Being a Detective Is a Job
by Miles Klee
Milo Milodragovitch, private investigator, is more washed up than hardboiled. The protagonist of Dancing Bear, by cult favorite author James Crumley, is a third-generation Montanan in his forties with a major chip on his shoulder and no detective practice of his own, having closed up shop and taken a low-end gig as a private security goon. He has multiple ex-wives. He sips peppermint schnapps, which he hates, in order to stave off the inevitable full-on bender that would result from a taste of whiskey, and he consumes a decent amount of cocaine daily, apparently more out of boredom than for euphoric effect. Early in the story, he gets into a ridiculous brawl with a mailman in front of his house. There is no way, the reader may imagine, that this dope will ever solve a mystery. But solve a mystery he does—after a fashion.
Once he takes on what should have been an easy job from the wealthiest woman in town, a lot of people are shot to death and blown up in the course of his erratic detective work. As much as he fucks up, gets fucked up, and is generally bewildered at whatever the hell he finds himself in the middle of, Milo steadily unravels a darkly plausible conspiracy. He survives this deadly game, but that doesn’t prevent the melancholy ending promised by the genre: as in any good noir story, the real discovery is that the world itself is rotten, just as our protagonist already knew.
Milo’s “success” in uncovering the sordid truth despite every handicap and setback got me thinking about the spectrum of competence in detective and crime fiction, the way we want to root both for the bumbling slacker (the heroes of The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice come to mind) and for the steely professional who satisfies our hunger for exactitude and the elegant getaway.
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