James Crumley

James Crumley was a prominent American author, known for his hardboiled crime fiction novels. Born in Three Rivers, Texas, in 1939, Crumley grew up in south Texas where his father worked in the oil fields and his mother was a waitress. He was a stellar student and a football player in high school, and went on to attend the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship. However, he left to serve in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1961, and later attended the Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship, where he received his B.A. degree in history in 1964. Crumley subsequently earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1966.

Crumley is widely regarded as one of the best practitioners of modern crime writing, and has been described as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. His writing is known for its violence and intensity, and he specialized in hardboiled crime fiction novels. In addition to his novels, he also penned several volumes of essays and short stories, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. His book "The Last Good Kiss" is considered to be one of the most influential crime novels of the last 50 years. Despite being highly praised by his fellow authors, up until about 1990, his books sold more in Japan and France than they did in the United States.

Crumley had not read any detective fiction until Montana poet Richard Hugo recommended the work of Raymond Chandler for the quality of his sentences. Impressed by Chandler's writing, Crumley began writing his first detective novel, "The Wrong Case," which was published in 1975. He served as a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and as a visiting professor at several other colleges. From the mid-80s on, he lived in Missoula, Montana, where he found inspiration for his novels at Charlie B's bar. Crumley died at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana on September 17, 2008, of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases. He was survived by his wife of 16 years, Martha Elizabeth, a poet and artist who was his fifth wife, and left behind five children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.