It must have been twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight years ago that I took a week-long writing workshop from the novelist James Crumley. This was in late August and on the east side of Montana’s Flathead Lake. Crumley was one of four or five instructors. Forty or fifty, maybe sixty aspirants were drawn together in dorms and classrooms to offer up stories and chapters for collective evisceration. A mashup of summer camp and seminar. Canoes and floating docks, bug dope and meals at a common table. Evenings with campfires and, since it was Crumley, a boatload of beer. Probably some Missoula homegrown passed around.
The other instructors that I remember were Carolyn Forche in poetry (genius, by the way) and Joy Williams in literary fiction. Rust Hills did a flyby. But it was Crumley who became the pivot and hinge of the week. Inadvertently, perhaps. Something to do with his gravitas, physical presence. Soft spoken, heavyset, he made you lean in. At some point, I should use the words barrel and chested. Five foot eight, maybe five nine on a good day, you nevertheless felt like you were looking up at him. At the time, I had only the vaguest notion of who the guy was. Wrote some sort of crime novels, I guess. Prior to the camp, I’d read a collection of his stories saddled with the unfortunate title Whores. A good enough book, but … well, you know. It was only later, after reading my way through his novels, especially those paired Zeppelins of pristine architecture, mordant humor, and humming, flawless narrative, The Last Good Kiss and The Wrong Case, that I really got it, that I saw what he had accomplished.
As a teacher, I remember him as being affable enough, and unexpectedly kind (unexpected, given his initial, gruff presentation). When he told me I should abandon my novel-in-progress, I somehow didn’t hate him for it. The spirit of a good teacher informs the classroom, and while I’ve since taken workshops that feel more representative of the form (cage-match ego battles, just as likely to cripple a work as to save it), Crumley’s workshop stands as a model for how it should be done. The students supportive, the maestro benevolent. The class was maybe 30 percent women, and at one point, after a discussion about female stereotypes in crime fiction—“Did you actually just say ‘fuck-me heels’?”—the women came into the classroom the next morning with balloons shoved up under their shirts. No fanfare about it. Just sat down with their notebooks and pens, encumbered by those ironic breasts, ready to work. Crumley had little to say, as I remember, but studied the class, enjoying the commentary immensely.
His fiction aspired always to push certain boundaries, to figure out something marginally new. Artfulness. To call it crime or mystery, to categorize it at all, was to somewhat miss the point.Over the ensuing years, Jim Crumley did me a number of solids, small and large. Participating in an anthology I was putting together, contributing to a magazine that I edited. But the most significant favor he performed, in retrospect, was inadvertent. Through silent example, he demonstrated the absurdity of literary labeling. By any objective measure—the vibrant heartbeat of his characters, the stiletto dig of his dialogue, the agile jump, swerve, and pirouette of his language—Crumley was a literary novelist. His fiction aspired always to push certain boundaries, to figure out something marginally new. Artfulness. To call it crime or mystery, to categorize it at all, was to somewhat miss the point.
Once I started paying attention, and after I got over whatever silly literary self-regard had me all twisted up at the time, I realized that Crumley was also at the forefront of a considerable community of like-minded novelists in the region. Over the next few years, I got to know and occasionally publish the likes of Jon A. Jackson, Neil McMahon, Jamie Harrison, Robert Sims Reid…. A body of work that collectively provided a bedrock for what, by any measure, continues to be an exceptional tidal sweep of writing. Call it a second wave of crime. Renaissance? Why the hell not.
Consider, for a moment, James Lee Burke and his tent poles, Robicheaux and the Holland family. Burke lives outside of Missoula, and while he only occasionally brings his characters into his backyard (The Lost Get Back Boogie, Bitterroot) Montana can still lay a decent claim to his work. New Orleans or not, he’s ours, dammit. In Wyoming, C. J. Box and Craig Johnson have each been so successful that they’ve surely upped the GDP of that state by at least a couple percentage points.
Decent fiction needs to be seated in geography, in place. And the place we’ve got is exceptional, and well aware of itself as such. The fictions reflect it. Where I live in Bozeman, Mark T. Sullivan penned a series of top-shelf thrillers before finding his breakout with Beneath a Scarlet Sky. Keith McCafferty leverages his rare authority in the outdoors (he’s a longtime Field and Stream contributor) to inform his Sean Stranahan mysteries. In Missoula there’s Gwen Florio with her excellent Lola Wicks series, and you’d have to say that Kim Zupan at least dips a toe into crime with The Ploughmen. Whitefish can lay claim to Christine Carbo and the Flathead to the compelling cozies of Leslie Budewitz.
Since then, the community of like-minded genre writers in the Northern Rockies has only bloomed, spread, erupted.It would be a mistake, of course, to hand Crumley too much responsibility for the flourishing. The styles, the voices, are all over the place. But for my money, Crumley got there first (forgive me, Walter Van Tilburg Clark), and so, in a sense, laid down the tarmac for much of what followed. Subjects that transcend genre, Faulkner’s “human heart in conflict with itself,” artfulness hidden inside a compelling hook. An overarching question that offers an engine for everything else. Crumley’s been gone more than ten years now. His appetites (cigarettes and Coors in a can) tipped him off the board early. But since then, the community of like-minded genre writers in the Northern Rockies has only bloomed, spread, erupted.
Sweeney on the Rocks will be my third novel, and it’s the first one to operate entirely within what the industry would call genre. If you take Crumley’s workshop as a starting gun, it took me almost thirty years to get here. And it’s to my enormous regret now that I can’t send Crumley a signed copy. The inscription would read, simply, “This one’s on you, man.”
