James Crumley is 49 years old and the author of four novels, one book of short stories and several screenplays that haven't been made. Francois disappears after the first one, and finally, round about midnight, we get down to the interview. We end up in the Bar Americain of a faded hotel near the Gare De Lyon and start on whisky with beer chasers. Later she drops me at Crumley's dinner party and Crumley, myself and one of the Francois decide to get a drink. I do my best and she tells me stories about meeting a jet-lagged James Crumley on the train to Grenoble for a crime fiction conference (the reason for his presence in France) and their subsequent discovery that free champagne was on tap in the bar. I go to meet a woman named Isabelle who has a bathroom crammed with American hard boiled fiction and wants to know about the roman noir in England.
Mid-evening Crumley is taken off to a dinner party with several men named Francois who constitute the French roman noir establishment - Hammett lives forever in the Sorbonne. We started early, dispersing the day's irritations. Their world is an America that has fucked up to the max.ĭrinking with Crumley is not something to be entered into lightly. Better than that, even Crumley's novels are shorn of Hemingway's macho excesses and his heroes are flawed to a point at which redemption is less than a certainty. The contrasting impressions are about right, James Crumley is an ex-roughneck and football-player whose few novels establish him as America's greatest writer in the Hemingmay tough-guy tradition. Greying now, he walks like a man who's worked physically hard for a living and talks with the care and courtesy of an English lecturer from a college in the Deep South. James Crumley is a big man, not tall but powerful with a spreading gut. After a day of trekking round Paris looking for a hotel room, any hotel room, and ending up in a fleapit that would win the Franz Kafka award for gratuitously depressing ambience, it was more than a relief to find a man who still likes a drink. It was invented by people who needed a drink!" Meeting James Crumley is by no stretch of the imagination boring. Chances are, when you meet some guy who writes about lowlife drunks and whores, bad guys and worse places, they'll be drinking Perrier water and telling you how they won their battle with the bottle just in time. It’s a dangerous myth, the hard-drinking artist.
Home? Try a motel bar at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, my silence shared by a pretty barmaid who thinks I'm a creep and some asshole in a plastic jacket who thinks I'm his buddy. Home? Home is my apartment on the east side of Hell-Roaring Creek, three rooms where I have to open the closets and drawers to be sure I'm in the right place.
Hard to believe I'm the age now that Jim was then.
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