Jake Berry Ellison – Independent Journalist

First a bit of preamble: The interview below is rough and loose. I’d hoped to have at least a couple of years to work with Crumley on a biography. He told me he thought he was incapable of writing an autobiography, that he’d tried and burned the pages. He did add that he wished he’d kept them …

Crumley had a great many friends, from the lonely drunk at Charlie B’s to the famous, monied and dedicated followers of his work (particularly in France). He had a great many friends in Missoula who would look at you askance if you said you knew him or had a relationship with him of any kind. Many said so, but only a nod from the man himself would give you any cover.

Crumley never bragged or postured, and if you dared tried to brag or posture or sniff at someone around him, you quickly suffered estrangement … no matter who you were.

So, it is with some trepidation that I release this interview that claims some connection to him. I only got to be in his circle a short time in total, but he was generous in his thoughts about my work and tried to help me from time to time.

Two quick preliminary memories:

I took a class on writing detective novels from him as part of the University of Montana’s MFA program and he was encouraging of me, though not into my writing for that class. I’d smoked hash and drank heavily with him and others at some of those iconic literary parties thrown in Missoula in the late ’80s and had a hell of good time. In the end, I produced the first third of a novel that got some attention from UM writers, though I freaked out and was later saved from being a complete idiot/asshole by a great and wonderful spouse, journalism and the following 30 years in the profession.

So … memory one … walking along the Clark Fork River in Missoula on a mid-spring morning, graduating soon with no plans, I ran into Crumley. He said he’d heard of my manuscript and as we talked said I’d better just focus on that (instead of worrying about a job). I said would but that I needed to stop drinking so damn much, he told me “drinking isn’t the problem, not writing is the problem.”

Memory two: We were in the middle of rollicking good party at Charlie B’s, a dozen writers, filmmakers and intellectuals gathered around Crumley, more or less. He’d recently been released from the hospital, just a few months before he died. I can’t remember (Crumley had a prodigious, accurate and intimidating memory, BTW) what the occasion was but he was clearly the beating heart of that rough beast.

A decision was reached to head several blocks to The Depot for a bit of food with more drinks. Crumley was barely mobile — a cane, those short steps of the suddenly old and inexpertly frail. I asked him if I could drive him and he said sure. Then on the way to the door, which took me at least one more drink to achieve, I got distracted laughing at great stories and so forth. I walked with the group to The Depot. Gathered in the lounging area, new drinks in hand suddenly someone asked me where the hell Crumley was. Oh shit. I’d forgotten him at Charlies! Fuck. I ran outside and there he was shuffling diagonally through the last intersection before the bar. A pickup darted around the corner and barely came to a stop before hitting him. Crumley was suddenly much younger, spun and straightened and put his head up and out and dared the motherfucker to hit him.

… so that’s how I almost killed Crumley. Anyway, here’s that piece.

10-05-2008

Before novelist James Crumley died on Sept. 17, 2008, he decided to get one last thing off his chest publicly, through me, a long-time acquaintance whom he mentored.

In his last in-depth interviews, the author of such acclaimed novels as “The Last Good Kiss” and “Dancing Bear,” revealed that his mother beat him viciously, possibly with an eye to killing him, when he was a boy. 

Our interviews, conducted with a eye toward writing his biography, took place during two beautiful Missoula, Montana, afternoons, sitting in iron chairs in a tucked away courtyard of a hotel called Ruby’s. We marched over the familiar ground of fists, booze, drugs and sex; romance, mountains, friendship and love. We upended glasses of Patron and sucked down a dozen cigarettes. 

That’s the Crumley we all knew (many far better than I), and it’s the writer we came to expect from his operatically violent detective novels. But, as the country saying goes, there was a fly in the ointment. 

His detectives, Milo Milodragovitch and C.W. Sughrue, got their impulse to defend the Weak (who are never what they seem), destroy Bad Men (although they too are Bad Men) and fatalism from the post-Vietnam American culture, for sure, but also from an overly intelligent boy, christened in violence at the hand of his mother, who became a great writer. 

“Sometimes he was very angry and bitter about it, and sometimes very thoughtful,” his wife, Martha Elizabeth, told me in a recent phone call. “I don’t think he ever came to terms with it.”

Crumley didn’t believe in “sanitizing a life,” she said, but he also “made me promise that I wouldn’t try to turn him into Saint Crumley when he died.” 

So Martha Elizabeth wasn’t sure what she would say if it fell to her to explain that detail of the writer’s past. Crumley, in this interview, solved that dilemma for her. I think intentionally. 

