Showing posts with label Jim Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jim Thompson. Show all posts

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Pop. 1280 (1964)

Jim Thompson published many more novels after Pop. 1280 which I still don't know, but somehow Pop. 1280 feels like the right place for me to stop. In many ways it is the inevitable resolution to his most celebrated and best-known novel, The Killer Inside Me—and in many ways it's much better. Killer is where Thompson hatched the idea of a sociopathic sheriff of a small Texas town who spouts endless clichés and homilies even as he lives the life of a depraved libertine. But I think Pop. 1280 may be where he perfected it. Unlike Killer's Lou Ford, who is vaguely troubled by his behavior and labels it "the sickness," sheriff Nick Corey of Pop. 1280 more accepts it as a given of the human condition. Better him than anyone else, seems to be his basic credo, never doubting for a second that anyone else in his position would be anything else. There's some tendency for Thompson to compress his cynicism into glib incident, for example in the whisper campaign Corey effortlessly launches against his opponent in an upcoming election, working obvious variations on Mark Twain's wonderful story, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." And much of the shocking cruelty of Killer is underplayed in Pop. 1280 too, which I miss. But nowhere is Thompson's worldview so curdled into such an expert latticework of foul human behavior. Sheriff Corey plays it straight always, outside of this narrative, and people just step up and voluntarily treat him wrong, thinking he is a nincompoop. And so, when he takes his various revenges, we are implicated, we are nearly always at least a little on his side, satisfied when as we see him deal out their come-uppances. Even as Nick Corey's veneer of self-serving rationalization is transparent we believe enough in his justifications to minimize any moral concerns we might think to entertain as the action flashes past. Corey's own words to live by, which he repeats over and over, speak exactly to that: "I ain't sayin' you're wrong, but I cain't say you're right, either." The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 also represent a familiar dynamic in many careers of the big ones, and nearly all of them who lived long enough. First there is the moment of great discovery, the raw innovation, and later there is a grand statement consolidation of the gains. Inspiration drives the first, experience the latter. Think of Highway 61 Revisited and "Love & Theft", think of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, think of The Clash and Sandinista! These two books by Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, belong with them.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Grifters (1963)

It's true I have misgivings about a few of Jim Thompson's most highly regarded novels, such as The Killer Inside Me and After Dark, My Sweet. Nothing major, just a little underwhelmed for one reason or another. For all its strengths, I think I might have to put The Grifters in that category too. It's obviously significant in terms of the rehabilitation of Thompson's reputation that came after his death, providing the source for a 1990 neo-noir movie with John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening, directed by Stephen Frears, produced by Martin Scorsese. And Thompson obviously went to a good deal of effort to research the con artist and his many tricks. But it only seems to provide distracting shape and underpinning to his more typical impulses (incest, alcoholism, gambling, etc.). The explanations of the tricks inevitably bear a certain pedantic tone, and though the tricky tricks remain interesting it's not exactly why we read Jim Thompson novels. (If it's con games you're after, see linguist David Maurer's 1940 The Big Con.) Yes, the Thompson elements are classic: a seamy Freudian tale of the relationship between con man Roy Dillon and his mother Lilly, who was 13 when she had him, further complicated by Roy having a girlfriend, Moira. There's a hot nurse named Carol too, a concentration camp survivor. As always, it is more or less about the rot that creeps into human relationships, a sickness unto death, with a thousand and one identical faces. Lilly is a monster and all the women here seem to have that potential. But it also feels just slightly artificial, as if Thompson has donned a girdle. It often feels programmed: a few tidy details on the intricacies of "short" and "long" cons here, some all-in-a-day torture with a cigarette there, and lots of lascivious blurp all over the place. The writing does feel more fresh and urgent than in many of his '50s novels, which saves it. Between the research and the writing, The Grifters is pretty good Thompson, even as it attempts to slot into some commercial format of popular taste. I won't argue with anyone who calls it essential. It's good enough, and you don't want to miss it if you're reading him.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Getaway (1958)

