History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10

• Plot: A private eye hired to bring home a drunken novelist ends up searching for a young woman who disappeared a decade earlier.
• Clues: Found in bars and motels across the West, often by accident.
• Reveal: Dark and sad, confirming the book’s sense of damaged people in a damaged country.

C.W. Sughrue, a former soldier and private investigator, is hired to find Abraham Trahearne, a famous writer who has gone on a drinking binge across the West. Sughrue finds him in a bar in California, where a bulldog is drinking beer. Then, at the request of a bar owner, Sughrue starts looking for her daughter, Betty Sue Flowers, who vanished ten years before.

James Crumley’s novel is famous for its opening, often cited as one of the best in crime fiction. The book that follows is a boozy, violent road novel through Montana, Colorado and California, full of bars, trailers, motels and lost people.

Crumley’s prose is lyrical, funny and bleak. Sughrue is a hard-boiled detective in the Chandler tradition, but more battered, more drunk and more complicit in the world’s damage. The Vietnam War, the counterculture and the loss of the West hang over the book.

The search for Betty Sue becomes a descent into the sex trade and pornography, and the book is frank about violence and exploitation. That can be hard to read.

The weakness is that the plot sprawls, and some episodes seem to exist for atmosphere rather than story. The treatment of women is often uncomfortable.

The 8 reflects a cult classic and a major influence on later crime writers, from Dennis Lehane to George Pelecanos. It is a book to read for its voice and mood more than its puzzle.