One of the most influential crime novels ever written, by a legend of the genre. Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense … for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America’s sleaziest nightmares.
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Excellent story line. Well written. They don’t write like this anymore.
great classic noir
Great
I had ‘The Last Good Kiss’ lined up for some time and the post-Christmas bliss of semi-hibernation was the perfect time – I would read it in two or three days.
Crumley’s style had me hooked straight away; my kind of writer, sit back and enjoy the ride.
“In the back seat, the bulldog hunkered like a heathen idol, some magical toad with a ruby as large as a clenched fist in his head, glowing through his stoic eyes, an inscrutable snicker mystic upon his face” – that’s one of the main characters, a bulldog by the name of Fireball Roberts.
It was only after a couple of weeks that I realized it was taking a lot longer to get through this book than I had expected. A 30 course nibble instead of a greedy feast. Why? The plot rolled along nicely enough, the characters were big and bold, and I admired Crumley’s style. So why did I find myself reading maybe only a chapter and leaving it aside for a few days until I disciplined myself to get back to it. And every time I did go back I found something else to enjoy.
“Usually, on those sleepless nighttime trips to the bathroom, I had to take a long look at my own battered, whiskey-worn face, searching it for a glimpse of the face it might have been but for the wasted years, the bars, the long nights. But this night, I rubbed my thumb over the faces locked beneath the brown translucent glare, all the weeping women, and I had no pity left for myself.
I had made my own bed and went to it to sleep, then to rise and do what I knew I had to do, to pay what I owed to the women.”
I love that type of self-pitying ramble, so why was my heart waning even as my head told me this was a great book by a great writer? Were there just too many wasted drinking nights, too much drunken ramble, too much self pity? But how can I get too much of what I like?
“We smoked his dope and drank my beer, watched the sun ride the wide open spaces of high blue sky, talked about wagon trains and trails, about what it might have been like, talked about the motorcycle shop he might open down in Santa Cruz, but we didn’t talk about Betty Sue Flowers and we didn’t get very high.”
Maybe my own expectations were too high, maybe you have to be American to catch all the nuances and flavour (sorry, flavor) but if I was being totally honest I would rate this as a 3 star read for myself – but I can see that most people will enjoy it as much as I expected to.
I still measure Crumley as being up among the best, if not quite making it to the top of the pile, and highly recommend ‘The Last Good Kiss’ to all PI devotees – just take it as it comes (as Crumley’s characters might) and don’t undermine it with your own high expectations.