The Right Madness

C.W. Sughrue #4

by James Crumley

James Crumley is one of the most influential crime writers of the post-Chandler era, and his raw, subversive novels have earned him living legend status. He first introduced readers to C. W. Sughrue (“‘Shoog’ as in sugar. And ‘rue’ as in rue the goddamned day”) in his now classic The Last Good Kiss. An ex-army officer turned Montana private eye, Sughrue is as tough and cynical as he is good-hearted and weak-kneed when it comes to women and booze. He’s back to take readers on a bender through small towns, dark bars, and dank hotel rooms in a novel charged with Crumley’s genius for the poetry of violence.

In The Right Madness, Sughrue’s close friend, psychiatrist Will MacKinderick, begs him to track down stolen confidential psychoanalysis files—he suspects one of his patients is the culprit. Going against every last instinct, Sughrue agrees to take on the case—a $20,000 retainer is always hard to resist. And when the suspects start dying of violently unnatural causes, Sughrue—fueled by alcohol, drugs, and lurid sexual entanglements—finds himself struggling to stay ahead of the madness unfolding around him.

Before Pelecanos, Connelly, and Lehane, there was Crumley and, with The Right Madness, he shows us once again how he put the “hard” in “hard-boiled.”

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Noir, Crime, Thriller, Hard Boiled, Suspense

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

James Arthur Crumley was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as "one of modern crime writing's best practitioners", who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel"and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson.His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as "the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years."

Crumley, who was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, where his father was an oil-field supervisor and his mother was a waitress.

Crumley was a grade-A student and a football player, an offensive lineman, in high school. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship, but left to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1961 in the Philippines. He then attended the Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship, where he received his B.A. degree with a major in history in 1964. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1966. His master's thesis was later published as the Vietnam War novel One to Count Cadence in 1969.

Crumley had not read any detective fiction until prompted to by Montana poet Richard Hugo, who recommended the work of Raymond Chandler for the quality of his sentences. Crumley finally picked up a copy of one of Chandler's books in Guadalajara, Mexico. Impressed by Chandler's writing, and that of Ross Macdonald, Crumley began writing his first detective novel, The Wrong Case, which was published in 1975.

Crumley served on the English faculty of the University of Montana at Missoula, and as a visiting professor at a number of other colleges, including the University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

From the mid-80s on he lived in Missoula, Montana, where he found inspiration for his novels at Charlie B's bar. A regular there, he had many longstanding friends who have been portrayed as characters in his books.

Crumley died at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana on September 17, 2008 of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases after many years of health problems. He was survived by his wife of 16 years, Martha Elizabeth, a poet and artist who was his fifth wife. He had five children – three from his second marriage and two from his fourth – eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA TERRA DELLA MENZOGNA



…da lì iniziai la caccia, battendo una bettola dopo l’altra a colpi di bicchierini e birre con la mia gente: delinquenti di mezza tacca, spacciatori di bassa lega, indiani che se continuavano a bere in quel modo si sarebbero estinti prima del previsto, puttane da quattro soldi e uomini dagli insuccessi che puzzavano di rabbia e risentimento. A sbronzarmi, no, non ci riuscii, e nemmeno a sballare fumando del crack con un mezzo sangue Umitilla dietro un cespuglio lungo la panoramica. Non riuscii neanche a cacciarmi in qualche bella scazzottata; cazzo, neppure a farmi arrestare.

Ho idea che James Crumley somigliasse alquanto ai suoi protagonisti, sia a Milo Milodragovitch sia a questo C.W. Sughrue. Ai quali avrà sicuramente regalato caratteristiche nuove – magari quelle che anche lui avrebbe voluto possedere – ma che tutto sommato gli sono vicini e simili.
Sono entrambi personaggi eccessivi, debordanti, come lo è l’avvincente scrittura di Crumley. Come lo sono le sue trame, sempre sul filo dell’inverosimile, ma che lui riesce a trasformare in credibilissime.



C.W. Sughrue è un misantropo. E forse per questo si è scelto il mestiere probabilmente sbagliato, l’investigatore privato. Mestiere che però, volente o nolente, porta avanti, e che sa svolgere anche piuttosto bene: arriva sempre in fondo, anche se la matassa è imbrogliatissima, lui riesce sempre a trovare i capi e a svolgerla fino in fondo. In questo specifico caso, più andavo avanti con la lettura, e più mi è tornato in mente il bel romanzo di Chandler The Long Goodbye (dal quale Robert Altman ha tratto un film splendido).

