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Photographs by Janine Niepce over at Everyday I Show.

No Regrets: A Hard-Boiled Life

By John Schulian

The train to glory left without James Crumley, who seems to have been too busy examining life’s gnarly side to bother catching it. There are no best-sellers for him, no money-bloated deals with Hollywood–just hard-boiled novels that are better than anybody else’s because all those lost nights stashed in the margins make each one a survivor’s story.

Crumley has never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he knows how blood looks when it’s spilled against a backdrop of whiskey dawns, cocaine pick-me-ups, and wall-shaking sex. His is a wisdom acquired by bellying up to the bar in roadhouses where bikers, ranch hands and oil-field workers beat each other senseless for playing the wrong Merle Haggard song on the jukebox. It’s no life for the delicate, but the delicate don’t have a taste for Crumley’s novels anyway, so the hell with them.

The time is right for saying so now that Crumley has again unleashed Milo Milodragovitch, one of his two memorably unapologetic rogue heroes. Milo comes barreling back in “The Final Country” because he needs something to keep Texas and a woman who’s the queen of mood swings from driving him crazy. To tell the truth, he’d rather be home in Montana after reclaiming his father’s stolen inheritance and snagging some unlaundered drug money in the process. Failing that, he uses a sap on a sucker-punching lady bartender, knocks the teeth out of a one-armed man’s mouth, and almost twists the nose off a security-company executive’s face–all before the shooting gets serious. Crumley, for what it’s worth, says Milo represents his kinder, gentler side.

They’ve both passed 60 without a whimper, no problem for Crumley, but strange territory for a hero in a genre that avoids aging as if it were a homely blond. Be advised, though, that when readers first met Milo, in “The Wrong Case,” in 1976, he was in strange territory for a PI then, too–the modern West–and he survived nicely. So when he talks about the two white streaks in his hair early on in “The Final Country,” he isn’t worried. It’s like he says: “I’m old, babe, but not dead.”

Of course, he comes close to making a liar of himself when the simple job of tracking down a runaway wife puts him in the path of a drug dealer “no larger than a church or any more incongruous than a nun with a beard.” The drug dealer, fresh out of prison, is looking for a woman, too, and when he doesn’t succeed, he decides the next best thing is to kill a bar manager. In the midst of the mayhem, over drinks, naturally, he and Milo connect. So it is that Milo decides to help a guy who doesn’t look like he needs any.

The set-up is straight out of Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely,” which Crumley admits and which, when you think about it, is only fitting since he has been described as Chandler’s “bastard son.” Anyone who doubts the accuracy of that label should read Crumley’s 1978 masterpiece, “The Last Good Kiss.” With all due respect to Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and the genre’s other heavyweights, it’s the best hard-boiled novel of the past 25 years. Some admirers swear it is even more than that, comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” To make their case for Crumley’s artistry, true believers don’t have to go any farther than “The Last Good Kiss’s” first sentence:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

The hero of “Kiss” is C.W. (Sonny) Sughrue, whose last name, as Crumley once explained it to me, is pronounced “sug as in sugar and rue as in rue the goddamned day.” Sughrue is a little younger than Milo and he isn’t as bright, but he’s a lot meaner, which comes in handy for a private eye wading through obsessions, sordid pasts and the dark places in men’s souls. When questioning a particularly difficult thug, Sughrue shoots him twice in the foot: “‘Once to get his attention…and once to let him know I was serious.’”

Culture critic Greil Marcus recalled that quote in the issue of Rolling Stone devoted to the September 11 attacks, as if to suggest that America can play as rough as any terrorists. But the quote’s presence so many years after it appeared in a novel that didn’t sell all that well also suggests an enduring fascination with Crumley. It’s not just that there’s enough demand for his six novels before “The Final Country” to keep reviving them as paperbacks; it’s that there are people who pay upwards of $300 for leather-bound copies of scripts he has written for movies that were never made. And there are even more people, it seems, who will gladly recall finding this expatriate Texan in his Missoula, Montana, lair and joining him in debauches worthy of rock stars.

