The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

Overview

WINNER OF THE DASHIELL HAMMETT AWARD

One night up in Montana, C.W. Sughrue sets his seedy bar’s pricey jukebox in front of an oncoming freight train. When predictable results ensue, he needs to find a way to make some money and pay back the jukebox company. So even though Sughrue’s officially retired from P.I. work, he picks up one small-time case involving some kidnapped fish. That fishy trail leads to a much bigger case involving a Texas politician's kidnapped wife, a valuable piece of pre-Columbian pottery, and a single mother who packs guns and stolen goods in her infant son's diaper bag.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101971482
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Series:	C.W. Sughrue , #2
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	654,609
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and spent most of his childhood in South Texas. After serving three years in the U.S. Army and completing college degrees in history (BA, Texas College of Arts and Industries) and creative writing (MFA, University of Iowa), he joined the English faculty at the University of Montana at Missoula. He was also a visiting professor at a number of other institutions around the country, including the University of Texas at El Paso, Colorado State University, Reed College, and Carnegie-Mellon. His works include a novel of Vietnam, One to Count Cadence, and seven detective novels: The Wrong Case, The Last Good Kiss, Dancing Bear, The Mexican Tree Duck, Bordersnakes, The Final Country, and The Right Madness. He died in Missoula in 2008.

Read an Excerpt

When the 3:12 through freight to Spokane hit the East Meriwether crossing, the engineer touched his horn and released a long, mournful wail into the wet, snowy air of our second early fall storm in western Montana. It sounded a hell of a lot like the first note of a Hank Snow ballad. I slipped the dolly from under the jukebox and plugged it into the extension cord. When I dropped a quarter into the slot, the large machine burped, the bubbling neon tubes glowed softly in the night, and the machine seemed to settle more solidly onto the railroad tracks.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Mexican Tree Duck"
by .
Copyright © 2016 James Crumley.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Lean, knuckle-crunching prose.” —Miami Herald

“Like James Ellroy . . . [Crumley] is a master of American vernacular, turning tough-guy slang into something like poetry.” —The Independent (London)

“The journey, with all its wild, wicked, sweet, painful, courageous, outrageous, and obscene encounters . . . will stay with the reader after the blood dries.”
     —The New York Times

"The pleasures of a James Crumley novel . . . derive mostly from the zing of its characters, the bite of its epigrams ("The bear of real life is waiting for everybody"), and a restless, almost manic vitality—prose on amphetamines. . . . The mix of black humor, violence, and trivia is . . . persuasive, and the setting is evoked as crisply as the landscape of an Ansel Adams photograph."
     —Entertainment Weekly

“Terrific crime-fiction writing. . . . Crumley has a gift for narration.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A surrealistic, raunchy buddy novel. . . . Tough writing with a manic edge and a neat surprise at the end.” —New York Daily News

“Powered by sex, drugs, rock’n’ roll, firepower, and a large portion of irreverence, The Mexican Tree Duck is one you won’t want to miss.”
     —Rocky Mountain News

“There’s [a] hypnotic craziness, that affectation for excess, expressed in profane and compelling and ultimately romantic language, that makes you keep reading The Mexican Tree Duck. Too much is never even close to enough for Crumley.”
     —Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the Publisher

A fantastic road trip...wild, wicked, sweet, painful, courageous, outrageous, and obscene.

New York Times Book Review

Crumley still writes the most amazing things.

Washington Post Book World

While the often furious action of Crumley's latest mystery takes place in the West, from Montana to the Tex-Mex border, the novel's heart beats in wartime Vietnam. There private eye C. W. Sughrue (first met in The Last Good Kiss ) and most of Crumley's memorable cast spent their formative years, learning about arms, reconnaissance and dope, and forging the relationships that hold them together or, in this tale that turns on betrayals, tear them apart as effectively as an AK-47. In Meriwether, Mont., Sughrue is hired to conduct a private search for Sarita Cisneros Pines, the missing Mexican wife of a slick Texas politician. Sughrue quickly runs up against the FBI, opposing bands of Mexican outlaws and some smooth American bad guys. As the bodies fall in increasing numbers, Sughrue falls, too--into bed with various women and in love with one or two; he enlists the help of other vets, including an ex-intelligence officer who is now a lawyer famous for defending drug lords. Sustained by booze and cocaine, driven by loyalty and revenge, Sughrue and his company gradually unravel the threads of sex, drugs, oil-interests and politics that lead to a final paramilitary campaign with a high body count. The occasional melodramatic note doesn't trip up the juggernaut action or knock Crumley's hard-guy prose off key. 50,000 first printing; author tour. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly