The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
Published 1978 · 320 pages · 75,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime
How hard is The Last Good Kiss to read?
The Last Good Kiss scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Literary prose with Western regional vocabulary, Vietnam-era slang, and Chandleresque turns of phrase.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The novel's elegiac quality elevates it beyond concrete investigation into meditation on loss and landscape.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Moderate density. Investigation details balanced with atmosphere, character, and landscape prose.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Two intertwined cases create some indirection, and Crumley's discursive style wanders productively.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The Western landscape, the missing woman, and the drunken writer all carry substantial symbolic weight.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Sughrue's wisecracking masks genuine emotional vulnerability. Hardboiled irony with a tender core.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- Both cases resolve late, with the connection between them providing the novel's final insight.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Two intertwined investigations across a picaresque journey. Episodic but purposeful.
How The Last Good Kiss is regarded
The Last Good Kiss holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.