Crumley finally picked up a copy of one of Chandler's books in Guadalajara, Mexico. His master's thesis was later published as the Vietnam War novel One to Count Cadence in 1969.Ĭrumley had not read any detective fiction until prompted to by Montana poet Richard Hugo, who recommended the work of Raymond Chandler for the quality of his sentences. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1966. He then attended the Texas College of Arts and Industries on a football scholarship, where he received his B.A.

Army from 1958 to 1961 in the Philippines. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship, but left to serve in the U.S. Thompson.His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as 'the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years.'Ĭrumley, who was born in Three Rivers, Texas, grew up in south Texas, where his father was an oil-field supervisor and his mother was a waitress.Ĭrumley was a grade-A student and a football player, an offensive lineman, in high school. He has been described as 'one of modern crime writing's best practitioners', who was 'a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel'and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. James Arthur Crumley was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays.

The Mexican Tree Duck by James Crumley