The Best American Noir of the Century

James (Arthur) Crumley (1939-2008) was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and grew up in south Texas. After serving in the Army in the Philippines, he received his BA in history (1964) from the Texas College of Arts and Industries, to which he had received a football scholarship, then got his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing (1966) from the University of Iowa, where he began his first novel, One to Count Cadence, as his masters thesis; it was published in 1969.

After that Vietnam War novel, he turned to mystery fiction with The Wrong Case (1975), introducing the first of his two private eye characters, Milo Milo-dragovich, who also appeared in

Dancing Bear (1983) and The Final Country (2001). His tougher PI, C. W. Sughrue, made his debut in The Last Good Kiss

(1978), which many contemporary mystery writers, such as George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane, regard as among the most influential crime novels of the second half of the twentieth century. This memorable novel opens with one of the most famous and perfect first lines in 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.” Sughrue also appeared in The Mexican Tree Duck (1993), The Right Madness (2005), and

Bordersnakes (1996), in which Milo also features. Inexplicably, and to its everlasting shame, the Mystery Writers of America never gave Crumley any award, or even nominated him for one — a seemingly impossible scenario when one considers the power and importance of his work, as well as the nearly overwhelming beauty of his prose.

“Hot Springs” was first published in the anthology Murder for Love (New York: Delacorte, 1996).

At night, even in the chill mountain air, Mona Sue insisted on cranking the air conditioner all the way up. Her usual temperature always ran a couple of degrees higher than normal, and she claimed that the baby she carried made her constant fever even worse. She kept the cabin cold enough to hang meat. During the long, sleepless nights, Ben-bow spooned to her naked, burning skin, trying to stay warm.

In the mornings, too, Mona Sue forced him into the cold. The modern cabin sat on a bench in the cool shadow of Mount Nihart, and they broke their fast with a room-service breakfast on the deck, a robe wrapped loosely about her naked body while Benbow bundled into both sweats and a robe. She ate furiously, stoking a furnace, and recounted her dreams as if they were gospel, effortlessly consuming most of the spread of exotic cheeses and expensively unseasonable fruits, a loaf of sourdough toast, and four kinds of meat, all the while aimlessly babbling through the events of her internal night, the dreams of a teenage girl, languidly symbolic and vaguely frightening. She dreamed of her mother, young and lovely, devouring her litter of barefoot boys in the dark Ozark hollows. And her father, home from a Tennessee prison, his crooked member dangling against her smooth cheek.