocious and transvestites, street thugs, nasty officers, and hippie pig farm communes won't stop him from getting to the bottom of the situation. The plotting is not what this book is necessarily about. Its the wild, almost-legendary drinking and atmosphere that makes this story.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Milton Chester Milodragovich, better known as Milo, is certainly not the most likeable of characters. He starts drinking in the morning and doesn't stop during the day. He occasionally mixes in speed and pain pills. At 39, one wonders if he will live long enough to get the principal of the estate his father left him, but which he isn't entitled until age 52. To add to that (and maybe why he drinks), he isn't entirely suited to real work. Though he made his living as a private detective, it was only to follow errant wives and husbands to provide their spouses with grounds for divorce. Then the divorce laws were changed to allow for irreconcilable differences. What to do, what to do?!!

I said in my last review that you don't read mysteries for writing or characterization. Instead, you read for plot. I might be wrong about that. The plot was just OK here. This is my first James Crumley, but I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the primary reason to read him is his writing style and characterization. I might not like Milo, but the characterization is well-drawn. As to writing style, my first thought was that this is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler. It isn't identical, but closer than I've read without reading the master himself.

I managed to pick up another by Crumley at the last library book sale. It is from another of Crumley's series. I'll be happy to read it in future and will not shy away from the next in the Milodragovich series. There is something special about this and I'm unlikely to forget it for some time. However, it only just barely gets to the 4-star group.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crumley's tale falls into the Ross Macdonald/Raymond Chandler vein in that it deals with family troubles and personal failings, and possesses the occasional passage of twilit lyricism. And some of Crumley's writing is as good as any I have come across in the genre. There are a few beautiful passages: one concerning Milo (the PI) seeing his dead father's clothes on the backs of local losers after his mother has given them away. Another is a hilarious description of a legendary fight between a bogus outlaw and Milo's supposedly heroic ancestor.

The standard elements of this type of writing are here: the world-weary, alcoholic private eye who finds a troubled, beautiful woman in his office one day, the array of troubled secondary characters, a little hot sex, the bourgeois families with their nasty little secrets. Like any good mystery writer however, Crumley sticks to the blueprint so far as general plot and character considerations go, but adds a lot that is uniquely his own. Alcohol abuse, althou a standard feature, is delved into considerably here, to the point where several of the leading characters are practically pickled in the stuff. Milo, the protagonist, is the drunken son of well-off drunks, and he finds companionship among the low-down, sloshed slobs of his fictional Rocky Mountain town. Another issue that comes up here is homosexuality (a few years before it became fashionable). A few of the lead characters are gay or bi men, but they are no lisping nellies - two are tough, butt-kicking gunslingers, another is a married professor. Interesting.

The plot basically follows the gorgeous 30-something babe's attempts to find out what happened to her younger brother, who apparently died of a drug overdose. She believes he was done in somehow, and Milo investigates (and begins to fall for his client). He discovers that the guy was gay, strange, and into drugs. He finds himself working deeper into the dark, seamy side of his hometown, a world that features drugs, violence, wasted hippies, small time mobsters, queers, and extramarital romance.

The ending is a downer, but is still satisfying. This was recommended to me by a friend, and I recommend it to you. It is one of the better mysteries I've come across.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Milton Chester “Milo” Milodragovitch was once a very successful private investigator, he made his living as the kind of sleazy keyhole peeper who kicked in doors to snap photos for use as evidence in divorce cases, then they invented the no-fault divorce and the bottom dropped out. On the plus side he has a sizable inheritance from his wealthy father’s estate coming on his 53rd birthday… on the downside that’s more than a decade away and, between his hard partying ways and questionable life choices, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether he’ll live that long. His mentor is a long disbarred attorney named Simon who has given up on society to become a first rate drunk... Milo is starting to think Simon might have the right idea!

