Bordersnakes is James Crumley’s 6th book. His first, written in the 60s about Vietnam, is still on my to be read pile. He has 2 main protagonists, Milo Milodragovich and C.W. Sughrue. They have each had 2 books prior to this and in this one, they team up.
Milo was left his multi-million dollar inheritance in trust until he was 52. He is finally of age and went to the bank to collect only to discover is was embezzled. He went to find his friend CW Sughrue in Texas only to discover that he had been gutshot and left for dead and has turned very hard, all the while taking care of a young child he ended up with after the Mexican Tree Duck case. He wants to find the guy who shot him. And off they go.
The Bordersnakes of the title are the dangerous Mexican near the border who are in the drug trade.
They go back to the scene of the shooting and find the gun, which had been tossed into a crook of a tree. Through tracking the ownership of the gun, they get their direction to start whereupon they find a double murder and things go from there.
It was a very enjoyable ride. I really enjoy Crumley’s writing style. His main characters are a little too hard drinking and drug using for me, but apparently he was as well, so he wrote what he knew.
This book is interesting in that because it has both of his main characters, he writes from their perspective separately. The first 120 some pages is written from Milo’s prespective. Then it Switches to Sughrue’s. Then back and froth from there. I discovered that I really prefer the way he writes Sughrue to Milo.
There were a ton of twists and turns along the way of the story. Trying to summarize it would be next to impossible. One disappointment is some of the coincidences that occur. A cocktail lounge singer who decides to come along with them suddenly becomes and huge part of the story and a key plot point. Looking back on the story, some of it is a little convenient.
My favorite type of story is the Hard Case crime story. The grizzled PI. Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer types. For some reason 1950s LA is a perfect time for me. Black Dahlia, Devil in a Blue Dress…. So, that is my sweet spot.
I have been trying to branch out. Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss was on a list of best detective novels, so I gave it a shot. It is a Sughrue book. This is the opening line:
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 Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
I read the first page and immediately ordered the rest of his books. I was home.
Bordersnakes is not his best, but its a fine addition to the kegacy of Milo and Sughrue books. I only have 2 more to go and I’ll be spacing them out.
8/10
Colin Reads 