James Crumley: The Dancing Bear (UK 2016)

From the Publisher:
A classic from a legend of American crime writing. 'Crumley writes like an angel on speed' Time Out.
Milo Milodragovitch isn't exactly an upstanding citizen. He's more than likely to be drunk, and leaves heartbreak in his wake; five ex-wives to be precise. In fact, 'his forte is self-destruction' (Elmore Leonard).

When an elderly lady offers him a handsome fee to satisfy her curiosity he thinks it's an easy job, a quick win. Every Thursday she watches a couple arrive at the same spot at the woods opposite her house, in separate cars. But finding out who they are and what they're doing is far from straightforward and before he knows it Milo is in a world of trouble, complete with machine guns, grenades, and a bag of coke. Never a dull day...

James Crumley: The Dancing Bear. Transworld Digital, ISBN: 9781473540699 (April, 2016), eBook, 2.14 MB (ca. 256 p.), £4.99.

James Crumley: The Dancing Bear (USA 1984)

From the Publisher:
His friends call him Milo. No one has ever called him Bud except his father, long dead, and now Sarah Weddington, stirring painful memoires and offering him his first case since he abandoned his private practice and took a job marking time on the night shift for Haliburton Security. The case seems almost too easy, hardly worth the large fee, just to satisfy this old woman’s curiosity. But things are soon exploding all over the place and Milo is turning up grenades, machine guns, a kilo of marijuana and a bag of coke... and suddenly Milo is on the run.

James Crumley: The Dancing Bear. Vintage Contemporaries, ISBN: 039472576X (September, 1984), 240 p., $8.95 (?).

James Crumley: The Dancing Bear (USA 1983)

From the Publisher:
His friends call him Milo. No one has ever called him Bud except his father, long dead, and now Sarah Weddington, stirring painful memories and offering him his first case since he abandoned his private investigator's office and took a job marking time on the night shift for Haliburton Security.

"See that small park?" she asked. "Every Thursday afternoon for the past six weeks, iwo cars park there, a man in one, a young woman in the other... and they sit in her car for an hour or so, talking, it seems. I would very much like to know who they are, what they talk about, why they meet like this..."

A puzzling case, hardly worth the large fee just to satisfy an old woman's curiosity. If Sarah Weddington hadn't been so rich, Milo might have felt guilty taking her money for something so simple...

But is it? Soon things are exploding all over the place. The man he's tailing goes up with the yellow Toyota hes driving. Then Milo finds a live grenade wired to the clutch pedal of his rental. Searching the trunk of the Toyota, he discovers five fragmentation grenades, two small submachine guns, ten loaded clips of ammo, a kilo of marijuana, a bag of coke. All of a sudden Milo is on the run... and before things get straightened out, sort of, bodies begin piling up all around him.

Dancing Bear is an action-packed thriller, but it is much more than that. James Crumley is a gifted novelist of character, scene, and mood. And Milo, his peppermint-schnapps drinking. cocaine-snorting detective, is an extraordinary creation. Weary, complex, and cynical. Milo looks at life with the resigned insight of a man whose opportunities have passed him by. He knows that distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys are often blurred and is only too aware of the havoc often wrought by those with good intentions, yet he can't help searching for elusive truths even when he suspects they'll be impossible to live with.

James Crumley: The Dancing Bear. A Novel. New York: Random House, 1983, ISBN: 0394521951, 228 p., $12.95.