With The Getaway Jim Thompson struck on a strategy that served him very well, producing one of his best—one of my favorites by him certainly. A slight shift in point of view, and a couple of fiendishly conceived plot points, seem to clear away all the static and clutter of the previous few novels. It's kind of amazing because pretty much all the usual is in there—drunks, sadists, harpies, felons, etc.—but utterly revitalized. Instead of focusing on the tiresome intricacies of a caper, that's taken as a given, and the action, as the title suggests, is all on the aftermath, a series of snafus and unfortunate incidents following a swift and easy takedown of a small-town bank. Instead of trying to make something unlikely work (my usual problem with caper and heist stories) Thompson turns his attention to something all too familiar: how things can go terribly wrong. The story proceeds like one of those dream nightmares where the predicament constantly worsens—focusing on the chaos rather than the order, Thompson's strongest point by miles. Then he indulges himself with two separate scenarios of profound claustrophobia, as vividly realized as anything he ever wrote. The first, particularly, which involves a cramped cave space reached underwater, is right over the top. I groaned when I came to it again because it was instantly as potent and disturbing as the first time I read it. I had to put the book down and pace my apartment awhile to restore a sense of freedom of motion. Thompson absolutely robs me of it in that section. The Getaway goes on the short list for me of his best.

In case it's not at the library.

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Wild Town (1957)

If anyone is looking for a generic Jim Thompson novel, you could do worse than Wild Town. It's less than inspired but packed with familiar Thompson notes, including a return appearance by the Texas deputy Lou Ford, star of The Killer Inside Me. Unfortunately, Ford has become less psychopathic ham and more Lex Luthor crossbred with Professor Moriarty, a sort of utility super villain who knows all, sees all, etc., which makes him a good deal less interesting. Once again the scene is a big hotel, and an isolated Texas boom town, and once again the plot is distractingly intricate. Babes abound, most of them swell-looking, and our hero, Bugs McKenna, is a typical Thompson outsider antihero, gruff, even corrupted, but with a heart of gold, kind of. For no reason I can discern, Lou Ford's girlfriend Amy Standish—also from The Killer Inside Me—gets a big role too. I get the sense from these mid-'50s novels that someone was seriously counseling Thompson to focus on plot because that is ultimately all they are, to the detriment of Thompson's rampaging, demented energy, which feels in Wild Town as if it is absolutely suffocating. At least Wild Town helps me see better how great The Killer Inside Me is by comparison. In fact, the two side by side really throws the situation in perspective. Checking Thompson's biography, I find Wild Town marks the end of a sustained burst of productivity, which maybe helps explain why the last few have felt a little exhausted. Jim Thompson was not done here—arguably his best work was still ahead of him, which we will be getting to presently. As for Wild Town, it's only for the hardest of hardcore fans, I would say. I'm not touching on all Thompson's work in this little series, but had meant to get to his best. Maybe I cast my net just a little wide. Wild Town is approximately 98% recycled devices, with diminishing vitality. No one needs to see Lou Ford like this. Feel free to skip.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Kill-Off (1957)

The Kill-Off is Jim Thompson's second bite (at least) at the As I Lay Dying apple, along with The Criminal. I associate the narrative strategy—multiple first-person stories by different characters from chapter to chapter—with the 1930 Faulkner novel, which now that I think of it has its own sources in the epistolary tradition of literature, alternating personal communications of different characters, which of course goes way back: Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a very fine example, and that's from the 18th century. But taking it out of the realm of letter-writing, perhaps prompted by influences of cinema with its cut-and-paste editing, Faulkner (or someone else?) came up with something that proved popular with noir writers of the '30s and '40s, and here is Thompson doing it again. Indeed, it feels like a carefully refined approach to the strategy. No character gets more than one chapter, for example. Thompson attempts (almost comically sometimes) to strike and maintain a specific voice for each one. But his two basic modes predominate: a foul surly turn of character mood whose foundations are beyond our ken alternating with a kind of prissy (and hilarious) formality. It is the usual candy store of taboos: alcoholism, adultery, miscegenation, incest, murder, rape, de facto slavery. Too bad there's not a fetish involving kitchen sinks. A lot of The Kill-Off was not convincing to me, notably the racial situation. It's set in a New England resort town for no particular reason. Characters have names like Pete Pavlov and Marmaduke "Goofy" Gannder. Still, I have an intense curiosity about one thing: What did people spending the original 35 cents make of these novels? If I had a time machine I'd like to travel back to 1957 or 1958 and strike up a conversation with someone I saw reading it. I should say the plot for The Kill-Off is reasonably well worked out. But the cast is so uniformly grotesque it's hard to care about or even follow all that's going on. A rich old woman sucking the energy off of a much younger man, a corrupt doctor and his mysterious maid Hattie, random nightclub shenanigans, prostitutes, surly jazz players, surly carnival moguls. Where do you put your hat down? Don't forget the weird structure! As for the title, it has something to do with Pillsbury Bake-Off competitions, which were popular in the '50s.

