James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe * New York Times * Like James Ellroy, he is a master of American vernacular, turning tough-guy slang into something like poetry * Independent * Reading Crumley is like hurtling through an assault course...funny, salty and ruthless...one of the marvels of contemporary crime writing * Literary Review * The poet laureate of American hard-boiled literature, superior even to James Lee Burke in his ability to evoke extreme melancholy, gruesome violence and an acute sense of landscape * Guardian * Crumley writes like an angel on speed * Time Out *