Nel mio lavoro avevo sempre dimostrato più interesse per la giustizia che per la legge, tanto da spingermi a imboccare scorciatoie di ogni genere ogni volta che mi era parso necessario.



Questa è l’avventura finale della breve serie che Crumley gli ha dedicato. E, secondo me, la vera follia del titolo abbraccia anche lo stesso C.W. Sughrue, che sa spingersi su sentieri impervi, addolciti, ma forse anche complicati, dalle enormi quantità di alcol che ingurgita, e le altrettanto enormi quantità di stupefacenti che ci accompagna.

Il suo migliore amico, lo psichiatra Dr. William MacKinderick, anche compagno di softball, lo incarica di un nuovo caso: qualcuno ha duplicato le registrazione delle sedute con i suoi pazienti più delicati. Sette in tutto. Chi è stato e perché (who e why) sono le prime domande da risolvere.
Sughrue preferirebbe astenersi: ha già risolto un caso per l’amico Mac, e si è risolto in un bel guadagno, ma anche abbondante spargimento di sangue e rischio di morte per il titolare dell’indagine. Sarebbe meglio passare la mano. Ma l’amico insiste. E Sughrue non sa dire di no.
Tra il Montana, frequenti puntate a Seattle, due viaggi nel sudovest ai confini con Messico, un noir nella migliore tradizione hard-boiled, bello aspro e speziato.


Il Depot di Missoula ha uno sgabello dedicato a James Crumley.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

When Mac, a psychiatrist and close friend of private eye C.W. Sughrue, suspects copies have been made of tapes of confidential psychoanalysis of his patients, he goes to the gumshoe for help convinced one of his patients is responsible. Sughrue accepts and progressively weaves his way through the madness, falling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

The Right Madness lacked identity and a clear focus. The plot seemed to switch tone too often, winding down a forgotten path and untimely getting the reader lost. The hallmarks of Crumley’s boozed soaked noir were there, though only in drips and drops; I wanted the whole dam bottle. Though a tamer character than previous installments, Sughrue's hard nature is still prominent throughout the investigation.

My rating: 2.5 stars. The Right Madness is an average read which could’ve been better had the author stuck to a straight forward script rather than the plot madness which ensued.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'll give him this: he didn't faint when I jerked the pen out of his forearm, poured vodka into the wound, stuffed cotton balls into the hole, then, for the final touch, tied it down with a pair of Lorna's thong panties."

That's kind of how this novel goes, with its meandering, at times hallucinogenic plot full of booze, violence, sex and healing old wounds. If you've read any of James Crumley's novels before this one then you'll know what you're getting into. If you have not, then I'm not sure this is the one to start with. Go back to The Last Good Kiss or The Wrong Case instead.

[Stephen J. Golds · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I was still covered with pig shit and wanted to kill somebody, anybody. If you’ve never felt that fire, you don’t know what it’s like: like an orgasm that never stops, like a moment when everything is right.”

Hell. As we reach the twilight of 2021, I curse myself for only just now discovering the absolute beautiful madness that is James Crumley’s pill-popping, weed-smoking, coke-snorting, ex-hippie, barfly private detective C.W. Sughrue. But, as I finish THE RIGHT MADNESS, I find myself smiling as well. Because discovering a new series that’s incredibly well-written, in a hard-boiled, hard drinking vernacular that fits your world-view is similar to starting a new friendship with someone who “gets you”.

Crumley’s prose is perfect. This is crime fiction at its absolute peak. Poetic, lyrical, gritty, hard boiled, stylized paragraphs pulling you along on one helluva joyride of a mystery.

"The last gig almost killed me partner," I said. "I didn't shit right or sleep through the night for months..."

CW Sughrue’s psychotherapist best buddy, Dr Will Mackindrick, begs him to come out of retirement and a drunken stupor to find out who broke into his office and stole his patients confidential files. Reluctantly, C. W takes on the case and is confronted with a grisly suicide his first day on the job. Murder, madness and mayhem ensues.

I realized this is the fourth in the C.W. Sughrue Series and have scrambled around on Amazon to get the rest of the series. The writing is that good.

