Detective Milo Dragovitch spends too much time boozing until he gets caught up in a case involving two-bit criminals and an old lady on the run. His friends call him Milo. No one has ever called him Bud except his father, long dead, and now Sarah Weddington, stirring painful memoires and offering him his first case since he abandoned his private practice and took a job marking time on the night shift for Haliburton Security. The case seems almost too easy, hardly worth the large fee, just to satisfy this old woman's ...
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Detective Milo Dragovitch spends too much time boozing until he gets caught up in a case involving two-bit criminals and an old lady on the run. His friends call him Milo. No one has ever called him Bud except his father, long dead, and now Sarah Weddington, stirring painful memoires and offering him his first case since he abandoned his private practice and took a job marking time on the night shift for Haliburton Security. The case seems almost too easy, hardly worth the large fee, just to satisfy this old woman's curiosity. But things are soon exploding all over the place and Milo is turning up grenades, machine guns, a kilo of marijuana and a bag of coke . . . and suddenly Milo is on the run.
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Seller's Description:
Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape. Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine.
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Acceptable. A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (However the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes--in pen or highlighter--but the notes cannot obscure the text. Book may be a price cutter or have a remainder mark.
If you like your detective fiction raw and nasty, James Crumley's Dancing Bear is your cup of meat. Its protagonist Milo Dragovitch pursues two cases at once, which quickly entwine him in a shipment of cocaine, poachers, stunning and disaffected characters, grenades, AK-47s, and a slew of corpses strewn across the macho backwoods of Montana. As the detective sinks deeper into this morass, he spends as much time snorting "toots," belting shots of peppermint schnapps, and skirt-chasing (though that puts it politely) as he does sleuthing.
The violent, toxic nihilism of this environment may be familiar to fans of Hunter Thompson. Dragovitch is a mess of compulsions. Crumley doesn't quite have Raymond Chandler's way with a metaphor, but it's hard to argue with Crumley's intimacy with place, however over-the-top. I'm of two minds. My preference is for a writer like Ross MacDonald, Chandler's true heir who with utter restraint, was able to depict Southern California as a blasted moral landscape. Crumley is doing something similar, but using a blowtorch to do it.