The Wrong Case has Milo agreeing to take on a missing person case for the simple reason that he is attracted to the missing man’s sister… the money isn’t bad either, but it’s mostly for the girl. The resulting investigation turns into a disaster when bodies begin piling up, an inexplicable junkie crime spree hits town, and Milo can’t seem to get a handle on exactly what’s going on or why. But, with a stubborn streak of tenacity that might get him killed, Milo is determined to solve the case and get the girl.

Milo is a redneck in the classic style, a hard drinking, hell-raising good ol’ boy with more guts than brains. He's reckless and self indulgent with no tolerance of rules or regulations of any kind and, like most classic hard-boiled types, he drinks WAY too much. It being the Seventies he’s also known to indulge in illegal drugs like speed and marijuana from time to time. He’s a hard-case (as well as something of a head-case at times) but he’s also a bit of a soft touch. Sure, he’ll knock you on your butt, but then he’ll probably help you up, apologize, and buy you a drink.

This novel won't be everyone's cup of Irish coffee, it's brooding, it's gritty, the mystery itself isn't all that great, the plot is a little hard to believe at times and none of the characters possess much in the way of redeeming qualities. These people are who they are and, while they may indulge in a little self pity from time to time, they aren't looking to change. Imagine something like Leaving Las Vegas as a detective story and you're getting close to the tone of this novel.

The style invites comparisons to Raymond Chandler mostly due to the genre and the fact that Crumley has a certain way of presenting a sentence that is almost lyrical or poetic at times while still never letting the reader lose the sense that what is being read contains some greater secret about the harsh truth of life.

The book contains adult language, sex, violence and racial slurs.

[Piker7977 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The business of private investigation is tough for a guy like Milo. He likes his booze, dope, and women. Amongst all of those distractions, he has a propensity for laziness and "who gives a shit" attitude. When a sultry red head comes into his office looking for her lost brother, Milo will be led around on a chain made up of the promise of sex and the complications of those who live in his community.

This is my second Crumley and I like his style. The themes in this book make for a good time capsule of the Seventies as many of the characters are counterculture or at least an odd take on the main stream. Booze, weed, and pills are the mainstream along with a disenchanted view of society and law enforcement. This particular book combines some of the imagery, feelings, and motives found in films like The Long Goodbye, Nashville, and Mean Streets. There is a pretty good literary thread throughout that echoes of Hemingway, Hesse, and Hunter S. Thompson.

The mystery portion is mediocre but the characters, booze filled ideas, drug laced adventure, and outsider perspective make this worth checking out.

[Lilirose · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perchè ho voluto leggere un hard boiled già sapendo che non è il mio genere? Non saprei, forse per venir smentita o forse per veder confermati i miei pregiudizi.
E' venuto fuori che a quanto pare avevo ragione a diffidare, perchè mi ha infastidito tutto di questo romanzo: i personaggi, l'ambientazione e soprattutto il messaggio che comunica. Ok che siamo negli anni '70, ma non ho mai visto un tale concentrato di sessismo, omofobia e mascolinità tossica. Tralasciando poi l'esaltazione delle droghe e della violenza, che assumono una dimensione quasi mitica, come se fossero il marchio dell' "uomo vero".
La cosa che mi dispiace è che non sarebbe neanche scritto male come giallo (nonostante una certa tendenza dell'autore a perdersi in chiacchiere), peccato che ogni buono spunto venga annegato in un mare di cinismo fine a se stesso e che tre quarti dell'opera consistano in sesso, risse e sbornie.
Suppongo ci sia tutta un'umanità che va in brodo di giuggiole davanti a certi romanzi, io di certo non sono fra questi.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crumley is undoubtedly one of the great writers, the very great. This is tightly crafted, reeks of cynicism, idealism and whiskey all rolled round the bottle together, lifts you up and casts you down, and the writing never ceases to be extraordinary. It is the dark, humourously tragic story of a divorce focused private eye kicked suddenly into a more dangerous sphere of money and murder and drugs...all in a medium sized rural town which is entirely unexpected for the genre and never fails to give enjoyment. And like all great noir writers, his book is infused with a shaded and complex love of the underbelly, dislike of authority and order, and perhaps hope for some kind of redemption.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite enjoyable, this title is a vintage hardboiled private eye book with modern flourishes. The prose often shines with its gems. For some reason, the landscape descriptions and PI's hard-livin', hard-drinkin' with a big heart life philosophy remind me of James Lee Burke's character this time.

