Dancing Bear
Dancing Bear is the second Milo Milodragovitch novel by James Crumley, published in 1983. Milo, a wealthy alcoholic working as a security guard while he waits to inherit, agrees to do a small favor for an elderly woman who wants to know about a couple meeting on a country road. The job balloons into a case involving cocaine, corporate dumping, and a string of dead bodies across the high country. Crumley writes in a style that owes as much to Faulkner as to Chandler, with long sentences, hard weather, and a deep love for the American West. The novel is admired as a high point of post-Vietnam noir, a book about a man trying to stay loyal to his own broken code.
What you might want to know about Dancing Bear
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Montana private investigator on the edge of retirement takes a simple surveillance job that pulls him into a sprawling drug conspiracy.
Bourdain tweeted it as his next crime pick right after praising The Friends of Eddie Coyle, calling Crumley one of the great voices in American noir and Milo one of the genre's true characters.
No. Dancing Bear stands on its own, though readers who like it often go back to The Wrong Case.
Dancing Bear was written by James Crumley, published in 1983 by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.
Dancing Bear is 231 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Dancing Bear takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
Dancing Bear is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.