In case it's not at the library.

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After Dark, My Sweet (1955)

I probably shouldn't complain about the novel that 35 years later became the movie that became a keystone in the revitalization of Jim Thompson's reputation. It's vintage Thompson: a drifter and ex-boxer at the center of it, falling in with and in love with a mercurial lush, whose moods switch around like the cat who thinks it wants to be outside, and she's mean when she's in a foul mood, which is often. There's also a grinning avuncular con man out of Sinclair Lewis, another familiar figure in Thompson novels, who's half Foghorn Leghorn comic relief and half deadly plot point. And what in the world are these three nogoodniks up to? Restaging the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping basically. So there are lots of interesting elements to the mix. I like seeing Thompson feel his way around the pathology of a kidnapper. Another area that looked promising, the relationship of the criminals to the boy they kidnap, only goes to predictable places after all. It feels like at some point he decided nothing about these things was much interesting. On the matter of plot construction it's reasonably sturdy, setting up and knocking down the various pins of a crime caper noir and pretty much keeping it all together for that. It's something he'd been trying for since at least A Swell-Looking Babe, and here he manages it pretty neatly. But with the parts working together like a machine the result is somehow robotic. The types are too set-in, especially Faye, the love interest / lush. Her mood swings, often conveniently serving some narrative purpose, feel mechanical, although, as always, few do mean quite as well as Thompson so perhaps it balances out. But it's not particularly believable as random behavior. Or this: our hero Collie has a history in mental institutions, to no discernible purpose other than to provide a vulnerability others can exploit. Frankly, I'm a little tired of mental institutions and the abuses thereof in Jim Thompson novels. There I said it. After Dark, My Sweet is regarded highly by many fans of Thompson—on short lists of the best, even. I'm not so convinced of that, but I don't think it's one you can skip either.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Nothing Man (1954)

Jim Thompson's The Nothing Man features an angry, sarcastic, drunken newspaperman named Brownie, who was castrated in the war, hence "the nothing." His boss at the newspaper was also his commanding officer in the war and Brownie is constantly mocking, needling, and trying to provoke him. As usual, something well to the side of the main events brings the most energy, in this case Brownie's constant caustic spew. Brownie dishes it out constantly, another one of Thompson's hellishly observed cases of foul disposition. The boss takes it from him because he feels sorry for him. At which point, some structural POV problems crop up, which Thompson attempts to deal with using alcoholic blackouts. Well, Thompson's plots tend to be purely incidental anyway, a loose skeleton onto which to drape things. What matters more is how well he manages to burrow into the psychotic mind, or some semblance of it peculiar to him and few others. On that score, The Nothing Man is not among his best. With Thompson, the hope always is for those chilling, clarifying breaks with reality, which connect in significant ways I think with writers like Poe, O'Connor, and Faulkner. In many ways all Thompson springs from the third section of The Sound and the Fury: tethers cut loose, raging with great abandon and almost no reason, and so desperate and vivid it is like staring through the pages. "Writing ecstatically," as Updike said of Nabokov. Well, there's less of that in The Nothing Man—it's good enough but second-tier. The whole impotence thing bores me now, after Faulkner's Sanctuary. With Thompson, I can let that go, along with the disappointing and mechanically happy ending. He's earned the right to fail now and then, even spectacularly, and The Nothing Man is not a failure, it's only entertaining.

In case it's not at the library.

