Milo Milodragovitch is a 50-ish Montana bartender, ex-deputy, sometime private eye, recovering alcoholic and all-around aging hardcase whose recently matured trust fund has just been stolen by some three-piece bastard with a computer. C.W. Sughrue is his equally leathery onetime partner and not-exactly-best friend, who retired from the missing-persons business to New Mexico only to be gutshot out back of a roadside dive. Together, they follow their transgressors across the dusty, deadly, backwards hell that is Texas, all the while dodging crooked cops, world-weary divorcees and arrogant Cowboys fans on the way to a showdown with the desert-dwelling crime families who control drug traffic from Mexico to America. If Bordersnakes sounds like a reiteration of classic Western and hard-boiled themes, that's because it is. Milodragovotch and Sughrue are impossibly tough, sentimental, chivalrous in their way, and brimful of the driving force behind male fiction: male self pity. But author James Crumley is one of America's great undiscovered writers. He adds depth to his characters by adding a big dose of country to the toughness and self-awareness to the self-pity: His two heroes are tough because they have nothing to lose, and deep down, they're aware that all their problems are their own stupid fault. Add to this Crumley's bitter humor and his gift for language, and you have an achingly good tragic novel independent of the limits of genre.