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The Last Good Kiss Howard Hughes 9781784161583 Books

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The Last Good Kiss Howard Hughes 9781784161583 Books

There were moments as I read this that I was drawn to the bittersweet memory of discovering Raymond Chandler. his writing would give me such pause that with each and every book there were moments of such overwhelming joy,I would close the book and just reminisce on the line just read. and bittersweet because I found out there were only a very few finite books left before his untimely death so I would savor each morsel. I was aware of these same thunderstruck moments upon reading "The Last Good Kiss". with a combination of hard-boiled fiction,pulp, and noir Crumley uses first-person narrative as we ride along with detective C.W. Sughrue among a cast of unsavory characters to try and solve this ingenious mystery. the prose is more hard-edged than Chandler's and to be honest laugh-out loud hilarious in places also. the remaining unfortunate quality that Crumley has in common with Chandler is he also died an untimely death leaving a small body of work. looks like I'll be savoring these morsels also.


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The Last Good Kiss Howard Hughes 9781784161583 Books Reviews

"he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog". That starts the book and it gets worse.
I only lasted a couple of pages more. I paid twelve bucks for this on the recommendation of someone who was interviewed by the NY Times. "Fake news"!
Sorry gang. I am an old man, maybe my sense of humor has shriveled, but I thought this was a really stupid and unfunny book.
I gave it one star because, if this was the last book in the world, I might read it.
And let me say, I have read many. Raymond Chandler, the unbeatable originator of the genre, is by far my favorite author, though I have also read deep and widely well outside the genre.

Absolutely stunning, just like the brief title blurb states. Heard about this book in an Otto Penzler compilation, in an intro where he called it the "SINGLE GREATEST PRIVATE EYE NOVEL WRITTEN". No qualifiers, and from Otto Penzler, for gods' sake.

Most humble, miserable but seriously Tough PI ever.

A plot that just keeps twisting, making Ross MacDonald look like a piker, yet quite coherent.

Characters, situations, and dialogue that mainly left me breathless, but near the end crying.

Unbelievable. I will be devouring Mr. James Crumley's entire oeuvre, but I almost can't imagine he could top this. No offense, sir, in case you might notice, my fedora is off to you. BRAVO.
You can usually tell if a book is worth reading if the first sentence grabs you. Well, the first sentence below will definitely grab you by the throat and not let go until the last, totally unexpected one

"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."

I had read The Last Good Kiss so many years ago that it seemed like the first time all over again when I picked it a few days ago. Fortunately, for me, I appreciated it a lot more now than I did way back when. At that time James Crumley was still alive and would go on to write more books, unfortunately, not all of them featuring Meriwether, Montana's "world weary" PI C. W. Sughrue.

Maybe I have the knack of finding authors whose books grab me who happen to have died back in 2008. The other author is Tony Hillerman. So what did I read before getting hooked on Crumley and Hillerman? Beats me. They mustn't have been all that entertaining or memorable.

Anyway, many of the reviewers who have given their opinions about The Last Good Kiss here have said just about all there is to be said, so I won't even bother writing about this book's plot and characters. I just wanted to put in my two cents and five stars. I recommend TLGK highly.

* Besides James Crumley, American poet Richard Hugo lived in Missoula. I understand that they were good friends and, I suspect, drinking buddies. It's a shame they are no longer with us.
If you have ever read any of the following titles & enjoyed them, buy this book immediately. These will seem like strange bedfellows, but they all have traces in Crumley's work; whether he's read any of them or not.

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Naked Lunch. Cryptonomicon &/or Snow Crash. The Road (Kerouac, philistine - actually, strike that, McCarthy works here too - see "Blood Meridian", though). Up Jumped the Devil. Any book written by James Ellroy.

If you enjoy gritty, perverse, darkly humorous, archetypal, depressingly-ruinous-but-somehow-cheerful writing in your fiction, this book will take all of an afternoon to finish. Upon completion, I immediately logged in and purchased every novel of Crumley's mentioning the anti-hero "Sughrue" in their descriptions.

I'm sincerely hoping the other characters; particularly old-man "Trahearne" make additional appearances. I have always loved self-depreciation in a novel - a wink and nod to reader letting us know we are in on the joke. Crumley quite often fires shots across his own bow, such as Sughrue's criticisms of Trahearne's (who coincidentally is both a poet & novelist) novels; stating the characters are one-dimensional; the men are overly manly, the women are penultimate victims. This novel revolves around that very concept, but flipped on it's head. While the men are undoubtedly "manly", the women are every bit as crass, ruthless & deviant as the males, often dominating the prose itself, their presence always felt (in particular the brief but thoroughly disturbing appearances of Trahearne's mother).

Read it. It won't be the last time you read Crumley.
There were moments as I read this that I was drawn to the bittersweet memory of discovering Raymond Chandler. his writing would give me such pause that with each and every book there were moments of such overwhelming joy,I would close the book and just reminisce on the line just read. and bittersweet because I found out there were only a very few finite books left before his untimely death so I would savor each morsel. I was aware of these same thunderstruck moments upon reading "The Last Good Kiss". with a combination of hard-boiled fiction,pulp, and noir Crumley uses first-person narrative as we ride along with detective C.W. Sughrue among a cast of unsavory characters to try and solve this ingenious mystery. the prose is more hard-edged than Chandler's and to be honest laugh-out loud hilarious in places also. the remaining unfortunate quality that Crumley has in common with Chandler is he also died an untimely death leaving a small body of work. looks like I'll be savoring these morsels also.