Just as an entire generation of British schoolboys can perfectly recite Monty Python's parrot sketch, there are few American crime writers of the hardboiled school who cannot quote verbatim the opening to James Crumley's novel The Last Good Kiss: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Traherne, 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." The novel was only Crumley's second foray into crime fiction but it brought him instant cult status among writers and readers of the genre.
Crumley, who has died aged 68, grew up in south Texas, but is most closely associated with his adopted home town of Missoula, Montana. After high school, he enlisted in the US army, then attended college in Texas, graduating with a history degree in 1964. He took an MA in creative writing at the University of Iowa and his thesis, based on his army experiences, was published as the novel One to Count Cadence in 1969. The book was well received by US critics but remained unpublished in Britain until 1994.
A career in university teaching beckoned, but when Crumley joined the English faculty at the University of Montana he discovered Raymond Chandler and was inspired to try his hand at the private eye story with The Wrong Case (1976), which introduced Montana-based detective Milo Milodragovitch. The Last Good Kiss followed in 1978 with another Montana detective, CW Sughrue, and cult status was assured when Milo returned for a second outing in Dancing Bear in 1983.
As with Chandler, Crumley's plots took second place behind his characters and the language of the prose, and Crumley was hailed as "the rightful heir" to Chandler. Yet his detective heroes were distinctly of the post-60s generation in their attitudes to drugs and alcohol, enjoying consumption to excess.
In fact, all the characters in Crumley's novels are distinctly offbeat, with skewed views of life. The violence that is usually meted out to them is described in a graphic, unsentimental, yet lyrical way, earning the author the sobriquet "the poet of hard-boiled".
His first three detective novels gained him an instant ranking alongside Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and James Lee Burke, as well as a dedicated following of fans, among them Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly, who were to emerge as the following generation of American mystery writers.
It was to be 10 years, however, before Crumley returned to the crime novel, as he was to be distracted by the lure of Hollywood. Although involved in numerous projects, including an adaptation of James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere, it is thought that not one word written by Crumley ever made it on to the big screen.
He was happier back home in Montana and eventually produced The Mexican Tree Duck in 1993, a second case for detective Sughrue ("Sug as in sugar, rue as in rue the fucking day").
In 1996, he teamed up his two detectives, Milogradovitch and Sughrue, on a violent revenge mission to the Texas-Mexico border in Bordersnakes. If the plotting was somewhat hazy, Crumley's lyricism and his eye for absurd but always human characters were still much in evidence, and his true return to form came in 2001 with The Final Country, which won the British Crime Writers' Silver Dagger award.
Financial problems and poor health, almost certainly due to his love of most things alcoholic, prevented him from travelling to London to collect his award in 2002, and friends and former students from Montana launched an appeal to help fund his medical treatment.
There was to be only one further addition to the Crumley crime canon of seven novels over 30 years, another Sughrue mystery, The Right Madness (2005). Probably the most autobiographical of his crime novels, it ruminates on ill-health, divorce, drink, drugs and his detective facing the prospect of semi-retirement. After years of searching for missing persons, his hero reflects: "I haven't even found myself. Of course, I haven't looked all that hard, yet."
Crumley is survived by his fifth wife, Martha Elizabeth, a poet and artist. He had five children, three from his second marriage and two from his fourth.
· James Arthur Crumley, crime writer, born October 12 1939; died September 17 2008