| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Mexican Tree Duck for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
C.W. Sughrue - anti-hero of the book "The Last Good Kiss" - is back, on the trail of a kidnapped woman no-one can find - neither her well-connected Republican husband, the FBI, nor a group of violence-prone guys from South America. His only clue is the strange, hollowed-out sculpture of a duck.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
When the 3:12 through freight to Spokane hit the East Meriwether crossing, the engineer touched his horn and released a long, mournful wail into the wet, snowy air of our second early fall storm in western Montana. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
When the 3:12 through freight to Spokane hit the East Meriwether crossing, the engineer touched his horn and released a long, mournful wail into the wet, snowy air of our second early fall storm in western Montana. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Not up to the standards of his best work
10 Feb 2001
Format:Mass Market Paperback
James Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss" (1978) and "The Wrong Case" (1975) are two of the best hardboiled detective fiction novels ever written. With "The Mexican Tree Duck," Crumley brings back Private Investigator C.W. Sughrue from "Kiss." Alas, the results are not nearly as satisfying. Crumley is quite adept at creating effective moments. For example, there is a flashback here to Sughrue's service in the Vietnam War in which an officer is killed by a poisonous snake that I will not soon forget. There are numerous such moments in this book, but not enough to make up for a story that stretches credibility to the breaking point. The novel also lacks an effective villian, and many of Sughrue's foes here are the type faceless minions you'd expect in a James Bond movie.
Overall, "The Mexican Tree Duck" is not a bad novel. Crumley at his worst is still a literary force who can put to shame a lot of the lightweights writing mystery novels these days. But I wouldn't recommend this as a first Crumley novel. Read one of his classics and get familiar with his unique genius first.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
the mexican tree duck
3 Aug 2000
Format:Hardcover
The first Crumley book I read was "the last good kiss" I have been hooked on crumley ever since. He is a chandlerisc writter who deftly out chandlers chandler. His black crime writting picks up in the 1970's where chandler left off in the fifties. What "the last good kiss" lacked in plotting focus came together completely in "the tree duck". a person simply has to love a guy whose cast of characters include :a drunk bull dog, a juke box with hank snow, twin fish peddlers who also have a sideline in gun running, and a filthy speed freak biker with a good heart and better woman.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A Nam Vet's response
8 Jun 2005
Format:Paperback
Okay, I gave you one credential. I served with E Recon 1/7th Cavalry. Crumley's a Nam vet too and in "One to Count Cadence" wrote one of the earliest novels that began to address that experience directly.
Here in "Mexican Tree Duck" he creates the emotional landscape that is shared by many of us who "also served."
Detective fiction has a subgenre that I might call "My Best Friend did it." Here that genre is mined to create the sense of abandonment and betrayal that many who served in Vietnam are ultimately heir to.
My favorite scene is that of Serita's rescue.
All the now old farts get it together and do exactly the tacticaly correct thing to do for what turns out, (for them), to be the inevitably wrong reason. Worse they fail to protect their unprotected flank and CW loses his love.
Doing what your supposed to and getting screwed for it....
Well every Nam vet I know understands that.
On top of that, (the not quite Masters in English is now speaking), what a technically proficient read!
Crumley knows how to use this genre and spin his good tale. He has slipped in other books, but this was not one of them, and I will still read them every one.
Here in "Mexican Tree Duck" he creates the emotional landscape that is shared by many of us who "also served."
Detective fiction has a subgenre that I might call "My Best Friend did it." Here that genre is mined to create the sense of abandonment and betrayal that many who served in Vietnam are ultimately heir to.
My favorite scene is that of Serita's rescue.
All the now old farts get it together and do exactly the tacticaly correct thing to do for what turns out, (for them), to be the inevitably wrong reason. Worse they fail to protect their unprotected flank and CW loses his love.
Doing what your supposed to and getting screwed for it....
Well every Nam vet I know understands that.
On top of that, (the not quite Masters in English is now speaking), what a technically proficient read!
Crumley knows how to use this genre and spin his good tale. He has slipped in other books, but this was not one of them, and I will still read them every one.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
