C.W. Sughrue, that refreshing breath of foul air, is back. He’s the private eye out of Meriwether, Mont., who hangs in there, in his own words, “like hair on a biscuit.”
In “The Right Madness” (Viking, 304 pages, $24.95), James Crumley’s great creation remains every bit as wild as he was in the 1978 classic “The Last Good Kiss,” when he left a trail of mayhem across the West. He also must be one of the few over-50 hired guns in this age of recovery still abusing drugs and alcohol with brio, free of any discernible guilt.
Crumley adds pop to his women too. Take Claudia: “She threw a twenty on the bar, shouted to the bartender, `A double tequila shooter with a Corona back, and get my friend something festive.’ “
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Crumley traffics in humor, high and low, as he mines the lethal behavior along the seedy highway towns of the West. The pages are suffused with benders, violence and psychosis. Crumley will always favor outrage over subtlety, which may wear thin for some. But there’s no one out there writing like him.
And, thank God, he’s not postmodern. Sughrue has his demons, bred during ugly business in Vietnam, but they’ll never be mistaken for angst. It will be a cold day in hell before he enters therapy, even though his wife has left him. He would probably treat a metrosexual, once apprised of the meaning of the word, as a hunter might a woodchuck.
Sughrue always seems to end up killing people while rescuing friends and family from seriously bad guys. This time he succumbs to the entreaties of his best friend, Mac, to find out who among seven of Mac’s patients in analysis stole the mini-disks with confidential information about all of them. Blackmail? Who knows?
Then folks start dying strange and gruesome deaths — and Sughrue has the karmic luck to witness all of it. Mac disappears; he’s probably dead, but you never know. His wife, Lorna, holes up in a Las Vegas hotel and commits strange acts while on a cocaine binge that lasts days.
The FBI appears. Sughrue takes a cosmic road trip south that ends up in El Paso before looping back toward Montana. He maintains his standards on the road: “I hate a motel without a bar.”
There are stone-cold killers, the odd transgender person, cowards galore and a piece of evil on two legs — the usual gamut of Crumley merry pranksters.
“The Right Madness,” like all of Crumley’s books, is not for the faint of heart. But for the rest of us, there’s only one thing to say: Welcome back, C.W.