Hard Boiled Lit: The Last Good Kiss

Post-Vietnam dark crime poetry

I came of age during the 1970s. As a late generation boomer, I missed out on the flower power days, the bright promise of a better world centered on love and peace. Instead, I grew up during the humiliating end of the Vietnam War, gas shortages, stagflation, and Watergate. I lost my virginity on the same day that Nixon resigned. I joined the Navy after I graduated high school, partly because my parents couldn't afford to send me to college.

As a result, my favorite brand of crime fiction is post-Vietnam era Noir. Like the progenitors of hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s, who reflected a dark worldview shaped by the Great Depression, the crime writers of the 1970s echoed the disillusionment and cynicism that suffused the society around them. Some of my favorites include Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg, Cogan's Trade by George V. Higgins, and No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker, all of which I have discussed here. Each touch on different areas of criminality, but all are drenched in the downbeat, defeated vibe of their era.

I have been on a mission to keep uncovering and discovering more of this fare. My latest find is The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley.

Low rent private investigator C. W. Sughrue, based out of Meriwether, Montana is contracted to locate famed poet and novelist Abraham Trahearne by Trahearne's wealthy ex-wife. He follows his trail from bar to bar all over the west, finally cornering the writer at a bar in Sonoma, California. The quest is a boozy series of drunken escapades, one night stands, and occasionally violent encounters with shady characters. The search culminates in Treahearne taking a bullet in his ass cheek and heading to the hospital.

While the writer is recuperating, the owner of the bar hires Sughrue for $87 to find her missing runaway daughter, who she hasn't seen in ten years. For his own reasons, Sughrue takes on the job and follows her trail through porn movies, hippie communes, and mob prostitution rings, with Trahearne tagging along. After hundreds of miles of cross country booze and sex, the trail eventually ends when Sughrue discovers she has been dead for years.

He finally gets Trahearne home, where he meets both of the writer's wives, his ex and current, and his terrifying mother. The boozing continues and Sughrue winds up sleeping with Trahearne's ex.

The first two thirds of the novel is a largely plot-less melange of hedonism, investigative dead-ends, and wanderings through the fringes of society. Then, Crumley delivers a major twist and the book charges into a tight, hard-boiled third act. Suddenly, it's no longer a very 1970s Easy Rider-style narrative and instead it's a classic Noir tale where Sughrue becomes the violent agent of justice taking down both sleazy gangsters and corrupt, immoral upper class society, very reminiscent of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It's a very satisfying resolution.

In this explosive third act, the true nature of the main characters is revealed, including that of the protagonist. This is Crumley's real achievement, stringing readers along for thirteen chapters, then dropping the hammer on them and delivering startling insight and truth. I had previously read Crumley's Milo Milodragovich detective novel, The Wrong Case, and enjoyed it. It shares many of the positive qualities of The Last Good Kiss, but lacks that final, brilliant reveal of character.

Crumley does this by initially portraying the actions of his high society characters as vain, selfish, and venal, but also somewhat silly. It's exactly the sort of childish behavior you might expect from spoiled adults with no real purpose in life. What Crumley unveils in the third act is that it's really all about control over money and he pulls the mask off with brutality. Suddenly all the pointless, aimless behavior of these people earlier in the book seems more like an absence of humanity than a character flaw. Unfortunately for them, he also pulls away his protagonist's mask and he is transformed from a wandering drunk into a lethal man of principles.

There is a lot to love about Crumley's prose. The opening paragraph - 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 Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. - is often cited as one of the greatest openers in all of crime fiction. Crumley claimed it took him eight years to write. There are plenty of other examples sprinkled throughout The Last Good Kiss.

The Last Good Kiss was influential among other crime writers. George Pelecanos said, "If you asked us to name one book that got us jacked up to write crime novels, it would be The Last Good Kiss. He tried to describe the country in the wake of Vietnam. It wasn't a detective novel. It wasn't a cop novel. He showed us a crime novel could be about something bigger than the mystery itself."

Dennis Lehane said, “I think it’s funny we all hold the same book in a certain high regard, which is James Crumley’s Last Good Kiss. I think that’s the thing we’re swinging for — ‘there’s the benchmark, let’s go after that.’ That’s a book that stands head and shoulders above any concept of genre fiction.”

Otto Penzler, owner of Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, labeled The Last Good Kiss the greatest private-eye novel he ever read. “It had a poetical quality that I don’t think anybody else ever achieved. I revered Raymond Chandler, but there was something about the beauty, the elegance of the prose that I think is the most important thing about Crumley.”

I will probably follow that path next year, when I write a Noirish P.I. novel set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It's long past the post-Vietnam era, but just as writers like Crumley echoed their Depression-era forefathers with reflections of their times, there is plenty of darkness around us now to channel into hard and biting crime fiction.

I can't wait.