I’ve also had Crumley One to Count Cadence on my TBR shelf for a while and will be jumping into that ASAP.

If you’re a fan of crime fiction or transgressive fiction this is a must read.

5/5
Highly Recommended

[miteypen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe I missed something because I've read several interviews with crime writers where they have cited Crumley as one of the best. Maybe I started with the wrong book (which I believe was his last). I found the plot almost incomprehensible. I never did figure out the antagonist's angle. The characters were not fully fleshed out. And there were things that just didn't make sense. I'm a fast reader, so I might have read it too quickly. Even so, I'm not sure I'd try another Crumley.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crumley trying to out-Crumley himself. I'm still unsure who did what to whom and why. Where did the plot go?

[Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm so glad I gave Crumley another chance as a writer. There are some readers who believe that he should be lauded as one of the absolute greatest crime writers of the century & now I officially join their ranks. This contains layer after brilliantly-crafted layer of plot, action, and intrigue. No character can be discounted, anyone could say a small piece at page 100 & show up at the end as a linchpin that the whole book hangs on. Since Crumley is deceased, I have to parcel out his books month by month, because what will I do when I've come to the end of his stunning oeuvre? Maybe give The Last Good Kiss another shot.

[Manu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ça se lit bien, mais je trouve que l'intrigue était un peu tordue

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROTAGONIST: C. W. Sughrue, PI
SETTING: Montana
SERIES: 4
RATING: 3.75
WHY: C. W. Sughrue is a PI who has a low-key practice. He’s quite reluctant to help out his best friend, psychiatrist Will McKendrick, not wanting to jeopardize their relationship. Will’s confidential files have been breached, and he wants CW to surveil 7 of his patients to see if one of them was the perpetrator. Things get weird, complicated and violent, and the original direction of the investigation gets lost in the shuffle. But that’s Crumley for you. I haven’t read a Crumley book in a long time, and I was happy to return to his writing despite the fact that the book devolved into a total mess.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crumley is a guilty pleasure for me, so it was great to catch this last one of six featuring one or both of his detective leads. Here rural Montana detective C.W. Sughrue takes on a psychiatrist friend�s case of robbery of his case files, but one by one the patient suspects he shadows tend to die from murder or suspicious suicides. To solve the case, he has to go far afield to distant sites and get information out of people with creative and dangerous strategies. His writing has been pegged as something akin to a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter Thompson, replete with outrageous internal monologues and over-the-top metaphors, lots of brutal violence, and heavy drinking, substance use, and sexual encounters on the part of our lovable hero. I find his stories approach a mythology where the hero�s inner demons of lust and PTSD vie with hosts of external enemies, but one in which his good heart miraculously helps him defeat the dragons, always at some cost.

[Brian O'Leary · Rating 1 out of 5]

All over the place, no consistency in characters

[Luca Lesi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Splendido, – fece lei. – Siamo solo lei e io, signor Chauncey Wayne Sughrue. - Puoi chiamarmi C. W., – dissi. - E tu puoi chiamarmi quando vuoi.

