Customer Reviews

Wrong Case

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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Take it from the title, "The Wrong Case," is not a happy story. In fact, private detective fiction seldom gets more hardboiled or as down and dirty as this one. Crumley's "hero," the recently unemployed private snoop Milo, is a man shattered by a terrible upbringing and by alcohol. But despite his cynical and distrustful nature, he takes a case he knows will be a loser in a last ditch effort to both redeem himself and to find love. The results are about what you would expect.

Milo is a completely different character than Crumley's other private detective hero C.W. Sughrue, the party animal star of "The Last God Kiss" among others. Milo has been scarred far deeper by life and fully expects to lose himself to his addictions at some point. His best friends are homeless winos with one foot firmly planted in their graves. Brooding, violent and with a perfectly shocking ending, "The Wrong Case" is one of THE great hardboiled detective novels.

The Grateful Dead must have written "Hell in a Bucket" for Milodragovitch, the well-born boy/man who never met expectations. So bright, so charming--what a shame! He's on the skids with booze and drugs, but going down gracefully. Milo is a private eye who just got legislated out of business. The divorce laws have been eased. It used to be adultery and insanity were the only grounds for divorce in his state (Washington? Montana?), which gave him a steady supply of clients trying to nail an errant spouse. Now all it takes is "irreconcilable differences" to win a decree, and who needs a private eye for that?

The standard gorgeous lady comes to his office with a tearful request as he is consuming his lunch of raspberry yogurt and "office whiskey." Her brother OD'd on drugs and has been declared a suicide. She vehemently insists he was murdered. Her description of her sensitive, academic gentle brother does not jibe with Milo's recollection of the cold-eyed loser he had seen about town, but he has fallen in love--instantly. He assembles his troop of bums, eccentrics and low livers to assist him in investigating the crime. He discovers layer after layer of corruption and rampant drug dealing in his supposedly peaceful town of Meriwether that his great grandfather founded. He is neither surprised nor dismayed.

This is a novel beyond noir; it is a novel of despair. Like Hunter Thompson's hero in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Milo is destroying himself with clarity and precision. The book is witty, humorous and lyrically written. The action is intense and explosive. But the undercurrents are always there, gray and dark.

Brilliantly written and highly readable, put this book on your "must read" list. You won't regret it.

The Wrong Case is a detecitive story set within a small city in the Pacific Northwest. It is also a story
of greater size and theme than the conventional crime entertainment.
It introduces Milo, a run-down alcholic private detective who will go on a personal
and professional journey as only a hero can do.

Crumley is a skilled and schooled writer. His characters are richly rendered, the plot is original and the suspense
is convincing. Unlike most detective works, Crumley manages to capture his city's growing pains with a Dickensian eye
as well as examine his past with a touch of Greek tragedy.

Don't miss any of Crumley's works. He captures the new American landscape
as nobody else can. I liken him to Graham Greene in the way he can deliver
original entertainment, excellent language, and themes much larger than a paperback

After having read a string of bad thrillers with stereotyped characters and endings that could be seen a mile off this was a breath of fresh air - an amiable amble through the low-lifes and unfortunates of Meriwether, Montana, recounted in a distinctive first-person style by our narrator, the alcohol- and speed-fuelled Milo Milodragovitch, killing time (and a few, more human, bodies) as a, somehwat inept, private-eye until his inheritance comes through. The best feature of the book is that it is character rather than plot-driven - indeed you may find, as I did, that you don't care how it turns out, just being in Milo's company for a few hours is reward enough!

Milo Milodragovitch isn't just any private eye. He's cloned from the literary DNA of Phillip Marlowe himself. Except it's the 1970's and instead of LA, Milo's shabby one man office is in downtown Meriwether, a city of 50,000 in the Pacific Northwest.

When early in The Wrong Case, the comely Helen Duffy of Storm Lake, Iowa nervously enters Milo's place of business to hire him to find her missing brother, the reader is likely to feel as though he or she has picked up Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister by mistake. That's how similar the two novels are in their opening passages.

We soon learn that Milo is a deeply flawed individual with alcoholism as only one of his many problems. He agrees to take the case, not out of professional interest and not for the wad of traveler's checks Helen eventually offers him. No, he takes the case because he lusts after Helen's body. At this point, one has to hand it to James Crumley. Few other author's would have dared to offer up a protagonist who is that much of a creep.

A lot happens as the narrative unfolds. On more than one occasion Milo is beaten to within an inch of his life. He kills a man using a derringer at close range. He even has sex with an uninhibited hippie chick he meets along the way.

Eventually, almost reluctantly, Milo discovers the key to the mystery surrounding Helen Duffy's brother. It then becomes abundantly apparent to both Milo and the reader that the case he's spent the entire book working on has been in so many ways a wrong one.

