I think I got slightly drunk reading this interview

One of my biggest regrets is that I completely whiffed on the chance to meet James Crumley a couple of years ago when he was at Bouchercon in Vegas, and that bad luck will probably extend to future conventions. But the Tacoma News Tribune’s Ed Marietta makes good on an invite extended by the legendary crime writer almost ten years ago and talks about — well, what it’s like to be James Crumley:

When I finally caught up with James Crumley, we ate medium-rare

rib-eyes at a hotel restaurant on the Clark Fork River just outside of

downtown Missoula, the 66-year-old author nursing vodka tonics against

the mountain-scorching July sun.

Hard living appeared to have caught up with the big man as well. Though

Crumley said he recovered from whatever nearly killed him, arthritis

and gout slowed him. His tumbleweed drawl was low and strained. When

Crumley laughed, which was often and easily, it was soft and hollow.

The craggily handsome roughneck of earlier years now resembled walrusy

actor Wilford Brimley.

The invitation to this interview was extended in 1996, when I met

Crumley as he promoted “Bordersnakes” in San Francisco. Look me up if

you’re in Missoula, Crumley said. A friend reported the same invitation

as Crumley promoted “The Right Madness.”

“I have a listed phone number,” Crumley said, explaining how visitors find him.

Most of those fans are French.

“They like my politics,” Crumley said. “I’m a Trotskyite.”

Not surprisingly, peers and students are quick to heap praise upon the man:

“Crumley has achieved a level of mastery that’s not just about

whodunit,” said Alicia Gaspar de Alba, author of “Desert Blood,” a

novel for which Crumley, her former professor, wrote a cover blurb.

“His protagonists, if you were to look at them outside of a book

structure, you would say, ‘What a loser. Why doesn’t he get a life?’ It

is through working their problems and using their problems and how

their problems take them places where those of us who don’t have those

problems never go, that’s the reason Crumley achieves that mastery.

It’s not just the detective form. It’s what he does with characters.”

While Crumley’s work is marketed among genre fiction, “When it’s good, it transcends that,” said Dexter.

Dexter, the National Book Award winner who lives on Whidbey Island,

said, “If I see a new Crumley book, I’ll get on a ferry and spend an

afternoon going to get it. He’s just a lot of fun.”

Since THE RIGHT MADNESS was out this year, it’ll probably be a good long while till the next one.