The last good kiss

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 right out of a fine spring afternoon.

CW Sughrue is a private eye in the tradition of Marlowe and Spade, which means that ten years after Woodstock, ten years after coming home from Vietnam, ten years after Kent State, etc etc etc he's as hopelessly out of time as the other remnants of a more hopeful time he keeps coming across. He's hired by the ex-wife of a famous novelist to bring said novelist back from one of his many 3-week benders, and when he finally finds him in a bar in California he gets to talking to the woman behind the bar. She asks him to look for her daughter, who disappeared into San Francisco in 1969 and hasn't been seen since. And for whatever reason - it certainly isn't money - Sughrue can't not take the case, so off he goes on a trip through a late-70s America full of ex-hippies, coke addicts, Vietnam vets, drunks, porn stars and clever exploiters, looking for a lost flowerchild.

It's a brilliant setup, sort of a low-budget hardboiled detective version of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, in a late-70s setting where everything seems covered in cheap upholstery and owned by some skeevy fuck in a plaid sports jacket and large sideburns driving a late-model Chevy with a plastic dashboard. ...And if that sounds a little too dramatic, then maybe that's part of the problem of the book as well. Sughrue is constantly monologizing like a Tom Waits character, and it gets a little too much at times. At the same time, that's part of the novel's charm; we have a novel where the typical cynical private eye, a man who's killed women and children in the name of democracy, suddenly finds himself almost the last person in the world who still cares about anything but money and power. As a detective story, it's deliciously slow-moving - no murder every 50 pages to keep up the interest, no endless descriptions of clues, violent and harsh when it needs to be but never looking away from the consequences (in this world, when you punch someone in the jaw, you break your own fingers). As a description of its time, it's fascinating if not quite as sharp as, say, James Ellroy - who, of course, has the benefit of hindsight.

The Last Good Kiss takes on two genres; the detective novel meets post-Vietnam Americana. It's not a perfect fit, and certainly not a marriage that lets anyone in it live happy ever after, but a fascinating one.