Il vecchio Sughrue è sull' orlo di un nuovo divorzio. Con nessun altro vero impegno che il campionato di softball per ultra cinquantenni Over Fifty League, la chiamavano. Old Farts Softball, dicevamo noi: roba per vecchi scoreggioni.
Notte pericolosa, Sughrue, – aggiunse con un risolino. – Che ti va di fare? Sarà il caso di sfidarlo, questo pericolo? - La cosa più pericolosa che intendo fare stanotte, – dissi aprendo la mia ultima birra, – è infilarmi i calzoni e scendere giù in centro.
Ma per chi nel suo lavoro aveva sempre mostrato più interesse per la giustizia che per la legge, tanto da spingersi a imboccare scorciatoie di ogni genere ogni volta che era parso necessario, non è tempo di pensionamento
Così C.W. finisce per accettare il caso dell' amico psichiatra Will MacKinderick, dal cui studio sono spariti i file riservatissimi di alcuni pazienti. Sembra una storia da niente. Ma i pazienti, uno dopo l' altro, cominciano a morire di morti orribili, e Sughrue è risucchiato suo malgrado in un vortice folle di morti, sesso, violenza, alcol, droga, cadute e redenzione che si dipana tra le terre bruciate del Colorado e le riserve indiane del nord-ovest, tornando ad essere l'incontrollabile portatore di guai cui eravamo abituati.
Dopo l'inarrivabile e splendido L'ultimo vero bacio e L'anatra messicana, un altro bel libro per gli amanti dell'hard boiled, accompagnati da un vecchio brano di Meat Loaf,l’d Do Anything for Love.
Di andare a caccia di persone scomparse ho quasi smesso. Le donne mi dicono che dopo tutti questi anni non sono stato capace neanche di trovare me stesso. Vabbè, non che mi sia sforzato più di tanto.
James Crumley si conferma un grande, stravagante autore del genere, una piacevole scoperta che si rinnova ad ogni libro.
Non ti credevo capace di bere roba con dell’acqua dentro, Sughrue, – mi disse sistemandosi al bancone, al mio fianco. - Peccato che non sai tenere una penna in mano, sbirro, altrimenti ci potresti scrivere un libro, sulle cose che non sai di me.
Sulle note, sempre dal libro, di Crazy nella versione di Patsy Cline ci lasciamo con un brindisi
All’arrivo del mio Martini, levai un brindisi a Mac. Facemmo tintinnare i bicchieri. – Alla vittoria, – dissi. - L’unica vittoria che ha un senso è quella sulla morte, amico mio, – disse lui. – Altrimenti è vuota come il preservativo di un vecchio -. Fissò la trasparenza del suo drink con serietà assoluta.
E con una grande verità :«Se l’inverno è duro e devi mangiarti i cani, comincia da quelli vecchi»,

[Don · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Crumley books - great writing, messed up characters, living in the gray borders of good and evil. But, this plot was hard to follow. I caught myself going back over and over to figure out just what was going on in the last half. Just peek at Amazon reviews to see an average of 3 stars - tells you something.

Try the earlier Crumley/Sughrue books like "Dancing Bear" and "The Wrong Case". Much better.

[Andrya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a genre book - the author's writing style is creative and in some places super original. I would not read another of his books, however - there is too much horrible graphic dismembering of people. It is a shame because with those bits gone, the rest is quite enjoyable, though racy and definitely hardboiled.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, dark, incredibly violent but with a humanity to it to gives it depth and wrings your heart the way so many noir writers simply fail to do. And you can't put it down...Crumley is one of my favourite writers. But not someone to read when you need cheering up, which I did.

[Rodger Payne · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's got a convoluted plot with a very large number of characters. The number of dead bodies is ridiculously high and the main character pivots almost randomly from exhibiting Jason Bourne-like skills to revealing the kind of carelessness that could have resulted in his death on multiple occasions (perhaps fueled by alcohol and drugs). Oh, he's also nearly the equal of James Bond in attracting women.

I finished only because I'm stubborn and because I really liked a couple of Crumley's previous books.

[Paul Reidy · Rating 3 out of 5]

crazy, convoluted, violent crime novel. An easy read, you hurtle through it, but there's so many characters I found it hard to keep up.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gritty, hardboiled, detective mystery, in which an American Mountain West, detective sleuthing the disappearance of a psychiatrist’s patients records triggers a string of murders leading back to a gruesome cold case.

My paperback version was 289 pages long. It had a US 2005 copyright.

James Crumley was an American author of crime novels. He passed in 2008. He wrote eight novels in two series and two volumes of short fiction. This was the fourth novel in his C.W. Sughrue series. It was also his last book. I had read all the books in the author’s series, except this one in the deep past.

The paperback version of this book has been on my physical TBR for at least 15-years. It got there when I wore a younger man’s clothes, and spent a lot of time either ‘out-of-town’ or traveling between them. It went into a box with its spine unbroken, when I got a job that allowed me sleep in my own bed most nights. That box rose to the surface, like a bubble in a beer glass, in a New Year’s De-cluttering. I’ve been finding a lot of amusement in reading these books I intended to read when I wore bell-bottomed trousers.

It’s recommended to have read at least one book in the author’s C.W. Sughrue series before attempting this book. That would provide additional context on Sughrue. Events from The Mexican Tree Duck provided the most frequent backstory references in this book.

With this book, I’ve read all of Crumbley’s novels. The earlier books were his best, or maybe I was more into hardboiled, cowboy PIs when I started reading him? However, right down to this last book, I found that Crumbley could still turn a phrase, even if my more discerning eyes rolled at his plotting.