In previously published interviews, he often hinted at a rough upbringing, begun in poverty. He said his mother, who died last year, always acted like an outsider, like a stranger, because of that early poverty and the fact that her own father had been in prison for bootlegging. 

“He treated her, when he was with her, he treated her well,” Martha Elizabeth said. “He didn’t agree with everything she said, but he treated her the way he thought his father would want her to be treated. With her, he made that effort. But it cost him.”

Heaven forbid that Crumley’s generous, diverse, wild writing life, his fictional world where everyone has a little good and a lot of bad in them, be reduced to this one detail. However, with this new information, every fight scene, every betrayal, every heart-achingly beautiful description in Crumley’s novels take on a new dimension. We know now that he, like his mirror-image detectives, lived out their PTSD daily and increasingly as they aged. 

Maybe it’s bad literary criticism to use that information, and maybe that’s just too fucking bad. 

“I save her life, she becomes the enemy. That’s cool. Life is more important than ideas. … And me? … I don’t go hunting for lost people much anymore. The women tell me that after all these years I haven’t even found myself. Of course, I haven’t looked all that hard, yet.” — From the last page of “The Right Madness,” Crumley’s final novel.

Here are the salient portions of those interviews on August 6^th and 7^th, 2008:

• Crumley (upon exiting his car): I need some tequila. 
• Jake Ellison: I got some Petron.
• Crumley: You the man. 
• …
• Crumley: I was born on a lease, an oil lease. My dad was a gauger. Takes care of the wells. The Texas Railroad Commission lets you pump this much oil but there has to be someone there to watch it. … We lived outside of Three Rivers at a little cross roads called Simmons. My mother insisted I be born in a hospital because no one else had been born in a hospital. … Then the war came along. … The place where I felt most at home was out at Henry’s place. My great uncle. That’s where I learned to hunt deer and poach turkeys and shit like that. Until the war, it was an okay place because of the mohair supplement. The government paid the farmers or hill-country farmers to grow mohair for gloves. Then came World War II, and then my mother’s father was a gambler and a fuck up. When my mother was very young she fell in love with my dad and her dad was always in trouble. He did three-and-a-half in Huntsville for bootlegging whiskey. He was bootlegging whiskey when she was in the third, forth, fifth grade. So, her daddy was in prison and they gave her a lot of shit. And she and my dad got married when she was 16. …
• J.E.: What did she look like?
• Crumley: She was a fairly pretty redneck girl, but she was very poor. … but very strange. My dad got drunk once after they got engaged, and he hitchhiked to San Antonio and bought an engagement ring and she gave it back to him. You know, we were dirt poor. I’m not poor mouthin’, it’s just that we were dirt poor. … So it went on and on and then he got in the civil service things were different … Unfortunately, like all good mechanics, he became a shop foreman and he hated being inside. And he quit. We were in Deming, New Mexico, by that time and he said fuck it I’m not doing this and we moved back to Johnson City, Texas.
• J.E.: What was he like at home?
• Crumley: My old man?
• J.E.: Yeah.
• Crumley: He was never at home. 
• J.E.: He was just never around?
• Crumley: He didn’t want to be around. If you had known my mother, you wouldn’t have wanted to be around either. 
• J.E.: Did he ever talk to you much?
• Crumley: Not much not till later. My old man he was very quiet. A good guy. Terrifically funny. But he wasn’t none of that other shit. She was …
• J.E.: He was good to you?
• Crumley: He was always good to me. She was … She was a fucking bitch. She tried to kill me several times. 
• J.E.: Like what? 
• Crumley: Hammer. Car. Fists. I mean, she had no …
• J.E.: You feel like she was trying to kill you or just … 
• Crumley: Damn right. I spent my childhood scared to death.
• J.E.: Why was she like that?
• Crumley: Poor. Poor. She never recovered from being poor. .. They don’t recover.
• …
• J.E.: Did you fight very often?
• Crumley: Not too often. … Nobody wants to fucking deal with me. I have my mother’s temper.  … When I get angry you’re walking on the edge of death and once it starts it doesn’t go away. 
• J.E.: When’s the last time you felt like that?
• Crumley: Oh, a long time ago. Pretty much been under control and mostly because of Martha. Martha’s been a life send. I never had quite so much fun just doing nothing. Just playing with our cats, shooting the shit. 
• …
• J.E.: I also read about where when you were first coming to after your last illness, you joked about hitting on Martha 
