The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

C.W. Sughrue, hero and narrator of The Last Good Kiss (1979), should have been played by Richard Boone.

I'm guessing around the time the novel was in preparation for release, he was battling Robert Mitchum as a villain in the remake of The Big Sleep.

While the Raymond Chandler classic was being retooled for the big screen, James Crumley was probably working under the hood of the private eye genre and fine-tuning this variation.  

Not much later Boone passed away, but his rugged would have been perfect for Sughrue.

It's probably best that, despite reading high praise for it over the years maybe first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or another publication at the time, I didn't read the first Sughrue adventure too early.

 I checked out a paperback edition from the library but didn't get far past the fabulous first line about the beer swilling bulldog, Fireball Roberts. My bad.

Still, I don't think I would have appreciated Sughrue and Crumley's perspective without more of my own.

Montana detective Sughrue is tired and cynical as the book opens, and his tale is not one of straightforward investigation. It's a tale with twists and turns that follows the hell-raising detective's involvement with renowned hell-raising author, Abraham Trahearne, and his quirky family situation.

He's first hired to find Trahearne. That's before the book's action begins. We catch up as he's getting close.

While locating the author in a California dive, he's hired--for $87--by the bar owner to find her long, long lost daughter, but things aren't quite as simple or straightforward as they look.

Trahearne winds up shot in a barroom altercation, so while he's in the hospital Sughrue begins the legwork and learns the lost daughter, Betty Sue, went from high school acting into Bay Area porn, eventually put on a lot of weight and left town.

His later findings about where she went next don't please Mom much.

After Trahearne's healed a bit, Sughrue takes him home, meets his family which includes the current wife who hired Sughrue, the ex-wife who's still in love with him and Trahearne's wealthy mom.

The odd family setup's integral to the story as it moves along, and that soon involves second rate mobsters, more secrets about Betty Sue, gunplay and eventually an ending that's surprising and brutal. It's as you might expect from an unflinchingly unromantic depiction of the private eye, though maybe Sughure's last move is romantic and appropriate and a good fit for the narrative.

To say more than that all the hype for this novel is pretty accurate if you're in the right place would be too much of a spoiler. It's a great entry in the private eye realm of the mystery genre, and happily, though Crumley's passed away, he finished several more books in the Sughrue series over the years.

Impulse buy

Phantom of the 13th Floor by Marilyn Ross

Gothic romances as mentioned in an earlier post enjoyed a long heyday in the '60s and '70s, perhaps fueled in longevity by symbiotic success of Dark Shadows, TV's Gothic soap which began in 1966 and continued until 1971.

Perhaps appropriately, a long series of Dark Shadows paperback tie-ins were released under the pen name Marylin Ross, actually William Edward Daniel or W.E.D. Ross (1912-1995).

Ross also penned a long string of stand-alone gothics under Marylin and a variety of other pseudonyms including tales from perhaps the twilight of the gothic era.

Phantom of the 13th Floor would seem to be from that later edge of the era, released four years after Dark Shadows' cancellation.

It's an engaging little tale set around Christmastime and New Year's in midtown Manhattan and stretches the boundaries of the gothic. It might be called romantic suspense these days. It eschews the usual old dark houses, though there is the ominous Midtown Hotel Brant, modeled on the Drake Hotel.

The heroine's a young Broadway actress who's a bit naive. Joan Crane is the granddaughter of actress Molly Miller who headlined "Me and Molly" in 1928 until her death in a fall during a party at the Brant. Joan's starring in a mid-'70s revival with much of the same production team and living in an apartment across the street from the historic hotel.

She's dating choreographer Rex Grayston, a generically perfect romantic lead, has a cabbie named Archie on retainer, and is surrounded by a circle that includes some familiar with her grandmother or at least the theater community.

A written invitation from Rex lures Joan to a party at the Brant on a rainy December night after a show, and there she encounters a turban-wearing mystic who soon has her in a trance that will quickly be followed by blackouts that coincide with murders. All of the victims have some tie to Joan's grandmother or others involved with the show including the gentlemanly producer of both original and revival.

As Joan becomes a murder suspect, Rex is drawn away to tweak the dances on a show in another city leaving her to fend on her own, and a possibly ghostly or possibly criminal series of events unfolds as Christmas approaches.

Ross tosses several red herrings into the mix, teases a bit of a romantic rival in the police detective investigating the murders and keeps the supernatural viable for much of the tale. Is the ghost of Molly Miller possessing Joan to kill off old rivals? Is the Vaudeville mentalist who once loved Molly really dead or pulling Joan's strings in a twisted act of revenge?

Despite the twists the tale remains a thriller and not a true mystery. The theater world feels just a tad generic. The sense that the novel was penned for a target audience is always there, as is the case with most tales of a type, I suppose. There's also a sense that this is a bit of a soap-on-paper, more in the realm of The Edge of Night if not Dark Shadows. 

None of that's to say it's not a fun, creepy and engaging page-turner with a real atmosphere of a grim and cold winter city as backdrop.

Gothics, especially those by prolific masters like Ross, shouldn't be lost to time. The serve up interesting thrills and chills.