This story had a complex structure like Russian Stacking Dolls. Coincidently, a Russian mafia group was worked into it. Sughrue at the behest of his shrink best friend, starts investigating the break in of his pal’s office and theft of patient recorded sessions. Then the suspects start dying suspiciously through accidents or always successful, suicide. Eventually, everyone is dead, and Sughrue has a single clue, to chase, a tenuous connection to a cold case that leads him the length of the mountain west, uncovering deeper secrets and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

Crumbley’s prose never fails me. His retro-hardboiled leaves me nostalgic for Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in his use of: similes and metaphors, idioms, and wisecracks. The dialog could be coarse, and artistically profane. In many places it was very funny. The descriptions were good, although at times a bit forced. In particular when describing the western scenery. There was a too-large, amount of repetition, particularly when providing Sughrue’s backstory. (Every sentence should be closely considered in a novel of only 290-odd pages.) Action sequences were good, and particularly violent, even by modern standards. I noted several continuity errors in the prose, although no copywriting errors. For example, Sughrue at one point ended-up driving a vehicle that became a Subaru, an unlikely, non-descript, ride for a PI on a stakeout in 2005, rural, Montana.

One of the more amusing parts of the story, was the protagonist was not a young man. Although, he had the resilience of one. He was also an ex-hippie, several times married, and Viet Nam veteran, of which the readers were too frequently reminded of.

Characters were standard for hardboiled, with American Western flavoring. There was the: tough cop, observant bar tender(s), strippers, strippers who were also hookers, plain ole' hookers, the obligatory femme Fatale, the decoy 'bad girl', good lawyer, bad lawyer, thugs, sniveling suits, drug dealers and their customers, corrupt Feds, cultists, Mexican illegals and Coyotes, bent doctor, hack0rs, etc.. However, character development was not deep. Sugrhue, always “knew a guy”, whether it came to getting rid of a body, or to take care of his ex-wife’s cats while he went on a road trip.

Plotting was problematic. Crumbly is renowned for his occasional OTT diversions. His readers should already be conditioned for the author’s Hunter S. Thompson -like bent. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro applied. I also noted the application of Raymond Chandler’s Rule:

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

This occurred several times. The author’s use of red herrings was more a herring salad, which contained ingredients that I didn’t think belonged. Not all of them lured me away. However, when the story was in the creel, the real Perps(!) left me with a me a WTF! moment. That the shrink Mackinderick and his wife Lorna were conspirators was quickly obvious. The stone cold, psychopathic, killers of the break-in suspects only found at the end of a long, American west road trip was as insane as they were depicted.

This story contained: sex, drugs, and rock'n roll music. Note my criteria for most noir-ish or hardboiled mystery success requires that trifecta along with pop culture references. In this case the pop culture was somewhat dated.

Consensual and non-consensual sex happened. Not all sex was heteronormative. Sughrue’s forced interrogation by a statuesque, Spetsnaz-trained, Ukrainian hooker still has me chuckling. Interestingly, Crumbley, who had been married several times was remarkably respectful of most female characters. Drug use was pervasive and continuous. Just about every Schedule I drug I’m familiar with, except heroin found usage. Sughrue’s favorite chair was a barstool. If there was a meeting, it took place in a bar. Alcohol was consumed continually, and frequently in excess. Sughrue stayed hydrated on beer. This book was written before the craft beer renaissance. I recognized all the popular, Western and Mexican brands consumed. There were frequent classic rock, and country rock music references. I went back and listened to Lucinda Williams’ albums from the noughties as a result. World Without Tears was particularly good.

Violence was pervasive. It was: physical, edged weapons, IEDs, and firearms, including military grade weapons. (The American west is a Gun-culture.) Body count was akin to small unit warfare. Blood and gore was graphically described.

So, this was a novel of corruption, violence, and betrayal in the seamy-side of the American Mountain West. Every character was morally ambiguous, including the protagonist. In places the story was OTT. It also took the long way around to wind-up the corruption and betrayal at the heart of it. I’m not sure driving a pickup from Montana to New Mexico, with side trips to Seattle, and finally international flight, was necessary color? However, despite the far-ranging, rambling plot, for such a short book, the gritty, hardboiled prose was in most places pure eye candy. I read several paragraphs more than once, for the I see what you did there. This was not Crumley's best Sughrue novel, that would be The Last Good Kiss . However, its all I had left to read.

