James Crumley, 68, Poetic Crime Novelist

HELENA, Mont. — Crime novelist James Crumley, whose hardened detectives worked cases in dingy Montana bars and other rough hangouts around Big Sky Country, has died in Missoula, Mont. after years of poor health.Crumley died Wednesday at a hospital in Missoula, where the former Texan made his home, a longtime friend and writer. Crumley was 68, William Kittredge, said.He was perhaps best known for “The Last Good Kiss,” which Men’s Journal last year ranked no. 12 among its Top 15 Thrillers of All Time. The book takes readers into the life of C.W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who works in a topless bar, is hired to track down an author and ends up searching for a girl missing in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.Crumley wrote “hard-boiled detective” books but made them poetic, said Mr. Kittredge, who taught in the University of Montana writing program for 29 years. Crumley was on UM’s English faculty soon after he earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa in 1966.Although he wrote about violence and coarse living, he was “the least violent man I’ve ever known,” an artist who lives in Livingston, Mont., north of Yellowstone National Park, Russell Chatham, said. Their friendship grew after they drove through Mexico together about 25 years ago.“I don’t think he would swat a fly,” Mr. Chatham said. “He’d open a window to let it out.”Crumley did not participate in the rugged outdoor pursuits that often draw people to Montana and compel them to stay, Chatham said.“Some of us are out there all the time,” Chatham said. “When he wasn’t writing, he was visiting with friends and having a drink.”In a 1991 Associated Press interview, Crumley said it was the urban aspects of Missoula — “down by the tracks, the old hotels, the funk you don’t find anymore,” that fascinated him when he got there.Mr. Kittredge said Crumley was “enormously attentive to what was going on around him.” When the two were in a Missoula bar or restaurant and people stopped at their table to talk, “he knew their kids’ names, their dogs’ names, he knew what street they lived on,” Mr. Kittredge said.Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and grew up largely in south Texas.He briefly attended the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship, then served in the Army from 1958-61. He enrolled at Texas A&I, now Texas A&M University-Kingsville, on a football scholarship and received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1964.After the 1969 publication of his novel “One Count to Cadence,” a look at the war in Vietnam, Crumley was a visiting professor at a number of campuses, including the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Reed College in Oregon, and the University of Texas-El Paso. He left teaching in 1984. Friends say he wrote some screenplays that never reached a screen.Besides “The Last Good Kiss” and “One Count to Cadence,” his books include “The Wrong Case,” “Dancing Bear” and “The Mexican Tree Duck,” all published by Random House. Viking published “The Right Madness” in 2005. Mr. Chatham’s Clark City Press published a Crumley anthology, “The Muddy Fork and Other Things: Short Fiction and Nonfiction,” in 1991.Survivors include Crumley’s wife, Martha Elizabeth.

James Crumley, 68, Poetic Crime Novelist

James Crumley, 68, Poetic Crime Novelist

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