James Arthur Crumley (October 12, 1939 – September 17, 2008)[2][3][4] was an American author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays.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",[5] who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel"[1] and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S.

"[6] Crumley's first published novel, 1969's One to Count Cadence, which was set in the Philippines and Vietnam, began as the thesis for his master's degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1966.

He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship for about a year before leaving to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1961; during his service, he was assigned to the Philippines.

[11] 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.

Impressed by the oeuvres of Chandler and Ross Macdonald, Crumley began writing his first detective novel, The Wrong Case, which was published in 1975.

[1][12] Crumley died at St. Patrick Hospital[1] in Missoula on September 17, 2008, of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases after many years of health problems.

None of the books that Crumley wrote ever became bestsellers, but he had a cult following devoted to his writing and received frequent critical acclaim.

[3] David Dempsey in the New York Times called Crumley's debut novel, One to Count Cadence, set during the Vietnam War, "...a compelling study of the gratuitous violence in men.

"[3] In 1993, Marilyn Stasio, reviewing The Mexican Tree Duck in the same publication, wrote: "Characters as memorable as [Crumley's] don't come blazing down the interstate that often.

"[15] Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described Crumley's work as being about "a violently chaotic world that can be seen as a legacy of Vietnam, of which his characters are nightmare-haunted veterans,"[16] while Ron Powers called it: the Big Sky Country [reimagined] as a kind of hard-boiled Lake Wobegon with bloodstains, a hellscape where all the women are tall ... the men sport pugnacious foreheads, brutal jaws and Indian braids, and all the children are away at camp.

[3][4][15] Its opening line is sometimes cited as the best in the genre:[1][3][4]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.In 1985, The Wrong Case won a Falcon Award from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan for the best "hardboiled" novel published in that country.

[3] In 2007, the magazine Men's Journal named The Last Good Kiss as number 12 on its list of "Top 15 Thrillers of All Time",[19] and in Newsweek, George Pelecanos, crime author and co-producer of the HBO series The Wire, rated Crumley's The Last Good Kiss as number 3 in his list of the "Five Most Important Crime Novels".

[20] However, despite claims made on a number of websites, Crumley does not seem to have been either a winner or a nominee for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for The Last Good Kiss or any other novel.

The detective "Crumley" in Ray Bradbury's trilogy of mystery novels (Death Is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Let's All Kill Constance) is named in tribute to him.

Additionally, Crumley provided the commentary for the 2002 English-language French film L'esprit de la route by Matthieu Serveau.

It's damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he's heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.The Wrong Case (1975)Obituaries and remembrances