Recommended for connoisseurs of Tarantino-esque, gritty, hardboiled only.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crumley's private-eye novel The Last Good Kiss (1978) has been a little overshadowed in my memory by my more recent readings of Chandler and Lawrence Block, but I remember thinking back in 2020 that it was very good. I remember The Mexican Tree-Duck (1993), the second book in the C.W. Sughrue series, as choppy but entertaining. And now I've read the fourth and final installment (I must have blanked on picking up the third somehow), The Right Madness (2005), also Crumley's last published work (he died in '08), in which we find Sughrue much older, married, and content to watch old movies on TV and play softball in the local OFL ("Old Farts League") in Missoula, Montana, until his psychologist friend "Mac" enlists him in trying to find out who's broken into Mac's office and stolen his patients' medical records.

It gets pretty convoluted. Sughrue is insisting as early as the second chapter that this is one of the most baffling and brutal cases he's ever worked on, that it's bringing back old war memories (Vietnam) and breaking up his marriage and that he has a terrible feeling about what he's going to find out...all of which is very clever on the part of the author, but which I think also betrays an anxiety (justified, frankly) on Crumley's part that the story is not up to snuff. It all comes across as more farcical than suspenseful early on, and there are some laugh-out-loud lines of dialogue, though Sughrue does admittedly witness a few people die in Agatha Christie-style shenanigans (maybe with a little more blood)...and for a wimp like me, sure, that would be traumatizing. But this is C.W. Sughrue! This is someone who once (I quote from later in the book) "...ran twenty miles naked across the desert, gutted two men, cut one's head off, then drove the Bowie all the way through the last one." It's a little hard to reconcile that guy with someone who's so shook by small-town homicidal hijinks.

There are two writers it seems to be required by law to bring up in any discussion of Crumley- Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson- and of course they're both mentioned in blurbs on the back of this book. The former because- well- according to the synopsis here on Goodreads, Crumley literally writes in the "post-Chandler crime" genre, and the latter for reasons stylistic, temperamental, pharmacological, and even regional. I'm sorry to say, though, that Crumley's similarities with Hunter extend even to his version of late-style- slipshod, cartoonish, a little too reliant on outrageous humor and violence to compensate for not being as sharp as he was in the 70s (the two of them even died within a few years of each other, now that I think about it). And man, does Sughrue drink hard in this novel. I know, it's a noir/private-eye novel, and I know how convenient it can be to have your characters always drinking or smoking something ("She lit the end of the Camel and took a long drag before replying" is a little more interesting than repeating "She said" for the zillionth time), but the unfolding of the plot here could only make sense to someone who was drunk, and that fact in addition did make me wonder just how much Crumley was boozing while he wrote this.

Still, if you are going for outrageousness and sleaze, push it as far as you can. And that, to strike a more positive note, is one thing that impressed me about this genuinely maniacal novel. I like to imagine that I'm pretty hard to shock, but it's difficult to think of a single depraved human experience that doesn't befall Sugrhue over the course of 300 pages (well- he never for any reason has to go to New Jersey, but that's about it), even if none of them really flow very logically from the initially quaint Case of the Missing Files: dragged through pig-shit, whipped during a non-con BDSM session, fed a massive dose of LSD and forced to drive through the mountains for two days straight...and at one point a woman says something to him that I'm pretty sure I've never read in a novel before, something that would have made Henry Miller blush. They are, in fact, words so profoundly erotic that I dare not repeat them in this review, for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of our society. You can't accuse Crumley of just replaying Chandler and pretending it's the 1930s; there are things here that even Marlowe didn't have to deal with.

Furthermore, as little sense as the plot made to me, I liked a lot of what was in-between the plot. I liked Crumley's descriptions of Montana, and remembered that the western setting probably had as much to do with my appreciation for The Last Good Kiss as the New York setting has to do with my appreciation of the Scudder novels. Crumley piles incident upon incident here, showdown upon showdown, and he doesn't seem to have much patience with any of it- I lost track of how many times Sughrue got hit over the head, left to die, and then somehow escaped, all over the course of 2-3 pages. Those scenes feel perfunctory. But what doesn't feel perfunctory is the way he describes the aftermath of violence. It's when his characters are nursing their wounds and making love in roadside motels or taking a "long easy drive through the Nevada desert fall, listening to Vivaldi and Zevon, drifting through along miles of the real Old West, the sort of country where jackrabbits carried water bags and gophers stood by the side of the highway, their little paws raised, waiting patiently for the brief breeze of a passing car" that his prose really flourishes, and you get the sense that he's writing about what he really wanted to, unencumbered by the tiresome mechanics of plot. He nails that melancholic, elegiac tone; it's just that it's an elegy for something other than the raunchy, freewheeling events of the story. War, getting older, his life in general...search me.

