The Last Good Kiss

I call them airplane books: cheap, thrilling, detective fiction to get you through a long day of travel or a breezy afternoon. I still have standards for them; I can't abide crap. They can be remarkably well-written and even achieve greatness. One writer regularly produced these crime novels, though most people would now consider his works serious literature.

That fine writer was James Crumley and he died earlier this week at the age of 68. His books redefined the form in a post-vietnam America. The malaise and disenchantment that has always been a part of that kind of fiction became even more palpable and violent in his best work. Writers like Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos show his influence in their work. Best described as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson, he would have been a master in any genre.

He wrote 11 novels, but perhaps his best was The Last Good Kiss, published in 1978. It's title came from a Richard Hugo poem, Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg: You might come here Sunday on a whim./ Say your life broke down./ The last good kiss/ you had was years ago.

I don't need to do anything to convince you of the book's brilliance other than to give you the hard-boiled but melancholic opening line; a line that Crumley said took him eight years to get right and might be the best opening line ever written for crime fiction:

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 Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

How could you not devour that on a long flight?

RIP James Crumley