It’s a long way from the artists’ entrance to the Barbican platform, and Norman did not want to be seen struggling the distance. After all, she is a diva, and should simply appear, by as close to supernatural means as the Barbican’s carpenters could devise. His barkingly funny dialogue and robust simplicity of characterisation make this the kind of book you read with your ears.. They were dumb shits and proud of it.” Lansdale perhaps comes closer than any other writer to achieving the mystic union of rock and roll, comedy and cri-fi. When Leonard’s boyfriend turns up, murdered, he’s the obvious suspect The book is full of country satire, earthy and brutal. While Hap’s away on an oil-rig, best friend Leonard loses his job as a bouncer for urinating on a troublemaker’s head United, the boys fight a rabid squirrel.

It has claimed a new territory inside crime fiction.Another example of the New Western is Joe R Lansdale’s Bad Chili (Gollancz, pounds 9.99), latest in what is becoming one of the decade’s great crime series – despite its potentially corny “odd couple” premise. “Shit happens” is their philosophy; and “Anybody who speaks badly of revenge ain’t never lost nothing important”. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the Western, here’s your answer. On about page 20 I lost track of the plot of Bordersnakes (HarperCollins, pounds 15.99) – some kind of revenge-fuelled odyssey thing – and by page 21 I just didn’t care The jokes are funny, the sex and violence even funnier. The dialogue rolls like a river: only genuine gut-writing can produce such slick fluency without sacrificing the abrasiveness of the characters.This book brings together Crumley’s two private eyes, Milo Milodragovitch and C W Sughrue, avoiding death around the Tex-Mex border. Shootings and stabbings are interspersed with banal, made-for-TV scenes of family life.

The author shoves irritating folk sayings into the mouths of whoever happens to be speaking: the nearest he gets to characterisation.
Headline’s publicists boast that “No other hardback launch has been so powerfully marketed” They should be ashamed. There are undoubtedly more good thriller writers active today than at any previous time, and no excuse for wasting vast sums on a book as unremittingly ordinary as this one. The ending, incidentally, is a cynical, corny teaser for the next instalment in the series.The only way to read James Crumley is to surrender yourself to the rough- bearded, booze-breathed poetry, the belligerent sentimentality, the not always pleasant but impressive spectacle of rednecked men exposing themselves to themselves. It contains no element of originality in plot, villain, hero or style; worse, no attempted originality. The chapter breaks are arbitrary, which slows down the action dreadfully, as every chapterlette must end in suspense and begin in recap.