This last paragraph may be entirely superfluous, fair warning, but I happened to finish this novel right around the time a friend of mine attended an AI conference in Mexico City. His main takeaway? "Just how impotent we are in the face of all this." He'd just come from a presentation where they were talking about how AI could be used to "improve" The Godfather. Around the same time, I read about a Japanese writer who admitted to using AI after winning some big literary prize (I don't even understand how the issue is controversial- she should give back the fucking trophy, or whatever they give you for literary awards, and be thankful they're not throwing her ass in jail). But it got me thinking that only a human being could write a book as weird as The Right Madness. That any AI that spit out a novel like this would be deemed to have the wrong madness, would be immediately unplugged and sent for repairs by its administrator; and that in turn speaks to a virtue...a virtue of Crumley's, I mean. If it hasn't happened already, these machines are soon enough going to perfect the beats of plot, the mechanics of suspense, the three-act structure and all the rest, and we'll be offered instantaneous and labor-free solutions for all our entertainment and artistic needs. In turn, I think I'm going to start valuing the imperfect, booze-addled narratives even more; the stories that are just not-great enough to be endearing, and to make you feel like you could do something similar, or even slightly better. This novel is far from perfect, but at least it came out of the human experience- and I'll take that over machine-generated "perfection" any day.

[Mark Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got Crumley's name from a review of a Dennis Lehane book and so had very high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, the book didn't meet my expectations. The hero, C.W. Sughrue, is a hard charging PI with a past that includes Vietnam, government service back home, rivers of beer and whiskey and a history of drug use that stretches to the present day. He's having relationship problems and gets into a case that features a rapidly rising body count. Crumley's lineage back to Raymond Chandler is clear in the characters he's created and the type of dialog this book features. At times I thought he was trying too hard with the dialog, for instance, using the term "my friend" way more often than any two friends would likely use it toward each other. The bigger problem for me, though, is the plot, which is over-complicated to the point of being confounding.

Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss" is, apparently, the first novel to feature Sughrue and is cited on the jacket of this book as "one of the most critically acclaimed detective novels". I will probably reserve that at the library to get the taste of this half-cooked mess out of my mouth.

[Dennis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think it's a good idea to read two crime novels (by two different authors: Crumley and Dennis Lehane) back-to-back. Their writing styles are somewhat similar and at times I had to remind myself that I wasn't reading Lehane's Moonlight Mile. In the end, however, "The Right Madness" was way too graphic for my tastes (when in doubt, shoot someone). Its story line was confusing and extremely difficult to follow...

[Doug Haskin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this book just doesn't live up to the rest of Crumley's work. While sparks of the author's skill show up here and there, the plot is simply too complex, with far too many characters introduced, then not linked back into the story line until much later - at which point you find it hard to remember who they were and why they are involved in the story to begin with.

[Rogue Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Betrayal, madness and murder. There is no right madness, no right murder but Sughrue keeps killing in the most gruesome of situations to keep on going like an ever ready battery. His choice in friends leave something to be desired and so does his choice in women. Lots of characters and kind of confusing. Miss Milo's tempering who's not even named.

[Garry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great writing. Great atmosphere. Great lines. Proves the hardboiled genre works just as well in wide open west as it does in urban grit and noir. Moving on to The Last Good Kiss soon...

[Chick Marks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have finished the book am not sure of what I have read.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Crumley's style, his sense of humor, and his private eye's voice, but something about the story didn't quite gel for me. Could it be because this isn't the first book to feature his P.I. C.W. Sughrue, and I'm late to the party? Could be, except I've started series midstream before and it never hurt, and when you think about it, pretty much every story about a PI is told in media res (they always have pasts, whether implied or literally described in previous installments).

Whatever the case, I closed the book shrugging.

