James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss (UK 2016)

From the Publisher:
Meet Private Detective C. W. Sughrue.
Private detectives are supposed to find missing persons and solve crimes. But more often than not Sughrue is the one committing the crimes - everything from grand theft auto to criminal stupidity. All washed down with a hearty dose of whiskey and regret.

At the end of a three-week hunt for a runaway bestselling author, Sughrue winds up in a ramshackle bar, with an alcoholic bulldog. The landlady's daughter vanished a decade ago and now she wants Sughrue to find her. His search will take him to the deepest, darkest depths of San Francisco's underbelly, a place as fascinating, frightening and flawed as he is.

Welcome to James Crumley's America.

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss. Introduction by Ian Rankin. Black Swan, ISBN: 9781784161583 (April, 2016), 381 p., £8.99, eBook £5.99.

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss (USA 1988)

From the Publisher:
Tough, hard-boiled, and briliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator, who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America's sleaziest nightmares.

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss. Vintage Contemporaries, ISBN: 0394759893 (November, 1988), 244 p., $9.95 (?).

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss (USA 1981)

From the Publisher:
"THE LAST GOOD KISS IS UP THERE WITH THE BEST!" - People

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart out of a fine spring afternoon..."

That's how Detective C. W. Sughrue ended one search and began another-a search for a girl in a dog-cared photo, ten years lost and gone. Now Sughrue has finally hit the big time, hunting down Betty Sue Flowers, the barmaid's beautiful daughter.

Who, what, and where is Betty Sue Flowers?...
Ask the men who knew her, but never well enough... ask the mobster who wants her dead... the friend who says she is... But don't ask Sughrue -- who's putting his life on the line for 87 bucks and a passionate obsession for a girl in a dog-cared photo.

"Chandleresque touches... James Crumley joins the masters of the genre." -- Newsday

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss. Pocket Books, ISBN: 0617498894 (January, 1981), 244 p., $3.50.

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss (USA 1978)

From the Publisher:
"In the years that I had spent looking for lost husbands, wives, and children, I had learned not to think that I could stare into a one-dimensional face and see the person behind the photograph, but the big man looked like the sort who would cut a wide swath and leave an easy trail."

That's private detective Sughrue talking, and the "big man" is Trahearne, poet and novelist, out again on a far-and-wide binge that his ex-wife suspects might take in every bar from North Dakota to Southern California. It gives nothing away to say that Sughrue finds Trahearne, or more accurately, that Trahearne finds Sughrue, and that together they set out to find the enigmatic Betty Sue Flowers, a barmaid's daughter who disappeared somewhere into San Francisco ten years ago.

There are those who insist that Betty Sue is dead: a close-mouthed woman produces a story of a car accident, a body lost in the river and a death certificate. But the search takes on a new identity when a postcard -- from Betty Sue -- arrrives at her shady father's saloon. The trail Betty Sue left is a faint one. She stopped once long enough to make a low-grade porno flick; spent some time in an Oregon commune. A prison sentence in Denver -- something, some say, to do with the mob.

As Sughrue and Trahearne wade through the rubble that is Betty Sue's life, each becomes in his own way obsessed with the search, and what will elude even the most engrossed reader -- until the end -- are the complex and very private reasons that drive each of the men to find her.

More than a suspenseful thriller, The Last Good Kiss is a rare drama -- a novel about obsessions and deadly passions.

James Crumley: The Last Good Kiss. A Novel. New York: Random House, 1978, ISBN: 0394419464, 259 p., $8.95.