Author James Crumley Dead

James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for both their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. Crumley described himself as a "bastard child of Raymond Chandler." Crumley wrote seven crime novels featuring private eyes, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch To tell his two detectives apart, Crumley suggested remembering that "Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot." The opening line to his 1978 Sughrue novel The Last Good Kiss, which many consider his best work, is considered classic:"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 of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." Crumley made his literary debut in 1969 with a widely praised book, One to Count Cadence, his only nondetective novel. The novel tells the story of a group of American soldiers in the Philippines at the start of the Vietnam era.