Rating: 4/5
Review:
Compelling and very well written
The Last Good Kiss is still a very good novel after 40 years.
C.W. Sughrue is an
ex-army man turned to private detective work. It’s not glamorous
and, as in this case, often involves finding runaway husbands.
Sughrue is on the trail of Abraham Traherne, a well known writer, and
becomes bound up in both his rather tangled life and in looking for
the daughter of a woman he meets while looking for Traherne. It’s
a convoluted but comprehensible plot, there’s a good deal of
violence, quite astonishing amounts of drinking and quite a lot of
inexplicit sex, but also some quieter, more contemplative passages so
the whole thing seemed very well structured and paced to me.
The real strengths
of the book are Crumley’s excellently painted characters, his
wonderful evocations of different parts of the USA from the seediest
bars and clubs to the magnificent landscapes, and the very fine prose
he uses to describe them. Sughrue’s narrative voice is tough and
world-weary, but he also has a strong moral sense (even if he can’t
always follow it) and it is excellently done. I found it involving
and very convincing and while it may not be an absolute classic of
the genre, it’s very good and I can recommend it warmly.
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