The contrasting impressions are about right, James Crumley is an ex-roughneck and football-player whose few novels establish him as America's greatest writer in the Hemingmay tough-guy tradition. Greying now, he walks like a man who's worked physically hard for a living and talks with the care and courtesy of an English lecturer from a college in the Deep South. James Crumley is a big man, not tall but powerful with a spreading gut. After a day of trekking round Paris looking for a hotel room, any hotel room, and ending up in a fleapit that would win the Franz Kafka award for gratuitously depressing ambience, it was more than a relief to find a man who still likes a drink. It was invented by people who needed a drink!" Meeting James Crumley is by no stretch of the imagination boring. Chances are, when you meet some guy who writes about lowlife drunks and whores, bad guys and worse places, they'll be drinking Perrier water and telling you how they won their battle with the bottle just in time. It’s a dangerous myth, the hard-drinking artist. Home? Try a motel bar at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, my silence shared by a pretty barmaid who thinks I'm a creep and some asshole in a plastic jacket who thinks I'm his buddy. Home? Home is my apartment on the east side of Hell-Roaring Creek, three rooms where I have to open the closets and drawers to be sure I'm in the right place. Hard to believe I'm the age now that Jim was then.
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