Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 26, 1993 TAG: 9309260220
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO Book page editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Though he's not particularly well known outside of the field, to mystery fans, James Crumley is one of the best.
His first two novels, "The Wrong Case" (1975) and "The Last Good Kiss" (1978) are masterful and completely original reworkings of Raymond Chandler's "The Little Sister" and "The Long Goodbye." Both concern booze-soaked private eyes caught up in complicated plots involving lust and murder. They're the kind of books that attract intense followings. People love these novels and recommend them passionately.
If Crumley's newest, "The Mexican Tree Duck" stumbles in comparison to those first two, it's still a wild ride across a new West that's peopled with cocaine cowboys, crooked politicians, crazed bikers and the women who love them.
Following an epigraph from "The High Window," the story begins when C.W. "Sonny" Sughrue (last seen in "The Wrong Case") and his lawyer Solomon Rainbolt share some tequila and crystal meth in the East Meriwether, Montana, snow as they unload a jukebox onto the train tracks. What else are they to do? The vending machine guys went to a "new format" and took away all the Hank Snow records. Might as well let the 3:12 freight to Spokane smash the thing.
Of course, Sughrue has to come up with the cash to pay for it and that leads him into a job repossessing some tropical fish from the leader of a motorcycle gang, and from there, to finding said leader's mother. Though it sounds bizarre - and actually, it is bizarre _ that part of the story makes sense. By the final chapters, the plot had successfully eluded me but that's not such a big deal.
It all involves a group of Sughrue's Vietnam pals who wind up searching from Montana to Texas for two missing women and one baby. The reasons behind all the activity have something to do with drug smuggling, politics and, as you might expect, secrets buried deep in the past. Scenes of stark violence are balanced by a rich prose that can be unexpectedly beautiful:
"In the clear, hot sunshine of autumn, the promise of winter waits just inside the shade of the pines, a vow always honored. Whatever winter brings - aching bones, starving elk, frozen children - we've got this moment of blue clarity. Western Montana at its best."
Crumley can also be perceptive and funny:
"It wasn't a party that a Republican could understand - the marijuana smoke sweet on the air, the occasional cocaine sniffle, cold Mexican beer, good food, great conversation and laughter - but a Parisian deconstructionist scholar might find it about as civilized as America gets. Or at least the one I met, who was visiting at UTEP, maintained. Somewhere along the way, he claimed, Americans had forgotten how to have a good time. In the name of good health, good taste, and political correctness from both sides of the spectrum, we were being taught how to behave. America was becoming a theme park, not as in entertainment, but as in a fascist Disneyland.
" `No facial hair, no false eyelashes, and no ... fun!' the short Frenchman shouted, then stormed away toward a tequila bottle in the hands of a tough-looking Kiowa-Chicana breed with a single foreboding eyebrow dark as war paint across her face."
No, "The Mexican Tree Duck" isn't perfect. Far from it. But James Crumley is so ferocious, unrepentant and inspired that criticism is pointless. Fans of "The Last Good Kiss" and "The Wrong Case" will get their money's worth.
by CNB