James Crumley and the Rest of Us

What does it mean to be a successful writer?

James Crumley’s magnum opus, The Last Good Kiss, doesn’t give you a chance to slip slowly into his hard-boiled world. Rather, he kicks the book off with arguably the best first sentence since “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sanoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

OK, I’ll just go ahead and give you the second sentence, too, just to prove the rest of the book is worthy of sentence one.

Trahearne had been on this wandering binge for nearly three weeks, and the big man, dressed in rumpled khakis, looked like an old soldier after a long campaign, sipping slow beers to wash the taste of death out of his mouth.

For Crumley (1939-2008) there was no space between him and his characters. He was there matching them drink by drink, with despair perched on the next barstool. He stripped the veneer from each person who entered a scene, yet made his readers sympathize with his characters’ dilemmas, whether they were down and out or perched on a faux cliff, soon to crumble.

Crumley never made the bestseller lists, but he built fans, people who found in his work doses of tragic insight that was true to the bone.

The question is a simple one that bugs me when I read Crumley and realize he never made it into the rarefied top sales rankings.

Was he a successful writer?

It’s a problematic issue, isn’t it? So often, we as writers look to sales ranking as the sine qua non of success.

But there is only room for a few people at the top of the charts.

If success means zillions of sales, the Crumleys of the writing world never make it.

But if success as a writer lies in stripping away people’s pretense and drilling all the way down to the essence of what it means to live, then maybe, just maybe, if we work on our craft, we may, every now and again, strike the truth.

And that sounds like success to me.