Documentation of such events is hard to come by, if not impossible, but nothing Crumley has written or said in interviews discourages the telling of such tales. “I think there are more people who drink a lot in America than ever show up in fiction,” he said once, the implication being that he was one of them. And he said, and implied, the same about drugs. But there was a 10-year lull after 1983’s “Dancing Bear” that left the impression his excesses may have gotten the best of him. When he finally reappeared with “The Mexican Tree Duck,” he used the acknowledgments to thank his agent for sticking with him and his publisher for gambling on him. The sentiment didn’t sound like it was coming from someone who’d been lounging on top of the world.

Three years after that, Crumley delivered “Bordersnakes,” which teamed Milo and Sughrue for the first time. And now there is “The Final Country,” his finest work since “The Last Good Kiss,” a splendid balancing act between Milo’s sense of moral outrage and his flare for the outrageous. It’s good to know there’s still a private eye who can enjoy a ménage a trois and then face down a rich, corrupt Texan he sees as “a hyena in the rotten wake of the multinational prides.”

Crumley obviously has a full head of steam, and the news from his camp is that he’s deep into writing his next Sughrue novel, “The Right Madness.” It’s hard to say what’s driving him. Maybe he feels the dogs of mortality nipping at his heels, maybe he has decided to get the most out of his vast talent. Not that he has ever given the impression of someone burdened by regrets. He did, however, apologize the day he showed up 10 minutes late for a writers’ panel on which he was the cult hero.

“I lost my watch,” he said.

“Any idea where?” asked an unsuspecting straight man.

“Yeah,” Crumley said. “I threw it out a car window in El Paso in 1978.”

Crumley died in 2008 at the age of 68. This piece originally appeared on MSN.com (12/3/2001).

My wife is a Ho for pecan pie. Seriously, it’s embarrassing. She likes to pick off the nuts and just eat the filling. I can’t take her anywhere, I tell you.

I don’t have any strong feelings about pecan pie but for the sake of either inspiring or grossing out the Banter’s resident food-tasters, Thelarmis and Chyll Will, check out this tasty recipe for chocolate pecan pie from David Lebovitz.

What do Myrna and Eddie Bo have to do with each other? Nothing.  I just dig this picture and love the tune, a true breakbeat classic.

Check out these blog posts about how people organize their books. I’ve arranged my books by topic but am too lazy to do it by author within a topic. Sometimes, I do it by size, or I clump together one author’s titles.

Once a year, I might be inspired to clean the mess up but maintaining it is another thing. Plus, I’m forever running out of space so things tend loose any sense of strict purpose. What I need is more space (the New Yorker’s lament), or less books, or a nook or a kindle. But I can’t imagine not collecting more books. It’s how I was raised and I don’t see it stopping.

Course, there’s also the books that are stacked on my night table, but here’s a look some of my library.

Tonight at the Varsity Letters speaking series, Harvey Araton will talk about his new book about the great Knicks teams from the 1970s, and Scott Raab will discuss his latest, “The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of Lebron James.” They will be joined by True Hoop blogger, Henry Abbott.

Promises to be a fun evening.

I stood over a young woman on the train last night. She had a narrow face and it looked like she was sucking in her cheeks. An open book rested on top of a big leather bag that was on her lap (the subject of what women put in their bags, and how often they change their bags merits its own discussion). Soon, I sat in a seat across from her. She was wearing black boots, and a long skirt and her hips were wide though I couldn’t make out her figure from the way she was sitting. I tried to figure out how a girl with a big body could have such a slender face.

As the train pulled into the 125th station, she closed her book and looked up. I saw that she was reading Diane Keaton’s new memoir.  That was when I noticed that her blazer and the big, decorated scarf that was wrapped around her neck. You know how some people look like their dogs? She looked like her book, a real Annie Hall. As I wished that I could take a picture of her, she looked at me. I raised my eyebrow and she titled her head, smiled, and walked off the train.

