In the summer of 1989 John L. Williams embarked on an epic journey through a deeply troubled USA. The result was an instant cult classic. Here he explains what that journey was about, followed by an extract from the book  

Into the Badlands was first published in 1991, just before my 30^th birthday. When I wrote this book I had two principal ambitions for it. I wanted it to serve as an introduction to the thrilling new wave of American crime writing, and I wanted to give the reader an unorthodox guided tour around the badlands of the USA at a time when relatively few Brits had visited the country in any depth. What we have now is a time capsule. This is a portrait of crime writers and their America from the last time before such things became over-exposed.

Reading back over the book I’m transported to a time before the internet and the corporate-ness of everything. It’s a time when crime fiction wasn’t seen as the commercial catnip it has become, but rather as a disreputable backwater, a lawless place where writers could do what they liked as long as they remembered to include a plot and a murder or two.

From Into the Badlands

Missoula, Montana

Sitting at the bar of the Top Hat on Front Street, Missoula, I make another attempt at calling [hardboiled crime fiction writer] James Crumley, and for the fifth time I get his answering service, who will once again certainly give him the message as soon as he calls in. It has not been a good day. Most of it has been spent in airports or aeroplanes, including an enchanting stopover in Salt Lake City, where you can’t get a drink except with food, which means that the bar does cracking business with a peculiarly repellent line of cookies which apparently conform to the Mormon definition of food. My big mistake was actually eating one of these cookies rather than just piling them up on my plate after the fashion of my fellow drinkers, who had clearly passed this way before.

Arriving in Montana I was welcomed by a wave of unforced friendliness and the news that my credit card was ‘maxed out’ and thus rendered me unfit to rent a car. After considerable faffing about, the remarkably helpful car-rental folks manage to fix me up with the local branch of Rent-a-Wreck, who are actually willing to accept cash.

An hour later I’ve checked into a motel on East Broadway, driven around Missoula’s new western suburbs, and inadvertently consumed a Big Mac, in between times attempting to call Crumley. Towards six o’clock I wind up back in the old town centre, walk around a little and decide to rest up a while in the Top Hat, a big dark bar, with a stage at the back and pool tables in the centre. It’s quiet and it’s dark and after a couple of Dos Equis I’ve summoned up enough bonhomie to start talking to the laid back longhair barman.

I explain I’m here to see James Crumley and he says, ‘Oh God, Crumley! He was here just a couple of hours ago. Have you tried him at home?’ Well, yes, that’s what I’ve just been doing. ‘OK,’ says the barman, ‘let’s try Charlie’s.’ He picks up the phone and gets what is clearly another bar on the line and asks has Crumley been in? The word comes back that Crumley has indeed been in, has just left and was thought to be heading homewards. Another call to his home is picked up by the answering service. The barman says, ‘Tell them you’re in the Top Hat.’ So I do.

And barely has enough time to order another drink elapsed before the phone rings and it’s Crumley to say, ‘Come on over, Philip’ll tell you where I live.’ So Philip draws me a map which, while somewhat short on street names and long on directions of the ‘turn left by the big tree’ variety, still proves serviceable enough.

Crumley is easily cast as the Hemingway of the detective novel. He’s a big bearded bearlike man who loves to drink and raise hell and talk about literature. He writes books about troubled macho men, adrift in a world where simple values, a desire for decency, can get you killed; books in which the hero is doomed always to lose the girl in the last chapter, desperately romantic novels of the private eye as the last denizen of the old west; novels in which Missoula, renamed Meriwether, stands as the last simple place left.

Crumley has written only four novels in twenty years, the first, One to Count Cadence, came out in 1969 and is rooted in Crumley’s time in the army in the early days of the Vietnam War. The three succeeding novels, appearing at intervals of five years or so, The Wrong Case, The Last Good Kiss and Dancing Bear, are all private-eye novels of a sort.

This tough-guy romanticism peaked with The Last Good Kiss, in which Texan Vietnam vet C. W. Sughrue, part-time PI and part-time bartender, searches the north-west states for a woman named Betty Sue Flowers. The book opens, however, with Sughrue running down an alcoholic middle-aged novelist named Abraham Traheame, a self-consciously Hemingwayesque bull of a man. Traheame leads Sughrue through a liver-critical interstate bar-crawl:

‘We covered the west, touring the bars, seeing the sights. The Chugwater Hotel down in Wyoming, the Mayflower in Cheyenne, the Stockman’s in Rawlins, a barbed-wire collection in the Sacjawea Hotel Bar in Three Forks, Montana, rocks in Fossil, Oregon, drunken Mormons all over northern Utah and southern Idaho – circling, wandering in an aimless drift. Twice I hired private planes to get ahead of the old man, and twice he failed to show up until after I had left. I liked his taste in bars but I was in and out of so many that they began to seem like the same endless bar.’

Chasing Crumley around the bars of Missoula is hardly in the same league, but when I succeed in following Frank’s map to Crumley’s place there’s a distinct sense of relief that attaches to finding him in, drinking a can of Pabst Blue Riband and talking down the phone to someone who would appear to have a) just got married and b) stopped using cocaine, both admissions provoking gales of laughter from Crumley. He puts down the phone and welcomes me in, mi casa es su casa style, then fetches some more cans of Pabst from the refrigerator.

Into the Badlands: America and its Crime Writers (£16.99) by John L. Williams is published by Oldcastle Books. This updated and expanded edition includes a new foreword by the author and an afterword by acclaimed novelist David Peace.

Out on 16 April.

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