This is hardboiled detective fiction in its most unvarnished form. Recommended to fans of the genre.

This gritty detective mystery has everything a good hardboiled book should have. A beautiful, yet troubled woman who has entered the detective's office looking for help, the down-on-his-luck detective who talks hard and drinks harder, a city that is in the grip of a crime-wave and a cracker of a mystery that builds to a terrific and unexpected ending.

We are introduced to Milo Milodragovitch and his hard-drinking, drug-taking, skirt-chasing ways. Milo's on the edge after two failed marriages, a failing business and a drinking problem. He makes no apologies for any of his bad habits and is prepared to blow off anyone who has a problem with him. The woman who has entered his office steals his heart and asks him to find her brother who has been missing for the past three weeks. It's a case that he doesn't really want to take, but does because, as he freely admits, she is such a stunning woman he'd do anything on the off-chance she might go to bed with him.

If anyone ever wanted to get a taste for modern hardboiled noir fiction, this would be the perfect book to read. I found myself drawn right into the book and could picture the town of Meriwether perfectly and at times I could picture myself occupying a stool at Mahoney's bar, the imagery is so vivid.

This is probably the most noir crime novel I've ever read. The main character is so far the anti hero, that you almost quit caring about him. The pacing of the story is a little odd also, it seems to come and go with no clear arch. The climax (if you can call it that) isn't really that climactic, and leaves the reader feeling almost let down. Also, this was written in the 70's and the dialog shows it. When they say 'ballin' or 'outa sight, man', it seems almost quaint.

The story was interesting, and there were a lot of twists that I didn't see coming.

Overall, it's good, but I would have liked a little tighter pacing.

Milo Milodragovitch is a private detective in the Pacific Northwest, probably in the post-Vietnam, drug using, clenched fist, promiscuous late '60's and early '70's.

Like C.W.Sughrue in The Last Good Kiss, Milo makes no bones about his lifestyle, frequently strung out on speed and alcohol, taking beatings and giving them, finding sex where and when he can. He takes a case for all the wrong reasons, and then Crumley shows us that he would likely as not have taken the case even if he had known the right reasons. If there were any right reasons.

He falls in love with Helen Duffy and offers to help find her lost brother.

He has the wrong information from the wrong friends. He is disliked by any and all that would help him, misled by clients, aided by winos and criminals, and continually sifts through misinformation, disinformation and lies. But it's tough to ferret out the truth when you're going from one binge to the next.

It's difficult to find something redeeming about Milo except there is a certain nobility in his tenacity. The characters are strong. This is dark mystery and not for the weak of heart. But it is particularly native to America and the American myth of the hardboiled Private Eye. We're talking hardboiled. Vintage Mike Hammer and Phillip Marlowe.

Good stuff. And life goes on after it's all done. At least for Milo.

Welcome to Meriwether, a city in a mountain valley somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It seems to be largely populated by homeless alcoholics and hippies. But it has a righteous sheriff. And it has Milo, a down-on-his luck PI.

Milo used to make a decent living getting the goods on adulterors in divorce cases, but his state has eased the divorce laws and he's out of business. He's from a rich and famous family, but his trust fund doesn't kick in for 13 more years. He's already had three shots before lunch and, gazing out his office window, is amusing himself by watching a purse snatcher get run over in the street when the beautiful Helen walks into his office and tearfully asks his help in clearing up the death of her younger brother, who was found sitting on a bar toilet dead of a smack overdose, needle still in his arm. She insists he was murdered. Milo doesn't buy her story, but takes the case in hopes of getting her into bed.

Thus begins "The Wrong Case" by James Crumley, one of the most hard-boiled, vivid, cruel, sleazy, tender, brutal, alcohol-soaked and brilliant noir novels you'll ever read.

Written in the early '70s, it perfectly captures the era. There's a wonderfully rendered reckless hippie chick named Mindy who lives a nomadic life and who likes to pose nude beside highways to see if she can cause an accident. Listen to her and you can hear how young people actually talked back then. Youthful readers may think she's unreal. She's not. I knew lots of people like this back in the day. She reminded me a little of my first wife.

As Milo digs, at first half-hearted, then with full blown tenacity, he gets beaten, shoots some people, blows up a gay guys front porch, visits a commune and hands out surveillance jobs to his crew of jolly winos.

Milo finally clears up the case and heads home, only to find one last startling and profoundly dismaying revelation awaiting him.

Wouldn't want to live there, but I love visiting Crumley's world.

This book won't be for everyone. It centres on a hard-drinking private eye trying to solve the mystery of the death of a young man.

Crumley writes well but seems incredibly focussed on alcohol and drugs throughout the book (and his other crime books). This is all well and good, but gets a bit tiresome after a while.

This is a solid read but not one in which you are left with the feeling of wanting more soon.