[Poster by Mike Oncley]

Bernie Williams is the best of this year’s crop of players that will be considered for the Hall of Fame. But as Rob Neyer points out, he isn’t good enough:

There’s a case to be made for Bernie Williams. For roughly 15 years, he played center field for an excellent team. He scored 100 runs eight times, and drove in 100 runs five times. Sure, his teammates helped in those areas. But Williams’ .297/.381/.477 line is quite lovely for a center fielder.

The problem for most of the voters will be Williams’ counting stats. Because he didn’t really become an every-day player until he was 24 and was finished at 37, he didn’t pile up a ton of hits or homers or RBIs. And while he does have nearly a full season’s worth of postseason statistics — for which he deserves some credit — he has few memorable October moments and overall his stats are right in line with his regular-season numbers.

That’s why he won’t get much support from the voters.

Should he, though? Based purely on his position and his hitting, I would rate him a borderline candidate. The problem is that his defensive statistics were terrible. Yes, I know he won four Gold Gloves. Derek Jeter won five. These facts say a lot more about the idiocy of the process than about Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter.

According to Baseball-Reference.com, Williams was a slightly below-average center fielder. According to FanGraphs, he was a terrible center fielder. Oddly, though, both sites come up with the same answer about his overall value: 47 or 48 Wins Above Replacement. And that’s just not a Hall of Famer.

Here’s something fun to chew on: Who has the best case of the all the Yankees who have not made the Hall, including Munson and Mattingly? Got to think Bernie ranks near the top of that list.

“The Artist’s Mother,” by Georges Seurat (1882-83)

I want. I need.

Still haven’t been out there. But I need. I want.

[Photo Credit: Three to One]

If you are looking for a holiday gift for a young Yankee fan, look no further than All You Can Be: Learning and Growing Through Sports, by Curtis Granderson. It’s a trim, glossy, hardcover book, illustrated by students from New York City’s public schools, and it is nicely done. It also includes  some fun pictures of Curtis as a kid.

The artwork is beautiful.

Painting by Logan Hines, 7 years old (Queens)

Detail of picture by Nancy Lin, 5th Grade P.S./IS 49 (Queens)

Check out this gallery of New York City photographs by Stanley Kubrick.

From How to Be a Retronaut, where else?

Here’s an oldie but goodie (sent to me from my pal Max):

[Photo Credit: Amy Dreibelbis]

The new manager of the Red Sox. Won’t be dull, that’s for sure.

One of Emily’s cousins is a self-proclaimed apple snob. Says nothing beats a honeycrisp as an everyday eating apple. I didn’t know from the variety until he mentioned it but have since tried out them out and have to say–damn tasty.

[Photo Credit: Ecker’s Apple Farm]

From our pal Glenn Stout:

It’s over, but we’ve been through this before, baseball and I, and I’m sure I’ll survive the winter soon to come. I know even as the whoops and hollers of baseball’s newest world champion fade that somewhere in the silence that follows, another season will start to make its sound.

There will be trades, Tommy John surgeries and free agent signings for too much money. Even though there will be snow upon the ground, there will also be talk about pitchers and catchers reporting, aging veterans and rookie phenoms. Something deep inside me will start to stir, and then I’ll hear it again; a voice on a playground, a bat meeting a ball, a cheer and a slap on the back. At first it will be faint and far off, but as the days get longer the sounds of baseball will be back beside me. Soon enough, we will both be ready for another season.

Happy birthday Mr. Rivera.

The last major league player to wear Jackie Robinson’s number turns 42 today.

I always got extra excited when I saw Batgirl cruise across the screen during the opening credits to Batman.

Yvonne Craig: Hooba Hooba.

[Featured Image via 1979 Semi-Finalist]

A rainy day in New York always makes me wish I was at a movie theater. Or maybe a museum, or a cozy restaurant. Or hey, what about an indoor batting cage? Yeah, taking bp with my brother, Ben, Jon DeRosa pitching. Something like that, yeah. Unless, I was just chillin’ at home, laying on my ass reading a book or watching a movie on TV. Or in the kitchen, cooking. That’d work, too. I suppose there is lots to do on a dark, wet day in New York, isn’t there?

[Photo Credit: Tall Kev]

Amen.

[Photo Credit: Forever on the Hips]