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A Hell of a Woman (1954)

I tried to write about this one before, but it was awhile ago so here's another go. If not Jim Thompson's best, A Hell of a Woman is at least on the short list of his best. By nicknaming his main character here "Dolly"—otherwise a bill collector named Frank Dillon—I think Thompson makes clear that no one, least of all himself, is immune to the impulses of perversion, at the right time and place. Our hero Dolly breathes and swims in an effluvia of rot and corruption that is distinctly American—money and sex are what you get by swindling and manipulating, and a good day's work by a smart operator should net plenty of both. The reward, at the long day's end of work, is drinking and oblivion. Dolly doesn't want to be here anyway, he's just too cowardly to kill himself. The last chapter is his way of saying goodbye. The "self-destructive tendency" finally brings Dolly to its inevitable deserts. Along the way he thinks he has found the ideal woman—a hell of a woman, deeply victimized and passive. A case study in learned helplessness. But decidedly innocent, and even pure, if defiled. But of course Dolly can't even hang on to that—among other reasons, for his own stupidity, and the sin of vanity, believing himself to be the smartest person in town and on the planet too. As his dreams slip away and his doom is realized he cracks apart into strands of narrative resolution and implodes in front of our eyes. It's crudely Joycean at that point but works. Even more so as a dime novel paperback original. What in the world did people think? Printer error, I suspect. A couple of chapters are framed up as chapters from a memoir ... or something ... but it is otherwise straightforward lurid steamy pulp. A bill collector is cheating everybody in sight and getting away with nothing. A mysterious girl and her elderly aunt are conducting a prostitution operation out of their house. Couples bicker and fight and get drunk, and then the fights get worse. Why would anyone want to read such things in the first place? The horror of finding a calculating, intelligent mind and persuasive worldview behind it is almost impossible to overstate. A Hell of a Woman is one of the most chilling things I've ever encountered.

In case it's not at the library.

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A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)

I'm not sure what it says that one of the most typical and evocative titles concocted by Jim Thompson serves a story that reminds me more of minor keys in Theodore Dreiser and especially An American Tragedy. Oh yes, there's a glancing thread of incest, and sure, it's no doubt the ritzy hotel setting and the ambitious bellboy that puts me in mind of Dreiser. This is more of a caper story, which I find little more appealing here than I do when I find them in the movies. The swell-looking babe referenced in the title, and a good many other characters, harbor secrets. Our job is to read the novel until we find them out. The two places where Thompson seems most engaged are the details of the caper, with its complicated mess of betrayals, which is central to the story at hand, and the Freudian / Oedipal tensions between our hero the bellboy and his father, which is not. It's something like the stage act where multiple plates are set spinning atop of thin dowels. Busy busy. I kind of get the sense someone might have suggested Thompson try a proper beginning, middle, and end because so much attention is given to the plot. He really seems to have something he wants to say about the love between a mother and son but it's beside the caper point. The result feels muddled and belabored and often not that interesting. But it's still capable of the classic Thompson style—brusque, crazy, headlong. The image of the swell-looking babe is powerful and strange, even if her role is ultimately mundane and she's wasted. As for Dusty Rhodes, the bellboy, he's fine, another standard-issue Thompson figure—wise, underemployed, and desperate. The story is told third-person but it is so far inside Rhodes's head I kept being surprised it wasn't first-person. So, overall, a lesser Jim Thompson, a little mechanical and unsatisfying. But good enough, and interesting enough in the way it opened the door into the next one, as he evidently decided to start putting the monster female figures that haunt and devil his work right into the titles of the novels.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Criminal (1953)

