Dancing Bear by James Crumley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I heard their voices but not the words, and they seemed far away, as if we all stood in the brilliant salt-air haze of some Mexican Pacific beach, paralyzed by the sun and the softly pounding surf, reduced into an infinite languor, language lost in the muffled, sun-struck crash of the waves in the throbbing air."

I have been afflicted by the curse of often finding books that are promising and captivating at the beginning, and then deteriorate into incoherent or implausible mess. I have even begun suspecting that maybe the fault lies with me being too excited about a new book at the beginning and then too fussy about details as the plot progresses. But no, I have checked quite a number of my reviews of crime novels and similar genres and only about a third of them exhibit the deterioration of quality as the plot develops. Alas, James Crumley's Dancing Bear (1983) is a prime example of that unfortunate category.

The novel begins strongly: the Native American tale about a dancing Brother Bear, the description of the narrator's fight with the hapless mailman, and the banter with Gail are captivating. The setup of the plot, where the narrator is hired by an elderly woman, Sarah, with whom he had been "boyishly in love" 40 years ago, is really excellent. The reader will even find snippets of beautiful prose - like the passage quoted in the epigraph above - which show Mr. Crumley's literary gifts. But then... shooting and killing begins. Killing and shooting. Geysers and rivers of blood. Ludicrous, contrived, gratuitous.

Anyway, the narrator is one Milo (short for Milton Milodragovitch), a late-middle-age burnt-out PI and rent-a-cop for a private security company, a heavy coke addict and alcoholic who stays sober by drinking only peppermint schnapps that he hates. Milo is waiting for his father's "ton of money" that he will inherit when he turns fifty-two, which event can't come soon enough for him. Sarah, who happens to be his father's ex-lover, hires him to investigate strange going-ons in her neighborhood. In the meantime, his boss in the security company gives him a tailing job. Naturally, as required by a cliché literary device, the two cases eventually merge.

Yet shooting and killing begins earlier. The reader is offered geysers of blood:

"His left leg was gone below the knee, his right above, and blood gushed from the nerve on his cheek, and most of his fingers were stubs, the pink, pork-chop flesh not bleeding yet."

Wait; there's more:

"[...] I made sure the dead were really dead. Nobody at home in Blondie's head, the little guy swallowed his tongue, choked on his own blood, and the actor's buttocks jiggled like jelly when I shook them with my foot [...]"

The plot takes place in western Montana and neighboring states: the author masterfully depicts the rugged landscapes and the tough people of the land. The prose is full of dark and rather grim humor; being a sworn enemy of private gun ownership I laughed out loud when I read the following passage:

"[...] a private investigator by the name of Shepard, when asked by a journalist if he carried a gun in his work, replied,
'Hell, no. If somebody wants to shoot old Shepsy, they're gonna have to bring their own gun.'"

So, despite the utterly ridiculous plot, despite the incessant shooting and killing and gushing blood, I can offer a very marginal recommendation. For the setup, for Montana landscapes, and dark humor.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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