Define Based On Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
| Title | : | The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1) |
| Author | : | James Crumley |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 244 pages |
| Published | : | November 5th 1988 by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (first published 1978) |
| Categories | : | Mystery. Fiction. Crime. Noir. Hard Boiled |
James Crumley
Paperback | Pages: 244 pages Rating: 4.06 | 6364 Users | 528 Reviews
Narrative Supposing Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
P BRYANT'S 18 RULES FOR HARD-BOILED PRIVATE EYE NOVELISTS1) The hero of your hard-boiled private-eye genre thriller shall be irresistible to women, mostly. Say about 80%, no need to stretch credulity. He will shag at least four women he encounters during the story and will also gently, sensitively refuse to shag a fifth one, not because he's tired out but because it wouldn't be the right thing. He has morals.
2) All the women are sexually bold. They all sleep naked.
3) He will take a good few beatings - broken fingers, ribs. Obviously nothing that's going to put him in traction for 6 weeks but enough that we know he's very tough and he suffers. Shagging and suffering - very important in the life of the private eye.
4) He will have a perpetual handy store of tough one-liners but will have an unexpected intellectual streak such as a love of chess or TS Eliot or Ludwig Wittgenstein.
5) He will plough on through the corkscrew plot twists and not know what the hell he's doing but his instincts will guide him to a just if messy conclusion.
6) He will rescue someone from something and it will go horribly wrong. This will show that he's human.
7) He will have a quirk, like a comical pet, such as a bulldog who drinks beer, or being a laplander. Anything. But get that quirk.
8) He will have no friends and especially no girlfriend - if he had a girlfriend then he'd be cheating when he shags the five women he encounters during the story, and we do not want our readers thinking our hero has no morals. He is a very moral guy.
9) He will drink so much during the course of all this that an actual human being would have been hospitalised by page 35.
10) He seems as the story starts to have no cases on the go, nothing is doing at all. We have to wonder how he makes ends meet. But maybe, given his sexual prowess, he moonlights as Dick Bold in the Naughty Nurses series from Cinema Triple X - come to think, there IS a resemblance.
11) There will be a person in the story who completely reinvents herself, to the point that when we meet them again on page 125 in their reinvented state we have no idea who they were. (So Diana Sonnderling was really Betty Ann Grot? And Pope John Paul II was really.... Dan Brown?? Or - no - the other way round!!) The identity revelation is a Big Plot Shock and either resolves everything or further complicates it, whatever.
12) There will be an older, really sexy woman. Much will be made of the fact that she's Older. But Sexy as Well. This will be piled on with a trowel.
13) The bad guys will spend money like water. They'll never run out. If they write off several cars in pursuit of the hero, several more will appear, as if by magic.
14) The first lot of bad guys are not the real bad guys, even if they seem really bad.
15) The police, the judges, the lawyers, the coroners, they're all on the payroll.
16) Drugs and porn generate vast amounts of money so somewhere at the bubbling plot spring of the story there will be drugs or porn.
17) Someone has a guilty secret which will turn out to be very significant to all the plot corkscrews. Usually this is an illegitimate daughter but it could be that the person used to be Dan Brown.
18) Everything must be very believable otherwise by page 125 your readers will already be thinking now, is this a one star book or a two star book? Hmm - one, two? Well, I didn't hate it THAT much. Okay, it's a nice day, I feel pretty good, so two.
Specify Books During The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
| Original Title: | The Last Good Kiss |
| ISBN: | 0394759893 (ISBN13: 9780394759890) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | C.W. Sughrue #1 |
| Characters: | C.W. Sughrue |
| Setting: | Montana(United States) |
Rating Based On Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
Ratings: 4.06 From 6364 Users | 528 ReviewsJudgment Based On Books The Last Good Kiss (C.W. Sughrue #1)
P BRYANT'S 18 RULES FOR HARD-BOILED PRIVATE EYE NOVELISTS1) The hero of your hard-boiled private-eye genre thriller shall be irresistible to women, mostly. Say about 80%, no need to stretch credulity. He will shag at least four women he encounters during the story and will also gently, sensitively refuse to shag a fifth one, not because he's tired out but because it wouldn't be the right thing. He has morals.2) All the women are sexually bold. They all sleep naked.3) He will take a good few[9/10] He wrote about the things he saw on binges, about the road, about small towns whose future had become hostage to freeways, about truck-stop waitresses whose best hope is moving to Omaha or Cheyenne, about pasts that hung around like unwelcome ghosts, about bars where the odd survivors of some misunderstood disaster gathered to stare at dusty brown photographs of themselves, to stare at their drinks sepia in their glasses. Noir is for me a literary art form that never gets out of fashion.
One of the best mysteries of all time. Contains cynicism and good-humor, elegiac sadness, a lot of drinking, a small bit of love and--oh yeah--a damn good plot and enough violence to keep you awake. And best of all, the voice of the detective narrator: charming, infuriating, and ultimately reliable C.W. Sughrue. If Sam Peckinpah wrote mysteries, they would be like this.
It would be an insult to the boozy soul of this book to write a review while sober, so for now I'll just say that it's a goddamn masterpiece of American detective fiction, and the best book I've read this year.Update: OK, I'm still sober but want to get some thoughts down now, so my apologies to the late Mr. Crumley.This is a post-detective novel, cut from the same cloth as '70s anti-mystery films like Penn's Night Moves ("Maybe he would find the girl...maybe he would find himself" could be the
C.W. Sughrue is hired to rack down an author before he drinks himself to death. Complications ensue and Sughrue takes on a second case while he's waiting for the writer to be healthy enough to travel, finding a girl that's been missing for ten years. Where will Sughrue's cases take him?Ever read a book and wonder what rock you must have been hiding beneath to never hear of it sooner? The Last Good Kiss is one of those books. Numerous reviewers have described it as a cross between Raymond
Before I can review The Last Good Kiss, theres something I have to confess: I'm a Raymond Chandler fanboy. To the point where I havent read all of his books, not because I haven't had the opportunity, but because Im trying to space out the few remaining ones as long as I can. If all goes well, Ill die with exactly one Chandler novel left unread.My first encounter with Raymond Chandler was largely a matter of good fortune: At the time, I would occasionally nab a book off the 1001 books to read
One of the best mysteries of all time. Contains cynicism and good-humor, elegiac sadness, a lot of drinking, a small bit of love and--oh yeah--a damn good plot and enough violence to keep you awake. And best of all, the voice of the detective narrator: charming, infuriating, and ultimately reliable C.W. Sughrue. If Sam Peckinpah wrote mysteries, they would be like this.
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