• Crumley: I didn’t joke about it. I hit on her. 
• J.E.: What struck me too was that you said, I’m Jim Crumley.
• Crumley: I am somebody. 
• J.E.: Yeah.
• Crumley: It’s my turn. 
• J.E.: Yeah.
• Crumley: I hope. Ha ha 
• J.E.: How long have you felt that way?
• Crumley: Quite awhile. I get a lot of big (accolades) in France and England. And a lot of people blame me for the way they work. I don’t know whether it is true or not, but obviously I’ve found something that seems to mean something and I don’t know whether it’s the voice or what it is. It’s just a gift. It’s an absolute gift. 
• …
• J.E.: Who do you think I should talk to (for the biography)?
• Crumley: Anybody you want to. I don’t care. I’ve got a huge body of friends. 
• J.E.: How did that happen?
• Crumley: I’m a good person. But I’m also a bad person, but over the years I’ve become a good person. Somewhere along when this anger thing disappeared, I noticed something odd was happening. People were putting their hands on me. You know like in friendship and I don’t know exactly what that’s about. I think it’s something good. 
• …
• J.E.: What is it that keeps drawing you to writing violent resolutions to almost every conflict?
• Crumley: ’Cus that’s the way the world is for me. There is no easy and most things are solved by violence, no matter what they say. … 
• J.E.: One other thing that really struck me, especially about One to Count Cadence, reading it as an older guy now, was the intensity of figuring out male relationships.
• Crumley: Well friendship, friendship is as hard to write about as love and it’s also as mysterious. You know there’s nothing to do but just write it. Like I said, I don’t think about things. 
• …
• J.E.: What about the drinking life?
• Crumley: It’s a snake you’ve got to keep a handle on it. You’re speaking to someone who has lost a handle on it from time to time.
• J.E.: What’s that like?
• Crumley: It’s not nice. Also, I love crack. 
• J.E.: Crack?
• Crumley: I love Crack. (laughs)
• …
• J.E.: What is it about a writing life that you’ve enjoyed the most? 
• Crumley: The free sex.
• J.E.: The free sex? (laughs)
• Crumley: Everything. I loved everything about it. Friendships and the joy of  reading books. … I don’t know, I never wanted to be anything but a writer, a pro-lineman or an astronaut. 
• …
• Crumley: When I was about three years old, somewhere in there, I told you my mother … My grandparents were visiting we lived in company houses, we never owned a house a of our own, my grandparents were down visiting … (long pause) My a (pause) My parents, we lived 35 miles from Corpus, my little brother (10 years younger than Crumley) started breaking out in hives, very bad case of hives, and you know his throat was swelling up, his eyes were swelling up, he was quit the mess. My mother grabbed the kid up. She held him up by one arm and screamed at me ‘You’ve hurt my baby. You’ve hurt this baby.’
• J.E.: Wow.
• Crumley: I come back I’m going to kill you. Talk about real threats.
• J.E.: What made her think you’d hurt a baby? Why would she say something like that? I mean that was weird.
• Crumley: Hate. Hate of my grandmother.
• J.E.: She was sending that message to your grandmother?
• Crumley: Yeah. 
• J.E.: Or she was reacting to something she thought your grandmother had done?
• Crumley: Yeah, she was out of it, out of the pale. So, there was nothing to do.
• J.E.: What did you think?
• Crumley: I thought I was dead. 
• J.E.: It didn’t feel like an idle threat?
• Crumley: My mother’s threats were never idle. I don’t mean even vaguely idle. Lots of trauma in my childhood. My mother beat me senseless endlessly. 
• J.E.: What was going on in her life that made her so desperate?
• Crumley: I think poverty. 
• J.E.: Just poverty. Which is enough. It’s no excuse, but it can do it. But shit everybody was poor or lots of people were poor. Is Rudy dead?
• Crumley: She died last year.
• J.E.: Did you go back for a funeral?
• Crumley: No.
• J.E.: In a lot of previous interviews you’re really fairly forgiving toward your mom. 
• Crumley: Yeah. Well, I still am. 
• J.E.: But you don’t want to not tell what happened.
• Crumley: No. You know, the way she treated me inculcated my life. She made me who I was. 
• … 
• Crumley: My mother let it all hang out. In many ways she was mean spirited as well as mean. 
• J.E.: You mean beyond excuse, beyond any reason to be mean she was just mean. 
• Crumley: Yeah. I was a pretty good kid. Unfortunately, what you get for being good is shit kicked out of you. Over and over and over again. I ran across the newly formed driveway, leaving little tracks, brother did I get it. And once she, she always wanted to make me do housework, I was never much for housework … Once she grabbed the hammer off the washing machine and hit me upside the head with it. 
• J.E.: So when you walked across the concrete which was black top or .. 