Although in many ways The Criminal reads like a Jim Thompson typing exercise, filled with typical language and situations, it is also the closest I've seen yet to "Dostoevskian," with its nearly total abstraction of a rape and murder. It is also a fragment, offering virtually no resolution and very little explanation, at least beyond, "Everything is corrupt and what if it wasn't." And it traffics in a popular noir device, apportioning the narrative chores to multiple first-person characters divided by chapter. Several characters get a chapter or two apiece. Kenneth Fearing has a very nice version in The Big Clock, but I suspect it all starts with As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, who could well be an outsize model for many crime writers of the mid-20th century. I get the feeling they were all well aware of him. In many ways The Criminal feels pro forma: the slutty teen tramp, the stammering good boy who behaves suspiciously because he's such an innocent, and endless corruption everywhere else. As always, the seven deadly sins play a vital role, and institutions such as newspapers and the criminal justice system are so rotten they are casual about the venalities that motivate them. As always, Jim Thompson's inner knowing raconteur keeps it compelling and compulsively readable. This may be an early attempt at innovating non-ending endings, but feels less thought through and more as if he reached some predetermined page or word count and stopped. All indications are that there's still plenty of plot to develop. After getting the young boy Bob Talbert, "the criminal" of the title, well and deeply into trouble, with charges of the aforesaid rape and murder via all the corruption extant and no good man to do a thing about it, he throws it into reverse and seems prepared to back out again, but that's where it stops. I don't even come away with a clear idea of who the guilty party actually is, or even probably is, or could be. Thompson may be at pains to portray everyone as guilty, and there's an argument it really doesn't matter. In fact, it could have been Talbert—he's more likely by circumstance than anyone else. And yet that would do little to change our perceptions. He's practically the most innocent person here no matter what.

In case it’s not at the library.

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Savage Night (1953)

Here's another Jim Thompson novel that I like very well, and in spite of the clunky way it moves. Again, these stories seem to just come spinning out of Thompson's head, carried by a certain headlong, heedless momentum. Even a moment's thought can deal lethal blows to narrative credibility. But never mind. Thompson's voice somehow keeps things compelling. Savage Night is about the visit that legendary hit man Carl Bigelow makes to a small college town. He is there to kill a man who is about to testify in a case that could hurt the man who has hired Bigelow. This man is known only as "The Man," and even celebrity assassin Bigelow fears him. Bigelow narrates the tale, and though he doesn't take long to reveal his identity, he withholds it awhile. We are thus ushered into a world where, in Alfred Hitchcock's famous formulation—or was it Thompson himself?—"things are not as they seem." That's something Thompson does very well, if occasionally ham-handedly, obviously making things up as he goes along (which novelists do, but you know what I mean). And so legendary hit man Carl Bigelow, who has earned his celebrated reputation with multiple slayings to his credit, each one ordered and paid for, turns out to be an orphan who owes much of his good fortune to a kindly old couple who took him in as a boy. The pressures of cognitive dissonance produce strange results. Savage Night notably has one of Thompson's great moments, which I give you now, when Carl finds himself in early scenes seducing (or seduced by) Ruthie, the maid who is missing a leg. He goes into detail:
I looked, and closed my eyes quickly. But I couldn't keep them closed.
It was a baby's foot. A tiny little foot and ankle. It started just above the knee joint—where the knee would have been if she had one—a tiny little ankle, not much bigger around than a thumb; a baby ankle and a baby foot.
The toes were curling and uncurling, moving with the rhythms of her body...
"C-Carl... Oh, C-Carl!" she gasped.
After a long time, what seemed like a long time, I heard her saying, "Don't. Please don't, Carl. It's a-all right, so—so, please, Carl... Please don't cry any more—"
End of chapter.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Alcoholics (1953)

I'm not about to second-guess Jim Thompson on the look and feel of rehab facilities in the '50s, but the treatment center in this one, El Healtho by name, veers toward the unbelievable, not least in the jolly way it seems to be run by Dr. Peter S. Murphy on a belief that alcoholics will just go on drinking no matter what, straying at will over into upbeat "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" territory. Dr. Murphy looks the other way in some cases, even provides patients with drinks, apparently with an idea that giving them drinks of smaller volume now will somehow head off problems of drinking too much later. Meanwhile, the nurse on duty, Lucretia Baker, lisps and is a sadist. This is minor Jim Thompson for a reason, but it is Jim Thompson through and through. There's a plot about the facility and Dr. Murphy being dangerously in arrears financially, then some kind of redemption via the refusal to help cover up a lobotomy performed on a member of a rich family largely because he was a nuisance (or maybe to keep his mouth shut about something, that's not entirely clear). It veers quite wildly between hardboiled depravity Jim Thompson style and the strangely jovial antics of patients and staff alike, reminiscent of Frank Capra, as they pull together and get things done. Under the non-treatment treatment strategy practiced at El Healtho, the patients, one at a time and each for their own reasons, grin big, clap arms across shoulders, and give up drinking forever. The Alcoholics has a big happy ending and also numerous smaller happy endings dotted all over. Nurse Baker, for example (spoiler alert), changes her ways after once having sex with Dr. Murphy and actually becomes quite obedient—"Yeth, thir!" There are multiple convenient careers held down by the patients that prove remarkably adroit—a marketing man, publishers, etc. I said I'm not going to second-guess Jim Thompson on this, and certainly much of the raw behavior of drinking depicted here rings true enough. But boy, these miracles. Left and right. With the happy endings, I think you have to take it as a comedy pure and simple, because otherwise it's hard to believe a word of it, including "and" and "the." On the other hand, yes, everything I love about Jim Thompson is adequately covered in Lucretia Baker, R.N., the lisping sadist—inspired, freaky, and mordant.

