James Crumley deserves to be regarded as a serious novelist who has chosen to write in the detective genre. Like his protagonists, he seems driven to seek complete answers where only partial or superficial answers can be found; in this sense, the detective mystery as a form has become an extended metaphor for Crumley 's search for self-expression as a novelist. Also like his protagonists, Crumley has wandered between the geographic and climatic--and the cultural and spiritual--extremes of northern Montana and southern Texas. What one of his detectives says to the other in Bordersnakes (1996) might be a rhetorical question posed by Crumley to himself: "You ever realize that you and me, we've always lived close enough to the border to run if we have to"" Since the 1969 publication of his first novel, One to Count Cadence, Crumley has published five novels and a collection of shorter pieces. Although...