Mystery of the Fading Talent...

A tip in an article about a wealthy man (who claimed he wasn't rich) who runs a bookstore in New York devoted entirely to crime novels lead me to James Crumley. Largely unknown, mostly forgotten, Crumley in 1978 published The Last Good Kiss. The novel is set in Montana and San Francisco in the early 1970's, and lays out the story of an alcoholic private eye on the cold trail of missing flower child. Like Raymond Chandler's four great Philip Marlowe novels, the beauty of Crumley's book lies not in the plot or any whodunit cleverness. Simply put, it is the fineness of the writing that makes the book such a worthwhile read. Page one:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog...in a ramshackle joint...drinking the heart right out of a beautiful spring afternoon.

Unfortunately, like Chandler, Crumley's muse did not stick around for very long. Chandler's best work was done between 1939 and 1943, after which his prose went decidedly downhill. Perhaps a similar malaise afflicted Crumley. By the time he returned to his hero, C. W. Sughrue, in The Mexican Tree Duck in 1993 his writing style had devolved to self-parody. That at least was my judgment on the book -- I stayed with it for two chapters and then threw it into the corner of the room in disgust before turning off the lights and going to sleep.

This judgment may be hasty and there are other novels he wrote between '78 and '93 that might well bear looking at. But it made we wonder about novelists whose talent peaks early and then goes downhill...Philip Roth was on this trajectory. After the promise of Goodbye Columbus his novels of the 70's were simply bad, the notoriety of Portnoy's Complaint not withstanding. But then he pulled it together late in life with American Pastoral and Human Stain.

Perhaps there is something in the private eye genre that chips away at an authors authenticity, or perhaps Crumley simply drank too much. Or both. Novelists that write about destruction and death of the soul are in a hazardous line of work.