"The Right Madness," follows C.W. Sughrue, a law school-trained, Vietnam bush-hardened PI who slings one-liners and doles out hard truths as good as the best of them. He's living way out West, seemingly between cases, and trying to settle down into something like domestic tranquility with his new wife. But then one night at the bar his psychiatrist friend persuades him to do him a favor, which naturally means taking up a case. The assignment: The shrink wants Sughrue to find out who stole the recordings said-shrink made while taping his sessions with his clients.

Sughrue, against his better judgment and his wife's protests, does the favor/takes the case. Things get bloody, then weird, then the quotient of blood and weirdness increases until it strains credibility a bit. It's as gonzo as Hunter Thompson at times (and just as psychedelic) and as hard-bitten and mordant as Charles Willeford back when his legendary Hoke Mosley alter-ego was swinging rusty chains in the Florida swampland. And while it has passages worth quoting, and scenes that make the heart race, they're frankly too few and far between. Maybe I should go back and read some earlier Crumley and then reread this one. I like the man's style, as I think I said.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

And so I finish the great road trip that is James Crumley’s mystery novel series featuring private eyes Milo Milodragovitch and CW Sughrue. While I didn’t like them as much as their most ardent fans do, I enjoyed my time going through all seven.

Apparently, it took a lot of prodding for Crumley to write this one. He wasn’t sure if he was going to do another after 2001’s The Final Country, which for my money is his best book and a tribute to Texas. I don’t know if he finished it because he felt compelled to bring Sughrue’s arc to a close the same way he had Milo’s. Frankly, I don’t find much difference between the two characters but either way, this is it for his whole universe. He died three years after it was published.

I don’t know if old age or cutting back on drinking helped him but this is one of the more focused Crumley efforts. I like his books a lot but his plots tend to meander as he loves dialogue and road trips. I’ve said in the past that I feel his books might be better if he wrote them from the perspective of a guy recounting a story on a barstool, because that’s what they feel like. Either way, this one is written just fine.

I did anticipate the twist but I didn’t anticipate the why of the crime, which was kind of clever. Nevertheless, you don’t read a Crumley to play sleuth. You read a Crumley to hang out in his world. This was a fun hang and because the plot was better executed than most, I appreciated it more. I’ll miss Crumley’s work and I hope to revisit a few sometime.

[John Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Crumley's last book featuring C.W. Sughrue has our hero (?) going out with a bang. Old C.W. best bud is one Dr. William MacKinderick, psychiatrist with gobs and gone of money, who hires Sughrue to track down who of his pack of wild loonies who stole the doc's most secret files.

Since this is a C.W. Sughrue mystery, the loon's are truly crazy and the body count of them begins to go up. Then old Doc Will goes missing and presumed dead, which brings in another pack of really dangerous people including ex-wives, old friends of both the doc and C.W. and a pair of FBI agents who are about a mismatched pair as you can get.

Meanwhile C.W.'s wife, Whit, is giving up on him for even taking the job in the first place (there's a secret in that). Along with more travel than a James Bond movie.

As always the characters are well drawn and they are characters (especially Agents Cunningham and Morrow. Of course there's enough sex, drugs and drinking to kill any real human being even with out the mystery of it all.

I read his first book "The Last Good Kiss" and thought I'd give the lactone a go. But now I guess I've sucked myself into the others.

[Van]

Picked up this books knowing nothing about it or the author at a great old bookstore outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The store itself was a great respite from the mind numbing activities done in Gatlinburg. It's a PI detective story. The plot and story were well written, yet I had trouble relating to the main character in terms of the choices he made and how he thought about things. It seemed 'off'. Maybe due to damage done while serving in Vietnam or other wars. For example, I can identify with the characters of Henning Mankell, Arthur Upfield, Janwillem van de Wettering, LeCarre, and yet somehow, with this author's character, it didn't work for me. I can't really give it any stars because it might totally work for you.

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's like a motto: you don't read Crumley for plot, you read him for... everything else. It's true. the rhythm of a Crumley novel is utterly unlike that of any other crime novel. The story stops and starts, drifts, twists, turns, wanders, pulls over by the side of the road to light up a doobie and enjoy the stars, then crashes through a bar and wrecks everything and kills everyone. Along the way there are great characters, strange incidents, powerful insights, substance abuse, astonishing violence, poetry and writing as beautiful as anything. Most other crime books are what I read while waiting for the next James Crumley to come along.