JAMES CRUMLEY, 68

Crime novelist

James Crumley, a critically acclaimed crime novelist whose drug-infused, alcohol-soaked, profanity-laced, breathtakingly violent books swept the hard-boiled detective from the Raymond Chandler era into an amoral, utterly dissolute, apocalyptic post-Vietnam universe, died Wednesday in Missoula, Mont.

No cause of death had been identified, his family said. Mr. Crumley had been in declining health with kidney, vascular and other problems in recent years.

If Mr. Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson had collaborated to produce a literary offspring, Mr. Crumley likely have been the result. In seven private-eye novels, he carved out a genre that might properly be called "gonzo gumshoe," set mostly in the back alleys, seedy bars and wild, forbidding countryside of Montana.

Mr. Crumley had two private eyes. The first, Milton Chester Milodragovitch, known as Milo, is a multiply divorced, hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting womanizer. Introduced in The Wrong Case (1975), he reappeared in Dancing Bear (1983) and The Final Country (2001).

The second, C.W. Sughrue, is a former Vietnam War criminal and hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting womanizer. Introduced in The Last Good Kiss (1978), he also appears in The Mexican Tree Duck (1993) and The Right Madness (2005).

Mr. Crumley's plots did not always make perfect sense, but they probably were not meant to: In a world where nearly everyone is guilty of something heinous, finding out whodunit is largely beside the point. But if critics faulted his plotting, they routinely praised his complex, broken characters and hurtling, hard-edged prose.