2023-10-24 08:32:53
Gallmeister Editions are reissuing the thrillers with “hard-boiled” accents by this American author who died in 2008 and who bore a strange resemblance to his alcoholic and drug addict private.
When he arrived at a French literary festival, James Crumley always made an impression. One suddenly had the impression that the air of Montana was blowing around this hairy, gruff, red-faced man, resembling his alcoholic and drug-addicted private, Milton Chester Milodragovich, alias Milo, or his almost brother, Chauncey Wayne Sughrue, detective in the same perimeter. James rested his elbow on the zinc, told stories of Vietnam veterans, quoted his writer friends, such as Richard Hugo, Kent Anderson or James Lee Burke. The whiskey was flowing freely and tempers were flamboyant.
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For several years, Gallmeister editions have been republishing the thrillers with “hard-boiled” accents, by this American born in Texas in 1939 but a child of Missoula where he wrote most of his books until his death. , in 2008. We have already seen Fausse Piste, Le Dernier Kiss or La Danse de l’ours and today, Folie Doux, the master’s latest novel with a new translation by Jacques Mailhos and drawings by Hugues Micol. This time, the hero is Sughrue, well planted in the small town of Meriwether in Montana, trying to recover from a bullet in the stomach picked up in Mexico which still hurts like hell. Sughrue thinks idly about retirement, telling himself that it is time to hang up even if loneliness weighs on him because the women he loves are not comforters. But duty calls him once again: someone has just broken into his psychoanalyst friend’s house, a corpse stands in his way, then another… In short, Sughrue will rest when he is dead and that is not for tonight.
Melancholy that turns to twilight
At Crumley’s, there is high doses of alcohol, women who leave regularly, not to mention the recurring blues as time passes. Above all, there is the rough charm of this writer whose style we recognize from the first pages and the taste for laugh-out-loud dialogue. Sweet Madness is not that funny and its ending is melancholy which turns into twilight. But Crumley’s heroes are not the type to whine about life, they put on their cowboy boots and set off again to attack one of those tomorrows which will always end in an old harbor where gin and beer cure most of them. neuroses.
Folie Douce by James Crumley, translated from English (American) by Jacques Mailhos, drawings by Hugues Micol, Gallmeister editions, 420pp., €24.80.
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