Put C.W. Sughrue in a crowded bar with Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Travis McGee and he’d be the one throwing back shots of tequila, snorting lines of cocaine and escorting leather-hearted dames into the back room for a few moments of quick pleasure.

When it comes to hard-boiled, Sughrue makes those other literary gumshoes look like they’re nothing but soft, runny yolk.

The creation of James Crumley, Sughrue is a latter-day private eye following the gumshoe tracks of tough guys who were usually played by Humphrey Bogart in the movies. But in novels like The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck and Bordersnakes, Sughrue lives closer to the edge of the razor than Bogie ever did. A veteran of Vietnam, Sughrue has seen and done things that would take the stiffness out of Sam Spade’s upper lip.

These days, the best actor to play Crumley’s boozing, coke-sniffing, violent detective would most likely be Nick Nolte. With his gravelly voice, hangdog features and lumbering gait, Nolte seems like he could play someone who’s seen a lot of despair. And despair is practically Sughrue’s middle name.

In the slam-bam opening of The Mexican Tree Duck, Sughrue murders a jukebox. Sughrue has taken over the management of a bar in Meriwether, Montana, spending most of his time drowning (and snorting) his sorrow in booze, drugs and country-western songs. When the vendor takes out all the Hank Snow songs, replacing them with the “high thin voice” of Michael Jackson, Sughrue puts the jukebox on the railroad tracks and waits for the next freight train to come along and smash the gloved one to smithereens.

That doesn’t do much to lift his spirits, but then his lawyer—fellow Vietnam vet Solly Rainbolt—throws a little work his way: track down a deadbeat named Abnormal Norman, a hyper-violent biker who passed a bad check trying to buy $5,000 worth of tropical fish from a pair of 300-pound twins who, coincidentally, like to collect military memorabilia…things like Browning Automatic Rifles and Sherman tanks, to be exact. Norman refuses to surrender the fish because, he claims, his doctor has prescribed them to cure his blood pressure. Sughrue and the twins descend on Norman’s compound, armed to the teeth. A firefight ensues, but no fish are harmed.

And that’s only up to page 40 of The Mexican Tree Duck. The ride only gets wilder for the next 220 pages. Norman hires Sughrue to find his mother. The wife of a politically-connected businessman, she’s disappeared without a trace, managing to elude the Secret Service, the CIA and the FBI. For Sughrue, however, picking up her trail seems to be no problem. Soon, he takes off on a drug-fueled odyssey across the modern American West. Along the way, he picks up a ragtag bunch of war buddies, an unwed (and thoroughly loveable) mother and her infant and a hot-to-trot female sheriff’s deputy.

Did I mention the ceramic duck with dried blood on its bill? This is the Mexican Tree Duck figurine, a nice twist on Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. That duck will eventually play a pretty important role in the novel’s denouement.

This was my first taste of Crumley’s hard-boiled fiction and, for the most part, it was a rollicking, fun drive along a highway full of hairpin curves. Laced with equal parts violence, vulgarity and good old-fashioned vavoom, The Mexican Tree Duck is a literary shot glass filled to the brim with cynicism—a great addition to the same bookshelf where Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler reside.

For the uninitiated, here’s a taste of Crumley’s style—the scene is when C.W. first goes to the obese twins’ fish shop:

When I opened the front door and stepped into the soft, bubbling light of the tropical fish section, a slight young woman with a large mouth and a small moustache darted swiftly through the sparklingly clean tanks. She stopped in front of me, her slim body still trembling, and whispered, “Yes-s-s-s,” breathlessly, her pale eyes bulging with the effort. I handed her my last card, a tattered bit, and asked to see Mr. Dahlgren.

“Which one?” she murmured wetly. I lifted a shoulder as if I might break out in an Australian crawl or butterfly. She understood, nodding. “I’ll get them,” she said, glancing at my card. “Mr. Soo-goo?” she ventured.

“‘Shoog’ as in sugar, honey,” I said, slipping my card out of her slick fingers and resisting a sudden urge to chuckle her behind the gills, “and ‘rue’ as in rue the goddamned day.”

Style like that—style that crackles and talks out of one side of the mouth with a sneer—carries The Mexican Tree Duck through even the most muddled plot twists. And, trust me, the plot does thicken—almost to the point where the reader can’t stir a spoon through it. Crumley nearly collapses the novel on itself with all the layers of crosses and double-crosses. Fortunately, it eventually comes together in a violent confrontation at the end. There’s nothing pretty about the resolution—it’s grim as hell—but there’s plenty to admire in Crumley’s tough, knuckle-cracking prose at every turn along the way.

[All right, dollface, listen up! Now that you’ve finished reading this little rat-a-tat-tat, make your way over to Easy Street (http://www.epinions.com/book-Member_Write_Offs-Private_Eye) where a bunch of other hacks like mshawpyle, kcfoxy, stract, redlass, auntnono and erik_kosberg are writing about dark alleys, dangerous dames and decadent detectives. It’s all part of the Private Eye Write-Off, organized by mshawpyle. When they slide open that little peephole at the speakeasy, tell ’em Grouch sent ya.]



Recommended: Yes