'As sweetly profane a poet as American noir could have asked for' Ian Rankin
'A friggin' masterpiece' Dennis Lehane
'The stunner that reinvigorated the genre and jacked up a generation of future crime novelists' George Pelecanos
Meet Private Detective C. W. Sughrue.
Private detectives are supposed to find missing persons and solve crimes. But more often than not Sughrue is the one committing the crimes – everything from grand theft auto to criminal stupidity. All washed down with a hearty dose of whiskey and regret.
At the end of a three-week hunt for a runaway bestselling author, Sughrue winds up in a ramshackle bar, with an alcoholic bulldog. The landlady’s daughter vanished a decade ago and now she wants Sughrue to find her. His search will take him to the deepest, darkest depths of San Francisco’s underbelly, a place as fascinating, frightening and flawed as he is.
Welcome to James Crumley’s America.
Publisher: Transworld Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 9781784161583
Number of pages: 384
Weight: 262 g
Dimensions: 198 x 127 x 24 mm
Crumley writes like an angel on speed - Time Out
The poet laureate of American hard-boiled literature, superior even to James Lee Burke in his ability to evoke extreme melancholy, gruesome violence and an acute sense of landscape - Guardian
Reading Crumley is like hurtling through an assault course...funny, salty and ruthless...one of the marvels of contemporary crime writing - Literary Review
Like James Ellroy, he is a master of American vernacular, turning tough-guy slang into something like poetry - Independent
James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe - New York Times
This book has got the most iconic first and last sentences I've read in a book for a long time. It captivates you from the first page until the last one. The crime novel extraordinaire almost poetic in story and... More
I absolutely loved this book, from start to finish. Incredible characters, brilliant writing, a fantastic story. I can't believe it took me this long to read Jim Crumley, now I'll be hunting down his other...
It's hard not to love a book that's full of bars, whisky, an alcoholic dog, a suffering poet and a private detective run ragged. There's camaraderie, intrigue, mystery and fun. It really does have... More
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