Cult crime novelist writer James Crumley, 68

James Crumley, a revered and influential crime novelist whose hard-boiled detective tales set in Montana and other Western locales were praised for their grittiness and the lyrical quality of their prose, has died. He was 68.

Mr. Crumley died of complications from kidney and pulmonary diseases Wednesday at a Missoula, Mont., hospital, said his wife, writer and artist Martha Elizabeth.

A self-described "bastard child of Raymond Chandler," Mr. Crumley wrote seven crime novels featuring two detectives set in what he called "my twisted highways in the mountain West."

Mr. Crumley's private eyes, C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch, were, as Dallas Morning News writer Jerome Weeks wrote in 2001, "sullen, violent men whose drug use and carnal antics would stagger a rhino."

To tell his two detectives apart, Mr. Crumley suggested remembering that "Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot."

The opening line to his 1978 Sughrue novel "The Last Good Kiss," which many consider his masterpiece, is considered classic — and fans often would recite it to him at book signings:

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

That line, Mr. Crumley said, took him eight years to write. But it, and the book, proved influential to a generation of crime novelists, including George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly.

"If you asked us to name one book that got us jacked up to write crime novels, it would be 'The Last Good Kiss,' " Pelecanos said.

Otto Penzler, owner of Mysterious Bookshop in New York and founder of Mysterious Press, has called "The Last Good Kiss" the greatest private-eye novel he ever read.

And, Penzler said, "although his series character [Sughrue] was a drug-abusing alcoholic, he still had a romantic vision about doing the right thing."

That was true about all of Mr. Crumley's work, said Penzler, who published the second novel featuring Sughrue, "The Mexican Tree Duck," which won the 1994 Dashiell Hammett Award for Best Literary Crime Novel.

Although he never had a best-seller, Crumley developed a large cult following and received tremendous critical acclaim.

"He just never found a vast mass audience," Penzler said, "and I wish I could tell you why. I don't know."

The son of an oil-field supervisor, Mr. Crumley was born Oct. 12, 1939, in Three Rivers, Texas.

He attended Georgia Institute of Technology for a year before serving in the Army from 1958 to 1961. He later earned a bachelor's degree in history from what is now Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1966.

While in the writing program, he wrote a good portion of what became his first book: "One to Count Cadence," a Vietnam War novel published by Random House in 1969.

Mr. Crumley, who moved to Missoula in 1966 to teach English at the University of Montana, later taught writing at colleges and universities across the country.

He also spent 10 years in and out of Hollywood writing unproduced screenplays and working as a script doctor. He co-wrote, with Rob Sullivan, the screenplay for "The Far Side of Jericho," which debuted at the Santa Fe Film Festival in 2006.

Mr. Crumley's second published book was "The Wrong Case," a 1975 crime novel that introduced his detective Milo Milodragovitch. Both of Mr. Crumley's detectives turned up in his 1996 novel "Bordersnakes."

His last novel, "The Right Madness," featuring Sughrue, was published in 2005 and was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller.

In addition to Martha, his fifth wife, of 16 years, Mr. Crumley is survived by three children from his second marriage, Mary, Elizabeth and David; two children from his fourth marriage, Conor and Chris; his brother, John; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.