James Crumley

James Crumley (1939–2008) was a writer best known for his crime novels. He grew up in southern Texas and studied with the help of a Navy football scholarship. As his thesis at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he submitted the first part of his novel “One to Count Cadence,” a notable work about the Vietnam War. From 1975 onward, he published exclusively crime fiction, influenced in part by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Alongside his writing, he taught English at a university.