Saturday, December 30, 2017

Review: The Wrong Case

The Wrong Case The Wrong Case by James Crumley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No matter when most detective fiction is set, part of it invariably takes place in 1955. That’s kind of the Victorian era of American literature – the moment when a public Eisenhower morality obscured a sordid underworld – and detective fiction is a lot like our Victorian novel: a popular form that, in talented hands, can be lasting literature. Chandler may have written much of his best work twenty years earlier, but he seemed to predict the 1950s (and many of the films of his novels were made then). And Ellroy, writing four decades later, set most of his work in the period. In between, their legion of imitators touched directly or indirectly on the same dynamic, a sense of noble disappointment that our American experiment carried a flotsam of cynicism, disappointment, and outright evil in its stream.

I mention all that because Crumley seems a rare bird who was able to re-fit the classic detective form into a different, later era. Writing around the same time as the more highly regarded (but so far, to me, disappointing) John D. MacDonald, he managed to modernize the form. MacDonald’s Travis McGee was just another Chandler “knight,” but a man even more removed from his time than Chandler’s Marlowe. I find him a whiner, but I do need to give him another shot, whining mostly about the fact that it isn’t 1955 anymore, that the world no longer has a clearly defined place for a man like himself.

Crumley, though, adjusted to the times. This is my second of his; it’s a bit less good than The Last Good Kiss, but, then, so is almost everything else. That reinvents the genre while this one merely stands as a satisfying extension of it. In either case, though, his novels feel alive, feel as if they’re using the genre to say something about a world that’s a couple decades newer than most of the others. (To be fair, Ellroy uses the 1950s to say a great deal about today, but that’s a matter for another day.)

In The Wrong Case, we have a cranky private eye in a mid-sized Western city. His great-grandfather established the family fortune as much through dumb luck as anything else, and now Milo has the means to stay drunk and dependent most of the time, needing to supplement things only a little with seedy divorce work that’s suddenly dried up with the state’s transformed dissolution laws.

On the surface, Milo is another fallen knight type, another guy walking down the mean streets without quite being sullied himself. He spends his days protecting a coterie of fellow drunks and down-on-their-luck drifters, and he doesn’t ask all that much for himself. Over the course of the novel, though, it becomes clear that he genuinely sees himself as lost. He sees all sorts of drug abuse and open sexuality, and he refuses to judge it. He suspects that these young people may be right, that they may have a better sense of how to lead a decent life than he does. And, since he’s certain he has no capacity for living decently, it’s inspiring to see his lack of self-righteousness.

In other words, he’s a hero not just in a different age, but for a different age. He sees a cultural transformation – it’s not Eisenhower’s America but Nixon’s – and he has a glimmer of hope that the young people he knows will do a better job than he or his self-important ancestors ever managed. There’s almost nothing he can do to help – the title suggests, after all, that he’s somehow on the wrong case all along – and even his solution of the mystery leaves things mostly as they were.

Throughout it all, Crumley writes with humor and insight. One of the reviews I glanced at calls him Chandler crossed with Hunter S. Thompson, and that’s a great way to put it. He’s Chandler forty years later; he’s Thompson without the full-blown misanthropy.

Consider this exchange:

Milo’s bartender friend laments a recently killed mutual friend, “The old fart survived two wars and some goddamned punk pushes him down the stairs and kills him. What the hell kinda life is that?”

And Milo answers, “I don’t know, Leo. The kind we have, I guess. I don’t know.”

I love the final “I don’t know” here. If I’d had the skill to draft such an exchange, I’d probably have cut it. But not-knowing is central to Milo’s existence. The world is in tumult, and he resists the standard impulse to complain that it isn’t as it was when he was a kid. It was broken and confusing then, and it’s broken and confusing now. The answers are never easy, and nostalgia isn’t any use.

There’s a gorgeous couple pages late in the novel – pages 235-6 in my Vintage contemporaries edition – that serve as a kind of ethical will from his father, a glorious drunk who died under suspicious circumstances when he was only 10, who tried to help him understand life while retching in a bathroom. It’s too long to quote entirely, but the essence of it is that there’s a kind of honesty in being a drunk. “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something down deep inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”

It’s not that sublime throughout – there are times you can see the guide wires of the standard form directing the action and coloring the minor characters we meet – but it’s certainly an inspiring effort. There are another 4-5 Crumleys out there, and I’ll get to them. I don’t know of any others that accomplish what he does, though, so I’ll be rationing them over the next good while.


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