[Gram · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost gave up before the end, but I battled my way through, feeling exhausted at the finish. There's a LOT of drinking and drunkenness in this story and I felt punch drunk while reading it. If you've never read James Crumley, try "The Last Good Kiss" instead of this one.

[Rich Gamble · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book stinks. I used to think I liked detective fiction..maybe I just like Raymond Chandler. Im not the first reviewer on goodreads to note the overwhelming plot similarities to The Little Sister but if you've read that before it will surely make you like this less. Dialogue has a few good moments but usually is cringeworthy and lacking in zing. Lead character is very unlikeable and Crumley's attemtpts to glorify this alcoholic slob fail miserably..definitely no crime fighting Henry Chineski thats for sure. Was going to be nice and give two stars but ending was very sloppy. Wouldve given up if it wasn't a VC..usually a source of good literature (both words don't apply here).

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hard drinking tough private eye is brought out of his stupor to help a pretty woman find her missing relative. I was bored just writing that. But this book tries to set itself apart, with its hippie infested tourist trap location. Milo, the leading man, is as caustic, tough and sad as they get. Even too sad for my tastes with his endless rhapsodies about the tragic beauty of alcoholism.

The set up for the plot wasn't terrible but did a tremendous amount of wheel spinning. Obviously, it makes sense since Milo is perpetually drunk and isn't going to be a fast worker and Crumley is setting up things to settle in for the long run.

The writing is a mix of crude non-PC dialogue and some poetry. The supporting cast of characters are well written and occasionally have some depth to them.

I didn't hate reading this, but it was too familiar and too tragic.

[Axolotl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite strong, but Milo is practically identical to Sughrue. The basic similarity of Crumley's private eyes (from what I have gathered after two, of his more popular, books), leads the reader to infer that he is a little one-note--but what a genre-smashing one-note: these aren't really "crime" novels at all!

Here is, by way of my favorite passage, an example in order to illustrate what I'm getting at with that last statement:

There is a quaintly modern notion that information will eventually equal knowledge, which is neatly balanced by the cliche that the more one learns, the less one knows. Both ideas are probably more or less accurate, but neither is particularly useful in dealing with the human animal.

James Crumley, The Wrong Case, p. 226

[Dara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like The Last Good Kiss (my favorite Crumley), this one is soaked-- marinated-- STEWED in liquor. The world's changing. Milo's PI business, built on ferreting out cheating spouses, is failing since the advent of no-fault divorce laws. In walks a redhead looking for her little brother. The mystery takes a back seat to the language and character, both of which are first rate.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard-boiled American crime novel in the style of Chandler. Milo Milodragovitch is an ex-deputy who has been making a living as a PI from divorce cases, but the amendment of the divorce laws means he is now scraping around for work. He is a hard drinker, occasional user of dope and speed, and spends much of his time hanging out with other drunks in the bar of the small Western town where he knows everyone. Then a glamorous woman turns up asking him to find her brother, and life gets very complicated…

This novel had many of the tropes of the hard-boiled crime style - flawed but basically decent PI in a corrupt world, everyone drinking neat whiskey from the bottle, mysterious femme fatale, shadowy organised crime figures - but still had a robust plot and moved along at a good pace. What took it above the standard of its type in my view, was the almost lyrical way Crumley describes the town and its surrounding scenery, so that they became a part of Milo and his damaged persona. There was definitely some beauty among the bleakness.

