Bordersnakes by
James Crumley
pbk out October 98
(Flamingo)
at £6.99
Crumley is deservedly hailed as the literary descendant of Chandler, Hammett and Ross MacDonald. In this novel he unites for the first time his two private-eye protagonists - Milo Milodragovitch and C.W.Sugrue - in a very personal quest for revenge. Someone set up Sugrue for target practice in the New Mexico desert. Someone else stole Milo’s inheritance from his father (apart from a couple of trifles - a $2000 Italian suit and a Cadillac El Dorado).
Sugrue and Milo take turns as narrator. Their double quest leads them on a zigzag journey punctuated with enough sex, drugs, drink and violence to satisfy the most jaded palates. By turns wild and leisurely, the novel is set largely in Texas, though not a Texas familiar to most of us. (If Crumley’s Texas were available in tablet form they would have made it a Class A drug.)
Beautifully written in the literary equivalent of a bar-room drawl, BORDERSNAKES is recommended for those with a taste for this branch of the genre. Like most so-called hard-boiled crime novels, it occupies a fictional terrain that shares borders with the fairy story on the one hand and the cartoon strip on the other: the Brothers Grimm meet Fritz the Cat - and none the worse for that.
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
