Point Books Concering The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
| Original Title: | The Last Good Kiss |
| ISBN: | 0394759893 (ISBN13: 9780394759890) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | C.W. Sughrue #1 |
| Characters: | C.W. Sughrue |
| Setting: | Montana(United States) |
James Crumley
Paperback | Pages: 244 pages Rating: 4.06 | 6364 Users | 528 Reviews
Define Out Of Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
| Title | : | The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1) |
| Author | : | James Crumley |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 244 pages |
| Published | : | November 5th 1988 by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (first published 1978) |
| Categories | : | Mystery. Fiction. Crime. Noir. Hard Boiled |
Explanation As Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
P BRYANT'S 18 RULES FOR HARD-BOILED PRIVATE EYE NOVELISTS1) The hero of your hard-boiled private-eye genre thriller shall be irresistible to women, mostly. Say about 80%, no need to stretch credulity. He will shag at least four women he encounters during the story and will also gently, sensitively refuse to shag a fifth one, not because he's tired out but because it wouldn't be the right thing. He has morals.
2) All the women are sexually bold. They all sleep naked.
3) He will take a good few beatings - broken fingers, ribs. Obviously nothing that's going to put him in traction for 6 weeks but enough that we know he's very tough and he suffers. Shagging and suffering - very important in the life of the private eye.
4) He will have a perpetual handy store of tough one-liners but will have an unexpected intellectual streak such as a love of chess or TS Eliot or Ludwig Wittgenstein.
5) He will plough on through the corkscrew plot twists and not know what the hell he's doing but his instincts will guide him to a just if messy conclusion.
6) He will rescue someone from something and it will go horribly wrong. This will show that he's human.
7) He will have a quirk, like a comical pet, such as a bulldog who drinks beer, or being a laplander. Anything. But get that quirk.
8) He will have no friends and especially no girlfriend - if he had a girlfriend then he'd be cheating when he shags the five women he encounters during the story, and we do not want our readers thinking our hero has no morals. He is a very moral guy.
9) He will drink so much during the course of all this that an actual human being would have been hospitalised by page 35.
10) He seems as the story starts to have no cases on the go, nothing is doing at all. We have to wonder how he makes ends meet. But maybe, given his sexual prowess, he moonlights as Dick Bold in the Naughty Nurses series from Cinema Triple X - come to think, there IS a resemblance.
11) There will be a person in the story who completely reinvents herself, to the point that when we meet them again on page 125 in their reinvented state we have no idea who they were. (So Diana Sonnderling was really Betty Ann Grot? And Pope John Paul II was really.... Dan Brown?? Or - no - the other way round!!) The identity revelation is a Big Plot Shock and either resolves everything or further complicates it, whatever.
12) There will be an older, really sexy woman. Much will be made of the fact that she's Older. But Sexy as Well. This will be piled on with a trowel.
13) The bad guys will spend money like water. They'll never run out. If they write off several cars in pursuit of the hero, several more will appear, as if by magic.
14) The first lot of bad guys are not the real bad guys, even if they seem really bad.
15) The police, the judges, the lawyers, the coroners, they're all on the payroll.
16) Drugs and porn generate vast amounts of money so somewhere at the bubbling plot spring of the story there will be drugs or porn.
17) Someone has a guilty secret which will turn out to be very significant to all the plot corkscrews. Usually this is an illegitimate daughter but it could be that the person used to be Dan Brown.
18) Everything must be very believable otherwise by page 125 your readers will already be thinking now, is this a one star book or a two star book? Hmm - one, two? Well, I didn't hate it THAT much. Okay, it's a nice day, I feel pretty good, so two.
Rating Out Of Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
Ratings: 4.06 From 6364 Users | 528 ReviewsCrit Out Of Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
One of the best mysteries of all time. Contains cynicism and good-humor, elegiac sadness, a lot of drinking, a small bit of love and--oh yeah--a damn good plot and enough violence to keep you awake. And best of all, the voice of the detective narrator: charming, infuriating, and ultimately reliable C.W. Sughrue. If Sam Peckinpah wrote mysteries, they would be like this.Rambling, alcohol soaked, depressive detective masterpiece from Crumley. Comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson and Peckinpah(the character C.W. yeans for Ride the High Country at one point but a closer touchtone is that similarly depressive, alcohol damaged picaresque Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) ring as true as Chandler. Great characters that I would follow anywhere and became absorbed with enough to be shocked when the plot turned on a dime, especially by the twists in the final pages
A true classic of the crime fiction genre, and for some reason I just got around to it. The book introduces C.W. Sughrue, a Vietnam vet who is now a private dick, usually working boring jobs doing repossessions and divorce cases. As the novel opens, he's finally tracked down Abraham Trahearne, a famous drunken writer who Sughrue was hired to track down before he drinks himself to death. While on the job, he takes another assignment from an old barmaid to track down her daughter, who ran away
Quality mystery about a private detective who is hired by his ex-wife to find an author, who seems to be out on a major bender. When CW finally tracks him down, he becomes obsessed with helping the bartender there find her daughter, who has not been seen in a decade since joining hippies in Haight-Asbury. The two story lines twist and turn, with many surprises along the way.
The first great read of 2013."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 Sonoma, California, drinking the heart out of a fine spring afternoon..."Crumley opens with this line and doesn't let up for nearly 300 pages of a rambling, alcohol soaked journey through a series of hard-boiled, depraved, violent and miserable events in the hunt for a beautiful girl missing for the past ten
James Crumley (1939-2008) - Texas tough guy, Army vet and creator of some of the most colorful crime fiction ever written, this rugged author could do drugs and drink whiskey with the best of them. A watering hole in Missoula, Montana has a bar stool dedicated to James Crumley.From the first page of this, the authors best known novel starring first-person narrator and slumping hero Montana investigator C. W. Sughrue, "Trahearne had been on this wandering binge for nearly three weeks, and the big
I really enjoyed James Crumley's, "The Last Good Kiss" but I did not fall in love with it. I fell for many of the side characters who are as rich and fleshed out as the leading cast. I loved the drunk bulldog, the Hunter S. Thompson style of the prose that captured the madness of life, and I loved the fable about family life. The plot here is somewhat simple: our protagonist, Sughrue, is asked to look for a bartender's missing daughter while he's working on a case to find a drunken literary
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