I enjoyed this as a quick and easy read, it’s not my favourite type of crime novel and at times I felt I’d seen this before, but overall it was a pretty fine example.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

No matter when most detective fiction is set, part of it invariably takes place in 1955. That’s kind of the Victorian era of American literature – the moment when a public Eisenhower morality obscured a sordid underworld – and detective fiction is a lot like our Victorian novel: a popular form that, in talented hands, can be lasting literature. Chandler may have written much of his best work twenty years earlier, but he seemed to predict the 1950s (and many of the films of his novels were made then). And Ellroy, writing four decades later, set most of his work in the period. In between, their legion of imitators touched directly or indirectly on the same dynamic, a sense of noble disappointment that our American experiment carried a flotsam of cynicism, disappointment, and outright evil in its stream.

I mention all that because Crumley seems a rare bird who was able to re-fit the classic detective form into a different, later era. Writing around the same time as the more highly regarded (but so far, to me, disappointing) John D. MacDonald, he managed to modernize the form. MacDonald’s Travis McGee was just another Chandler “knight,” but a man even more removed from his time than Chandler’s Marlowe. I find him a whiner, but I do need to give him another shot, whining mostly about the fact that it isn’t 1955 anymore, that the world no longer has a clearly defined place for a man like himself.

Crumley, though, adjusted to the times. This is my second of his; it’s a bit less good than The Last Good Kiss, but, then, so is almost everything else. That reinvents the genre while this one merely stands as a satisfying extension of it. In either case, though, his novels feel alive, feel as if they’re using the genre to say something about a world that’s a couple decades newer than most of the others. (To be fair, Ellroy uses the 1950s to say a great deal about today, but that’s a matter for another day.)

In The Wrong Case, we have a cranky private eye in a mid-sized Western city. His great-grandfather established the family fortune as much through dumb luck as anything else, and now Milo has the means to stay drunk and dependent most of the time, needing to supplement things only a little with seedy divorce work that’s suddenly dried up with the state’s transformed dissolution laws.

On the surface, Milo is another fallen knight type, another guy walking down the mean streets without quite being sullied himself. He spends his days protecting a coterie of fellow drunks and down-on-their-luck drifters, and he doesn’t ask all that much for himself. Over the course of the novel, though, it becomes clear that he genuinely sees himself as lost. He sees all sorts of drug abuse and open sexuality, and he refuses to judge it. He suspects that these young people may be right, that they may have a better sense of how to lead a decent life than he does. And, since he’s certain he has no capacity for living decently, it’s inspiring to see his lack of self-righteousness.

In other words, he’s a hero not just in a different age, but for a different age. He sees a cultural transformation – it’s not Eisenhower’s America but Nixon’s – and he has a glimmer of hope that the young people he knows will do a better job than he or his self-important ancestors ever managed. There’s almost nothing he can do to help – the title suggests, after all, that he’s somehow on the wrong case all along – and even his solution of the mystery leaves things mostly as they were.

Throughout it all, Crumley writes with humor and insight. One of the reviews I glanced at calls him Chandler crossed with Hunter S. Thompson, and that’s a great way to put it. He’s Chandler forty years later; he’s Thompson without the full-blown misanthropy.

Consider this exchange:

Milo’s bartender friend laments a recently killed mutual friend, “The old fart survived two wars and some goddamned punk pushes him down the stairs and kills him. What the hell kinda life is that?”

And Milo answers, “I don’t know, Leo. The kind we have, I guess. I don’t know.”

I love the final “I don’t know” here. If I’d had the skill to draft such an exchange, I’d probably have cut it. But not-knowing is central to Milo’s existence. The world is in tumult, and he resists the standard impulse to complain that it isn’t as it was when he was a kid. It was broken and confusing then, and it’s broken and confusing now. The answers are never easy, and nostalgia isn’t any use.

