The Final Country by
James Crumley
"Just high on life" says Milo Milodragovitch, "and happy to be alive."
Replies distressed maiden ("skintight jeans and a tank-top that could
have been painted on her torso"), "At your age you should be".
Milo, in his fourth book in 27 years (counting Bordersnakes [1996]
shared with ex-partner C.W. Sughrue) is pushing sixty, but his passion
for good whisky, wild wild women and the occasional line of cocaine
remains undimmed. Milo is back much where he started - tending a bar
that, this time, he fully owns and with the usual small-time PI work on
the side - but in Texas with 1300 miles between him and his beloved
Montana. He’s a reluctant good citizen too, a relatively rich man,
laundering through the bar the drug money he and Sughrue liberated at
the close of Bordersnakes. In pursuit of said distressed maiden, he
encounters Enos Walker, a big black drug dealer just out of prison with
"breath as rank as the winter den of a grizzly", as Walker takes apart
a bar and blows away its owner in self defence. Recognising a brother
under the skin and recollecting the Texan liking for the death penalty
("just a way for fools to get elected"), Milo resolves to come up with
the evidence that will spare Walker from the local cops.
Thus begins another odyssey into the rotten heart of post-Vietnam
America. The prose remains dynamic and fast-moving, the dialogue often
bitterly funny, the action more firepower than fists. The plot, as
ever, takes work. But this is drama on a more human scale than we have
seen lately from Crumley. There is something here of his masterpiece The
Last Good Kiss [1976]. It’s not just that the name Mandy Rae Quarrels
haunts the story as Betty Sue Flowers did the earlier book. But the
anger and compassion that made the earlier book so great is here again,
tempered by time, true, but in greater measure than in his more recent
work. And in its final revelations Crumley once again confronts us with
the moral vacuum at the heart of so much of corporate life, and makes us
feel for the wasted, tragic lives that result.
Crumley’s best since Kiss. On this form, it’s great news that he’s hard
at work on a new one, this time featuring Chauncey Wayne Sughrue.
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