Bordersnakes - Hardcover

Crumley, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892965738 ISBN 13: 9780892965731

Publisher: Dennis McMillan, 1996

Synopsis

Detective C. W. Sughrue joins forces with Detective Milo Milodragovich to search for two would-be assassins and a thief, in a journey that takes them across the American Southwest and into Mexico. Tour.

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Reviews

Lit by flashes of brutal lyricism but bordering on incoherence, Crumley's fifth detective novel sports a hook that's certain to captivate longstanding fans: it's the first joint outing of his two aging and irascible sleuths, C.W. Sughrue (last seen in The Mexican Tree Duck, 1993) and Milo Milodragovitch (dormant since 1983's Dancing Bear). Forsaking a hard-fought sobriety after his $3 million inheritance vanishes from his Montana bank account, Milo travels to El Paso, Tex., to ask his former partner, Sughrue, to help track the errant banker. He finds Sughrue hiding out in the desert after having been shot and left to die by Chicano thugs who divulged that it was a contract hit. The two join on a desperate quest for retribution, traveling through a haze of booze, cocaine, barroom brawls and sadistic crime scenes, zigzagging from Austin to Seattle to a final showdown south of the border on the estate of a drug lord. What seems a hodgepodge of false leads begins to coalesce (after 200 pages) around a South Texas crime network that dabbles in S&Ls, money laundering and drug distribution. Crumley's harsh realism is vitiated here by James Bondish gadgetry and gunplay. While the plot reads at times like an overbudget western directed by an LSD-addled Raymond Chandler, the far-flung cast, which features small-time sleaze kings, man-eating women and a sinister general implicated in Iran-Contra, is drawn with panache. Major ad/promo.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Milo and Sughrue together at last! If you read James Crumley, that's all the review you'll need. The return of C. W. Sughrue ("Sugh as in sugar, rue as in rue the goddamn day" ) in The Mexican Tree Duck (1993), Crumley's first novel in 10 years, was a special treat for the cult author's long-suffering fans, but this one's even better. Not only is it a meatier book, but it brings together the two orneriest, gutsiest, drunkest, toughest, funniest, most delightfully obscene rugged individualists in the entire state of Montana ("where men are men, women are scarce, and sheep are lying little tramps" ). Offstage pals but never costars in Crumley's four previous mysteries, the pair get together not in Montana but in barren west Texas, where Sughrue is licking his wounds after being gut shot in a suspicious bar fight. Milo has his own problems: his dead father's fortune has been plundered by a white-collar scoundrel. Milo and Sughrue join forces to claim revenge and right the crooked courses of their lives. So begins the most tangled, ultimately unfollowable plot since Raymond Chandler got lost somewhere in the bowels of The Big Sleep. So what. If you read Chandler or Crumley for the plot, you would probably visit Casablanca for the waters. The pleasure here is watching two world-weary, no-nonsense old-timers slap the stinking world upside the head one last time. Sure it's a fantasy, but what a fantasy: the ribaldry of Falstaff and the wisdom and courage of Prince Hal, wrapped tightly in the leathery sinews of two aging renegades. Bill Ott

Milo Milodragovitch and Sonny Sughrue are former partners bent on revenge. Rough-riding prose, unrepentant wit, and tough, Texas countryside come along for the trip. Milodragovitch, ex-lawman, p.i., and bartender in his mid-fifties, vows to locate the weaselly banker who absconded with his inheritance. Sughrue is a leathery cowboy looking for the men who tried to do him in. They crisscross Texas in Milo's new Cadillac, drinking hard, throwing money and punches, tricking bad guys, and coming upon a gruesome murder. Crumley's (The Mexican Duck Tree, Mysterious, 1993) gutsy, action-packed, and violent thriller is tempered with humor. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dennis McMillan
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892965738
• ISBN 13: 9780892965731
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320