Described as the literary offspring of Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson, none of the books that Crumley wrote ever became bestsellers, but he had a cult following devoted to his writing, and received critical acclaim. David Dempsey in the
New York Times called Crumley's debut novel,
One to Count Cadence, set during the Vietnam War, "...a compelling study of the gratuitous violence in men. ... It is a story of bars, brawls, and brothels...and I don't know of any writer who has done it better." In 1993, Marilyn Stasio, reviewing
The Mexican Tree Duck in the same publication, wrote: "Characters as memorable as [Crumley's] don't come blazing down the interstate that often. Neither do writers like Mr. Crumley. Treasure them before they burn themselves out...and take the flame with them." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described Crumley's work as being about "a violently chaotic world that can be seen as a legacy of Vietnam, of which his characters are nightmare-haunted veterans," while Ron Powers called it "
the Big Sky Country [reimagined] as a kind of hard-boiled Lake Wobegon with bloodstains, a hellscape where all the women are tall ... the men sport pugnacious foreheads, brutal jaws and Indian braids, and all the children are away at camp.
"You don't read Crumley for plot," according to Patrick Anderson in the
Washington Post, "You read him for his outlaw attitude, his rough poetry and his scenes, paragraphs, sentences, moments. You read him for the lawyer with 'a smile as innocent as the first martini'" . Critic Maxim Jakubowski, who was a friend of Crumley's, writing after his death, referred to his last two books,
The Final Country and
A Right Madness as:
...bittersweet adventures in which [Crumley] could evoke the skies over Texas and Montana and the landscapes of America like a veritable angel slumming amid the ferocious gunfire, the betrayals his characters always suffered and the trademark bruised romanticism that only he could conjure up without it sounding maudlin.
A number of writers view
The Last Good Kiss as Crumley's best work. Its opening line is sometimes cited as the best in the genre:
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.