• Crumley: It was that fine red cement they use for walkways and driveways. She beat me then until I was breathless. It was something. I have this feeling that she was molested. I found out later in life this is often the behavior of a molested women. But I have no way of knowing it. 
• J.E.: So as you become a teenager, you become too big for her to mess with.
• Crumley: I remember the worst moment of my childhood. I made her cry about something, she couldn’t whoop me and she tried to get my daddy to whoop me …
• J.E.: Roughly how old would you have been
• Crumley: 14 or 15 or so. She went and got the belt and gave it to my old man and told him to whip me but (long pause) 
• J.E.: He wouldn’t do it?
• Crumley: I took the belt away from him and said, ‘Shorty, you going to whip me, you’re going to have to whip me with  your fists.’ And that sick look on his face is … I’d have done anything to take that look off his face. 
• J.E.: Wow.
• Crumley: Anything. He came through when it was necessary. He came through. 
• J.E.: At that age you were playing football, into school more, more independent because of those things. 
• Crumley: I was also, as you might expect, insane. 
• J.E.: What is insanity? What do you mean by that?
• Crumley: What?
• J.E.: Insanity.
• Crumley: I was completely out of control. It’s a wonder I didn’t kill somebody. I was on the edge of killing somebody all the time. 
• J.E.: Would it have been sort of cold blooded or would it have been in the middle of a fight or 
• Crumley: It’d have been cold blooded. Once I get over to that mad place, it’s crazy.
• J.E.: Once you get over to that mad place?
• Crumley: Yeah. I’m out there. No more. Never spanked my children. Not once. Maybe I should I have a beer. …
• J.E.: Do you think more about your childhood now? People always ask you about it. So, it’s no wonder you would talk about it when someone would ask, but 
• Crumley: It’s always there. It’s the reason I can’t sleep. 
• J.E.: You still relive some of that?
• Crumley: Yes. I take two sleeping pills every night and have for about five or six years just to get some sleep, otherwise I would, between my childhood and fucking gout, I wake up screaming about half the time.
• …
• Crumley: I hate to say it this but Mexican smoke and nigger music saved my life. You know as an outsider you’re always startin’ to hang around different stuff. … My home town is 65 to 70 percent Chicano. I felt like I belonged there … See we moved to Texas when I was in the second grade. I felt like I belonged to them. And then, you know, later I came around to this other almost thing .. hmmm 
• J.E.: Came around to what?
• Crumley: Sort of thinking I was a white guy. I’m a failure as a white guy. 
• J.E.: Yeah
• Crumley: I feel more comfortable in Mexico then I do in America and certainly in Texas. Something missing there.
• …
• J.E.: Reading your work I kept asking myself, well where does Crumley get this sense of PTSD that isn’t just canned? Your characters have PTSD and the people they know who have been in wars have PTSD. It doesn’t just look like it. They have it. 
• Crumley: Yeah. Sure enough. 
• …
• J.E.: What was in the military that might have been instructive to you?
• Crumley: I liked it. 
• J.E.: What did you like about it?
• Crumley: Everything. Having a uniform. Having a gun. Being a turd … I spent lots of drinking time with Hukbalahaps because I would always wonder off and go where ever they lived. I talked to these guys.
• J.E.: Like your experience of going to Mexico, you found the same thing by going off base and talking with these guys.
• Crumley: Right. By not being afraid. I went some places and looked at some shit. Wonder I didn’t get killed.
• …
• J.E.: How will you be able to start your next book?
• Crumley: I need a sentence.
• J.E.: What was the sentence for The Right Madness?
• Crumley: Softball. The opening lie of friendship. 
• J.E.: The line I have for a book I hope to start is: Survival is not the first instinct of my people.
• Crumley: That’s not bad. I might go home and steal that.
• J.E.: I’d be honored.
• Crumley: Good writers steal. Bad writers imitate.  

Details:

James Crumley died on Sept. 17, 2008, from complications of kidney and pulmonary diseases. He was 68 years old. He published 11 books, eight were detective novels. He has been widely acclaimed and credit with transforming the detective genre from the Chandler era into the post-modern era and inspiring many of the best and most prolific detective fiction writers in America. His obituary was carried in the New York Times, The Economist and The Washington Post, among many other domestic and international publications. 

Jake Ellison has been a journalist for 30 years and is currently semi-retired (still writing but not on deadline). He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Montana in 1991, where he first met James Crumley.