Jim Harrison, Tough Poet

The world needs more hard-boiled mysteries written by soft-boiled poets. This admittedly peculiar insight occurred to me as I was reading poet and novelist Jim Harrison’s first crime novel, The Great Leader. The book immediately reminded me of another mystery written by a poet—my favorite modern poet, as a matter of fact—Richard Hugo. The interesting thing about these two books—both of which are thoroughly gritty and definitely not “cozy”—is that their protagonists are given to weeping. If you’re from the Raymond Chandler school, you probably subscribe to the axiom that there is no crying in the hard-boiled novel. Well, you’d be wrong