The Last Good Kiss (1978) Signed First Edition Reference

The Last Good Kiss is James Crumley’s masterpiece — published by Random House in 1978, it is one of the handful of American private eye novels that transcends its genre to become a work of genuine literary art. The novel follows C.W. Sughrue as he tracks a missing woman across the bars, motels, and highways of the American West, accompanied by a bulldog named Fireball Roberts and sustained by vast quantities of alcohol, cocaine, and stubborn determination.

The Book

The novel’s opening line — “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a bar called Rosie’s in Sonoma, California” — is one of the most celebrated first sentences in crime fiction. It establishes the novel’s tone: picaresque, boozy, violent, and darkly funny, with an undercurrent of genuine sadness about the American capacity for self-destruction.

Sughrue’s search for the missing woman takes him through a landscape of damaged people, failed dreams, and the remnants of 1960s idealism gone rancid. The novel is simultaneously a detective story, a road novel, a love story, and an elegy for the American West. Crumley’s prose — muscular, whiskey-soaked, and surprisingly lyrical — elevates the material beyond genre conventions.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Random House, New York Publication date: 1978 Format: Hardcover in dust jacket Print run: Small (estimated under 5,000 copies)

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition, fine/fine: $1,500–$4,000
• Inscribed copies: $2,000–$6,000
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $400–$1,200
• Unsigned first edition, good condition: $100–$300

The Last Good Kiss is genuinely scarce in first edition — the small print run and the book’s initial commercial indifference mean that few copies were preserved in fine condition. Signed copies are proportionally rarer still.