There’s a gorgeous couple pages late in the novel – pages 235-6 in my Vintage contemporaries edition – that serve as a kind of ethical will from his father, a glorious drunk who died under suspicious circumstances when he was only 10, who tried to help him understand life while retching in a bathroom. It’s too long to quote entirely, but the essence of it is that there’s a kind of honesty in being a drunk. “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something down deep inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”

It’s not that sublime throughout – there are times you can see the guide wires of the standard form directing the action and coloring the minor characters we meet – but it’s certainly an inspiring effort. There are another 4-5 Crumleys out there, and I’ll get to them. I don’t know of any others that accomplish what he does, though, so I’ll be rationing them over the next good while.

[Sidney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I began this book and the language wasn't very good, so I decided to quit reading it. I am very fussy about bad language and content, so I choose to not read many books. Mike and I read the last chapter while on vacation, and Mike's summary was that this was an old fashioned detective style novel - BUT WITH BAD LANGUAGE.

[Alberto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Qualcuno qua ha commentato "è il primo di romanzo di Crumley che leggo, sicuramente non l'ultimo." Io dico invece: è il primo che leggo, ed è anche l'ultimo.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mother raised two boys. She loves spending time with my son, her grandson, who has a tendency to bouncing-off-the-walls physical craziness in the manner of many toddlers. When he does something along those lines, my mother, who would know, is fond of saying “You’re such a boy.”

I read mostly male authors but I have done better in recent years. I’ve tried really hard to get away from tough-talking PIs who put women in their place and screw them when the case is solved. I rarely read books that feature women being murdered anymore, finding the trope tiresome, predictive, and misogynistic.

But man, good writing is good writing. I am such a boy. And James Crumley, whose sole ambition is to write about the angst of drunken men, is a damn good writer.

It took me four tries to get through Crumley’s seminal work The Last Good Kiss, because as much as I liked it in the beginning, I couldn’t get over some of its toxic parts. When I pushed through, I discovered why the novel is seen to be a gem by so many, even if the mystery is weak. Crumley’s dialogue is so much fun, his characters (minus some female ones who we’ll get to) so rich, his world so vivid. I mentioned in my review of the novel that The Last Good Kiss was as if the America song Ventura Highway came to life as a murder mystery.

Like Good Kiss, this one evokes the beauty of the west, specifically the pacific northwest. The town felt lived in and Milo, an obnoxious drunk, felt like a logical extension of its best and worst. The other barflies and assorted losers he hangs out with feel real too. You wanna hang out with these people, maybe not too long and maybe one drink short, but long enough for the fun.

The mystery is prevalent here but almost an afterthought, which usually bothers me in books but doesn’t as much here. It’s reminiscent of early Chandler in that it has a convoluted plot that shakes out a little too neatly by the end. But it still kept me guessing.

The book has two main weaknesses which will turn many readers off so be forewarned….

1. Homosexual characters are critical to the plot and while Crumley is probably sensitive for someone writing a book in 1975, this still came out in 1975. It’s not the best depiction of homosexuality. Be forewarned.

2. The female lead who kick starts the mystery is the same kind of poorly written female character in Good Kiss. Crumley can’t decide if he wants to make her a damsel in distress or a femme fatale and we kind of know by the end but her existence gives the plot purpose and not much more. She’s angry when she should be, horny when Milo needs her to be…you get where this is going. The other female characters are interesting and Crumley takes their circumstances seriously. But they’re not the main one. And it is a major problem.

Reading Crumley reminds me of a line from The Last Good Kiss when CW Shugrue witnesses a bunch of manual laborers heading to the bar after a shift: I knew they were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load liberals for hard work and good times. I enjoyed myself reading this and I want to read more, even if I should know better by now.

[Graham Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Wrong Case is Crumley's first detective novel, introducing Montana private eye Milo Milogragovich, who's hired by a young woman to find her wayward brother.

The actual case seems almost incidental as the investigation soon splits in two, as Milo investigates the metaphorical figure of his father, and the actual murder of his surrogate father. I'd never read anything like it before, and I'm still not sure that there's a whole lot that compares.

Some of the violent ending seems to be there just to check all the boxes that make up a private eye story, but this melancholy story is far outside the run-of-the-mill PI genre and will reward many readers who might never read about detectives like Spenser or Archer.