In case it's not at the library.

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Cropper's Cabin (1952)

Cropper's Cabin came out the same year as The Killer Inside Me, and feels like a rush job—but then, so does Killer, and much of Thompson's catalog. It slots pretty easily into a certain hillbilly mode of pulp fiction, set in the familiar environs of Oklahoma, but with many trappings of the Old South, white trash division. Moonshine and intimations of incest, for example, tend to be givens, the sharecroppers are growing cotton, and they are sharecroppers. There's a flavor of Oklahoma in a general lust for oil, but that's mostly in the background as a motivational device. As usual, Thompson plays with genre clichés and expectations at will. So the sharecropper's boy Tommy Carver (who narrates) is involved with the landlord's hot daughter. His family background is complicated and creepy—widowed stepfather with a bought-and-purchased 14-year-old helpmeet (who is of age in the present time of the tale, but of course having sex with both stepfather and stepson). This is definitely second-tier Thompson, at best, but nonetheless with many of the Dostoevskian touches we know him by: the fulminations at fate, the aw-shucks language masking deeper issues, the wanton ways of worthless reprobates, and a story that dissolves into nothing before ... The End. He's done it better elsewhere but he usually does it pretty well, and on that level Cropper's Cabin is worthy enough. There's also a murder mystery in the middle of it, though typically enough that becomes incidental. Some interesting lore about Oklahoma and Native Americans rounds it out, things we don't really need to know but evidently Thompson thought we might find them interesting, mostly concerned with the Trail of Tears and then the later Oklahoma Land Rush. So it's not exactly a mystery, and it's not exactly the hillbilly pulp sub-genre, but something of both, and vintage Jim Thompson more than anything. You don't want to start here, but you might want to end up here.

In case it's not at the library.

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The Killer Inside Me (1952)

Jim Thompson's breakthrough novel—not literally his first, but it might as well have been—is typically hailed as his masterpiece. Even Stanley Kubrick got in on the act, famously calling it "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." I'm not sure I agree. I can think of at least two other novels by Thompson that are better, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280, and many more with details much more vivid and disquieting than anything here. But this is where Thompson figured himself out as a writer, already in his mid-40s. It has the thrill of discovery and certain clarity. The brutality and the raw (if folksy) misogyny, offered so casually and lightheartedly, the insight that psychopaths are people a lot like you and me (and very different too), Thompson's easy manner of feeling his way into the story with such a calculated jaunty air, and above all the bold innovation of telling it first-person from the point of view of the diseased mind—that's all born practically fully formed here. It's lurid and violent but always just a little bit comical, except it's never funny. It has the effect of someone amped on speed and too many days without sleep trying to tell a joke. It's impossible to get away and you dread the punch line because you know you will be expected to laugh. The Killer Inside Me is very much experimental work and half the fun is watching the crazy ideas come from nowhere, discarded when done with. Thompson appears to have had some notion, for example, that Lou Ford, our (anti)hero, a deputy sheriff in a rural Texas county, would among other things bore people to distraction with unending streams of platitudes. That's pretty funny until you see it in action. Then it's just weird. By the second third of this very short book it's about dispensed with. I understand most of Thompson's novels, and all the good ones, tended to be written in concentrated bursts, after a few weeks in a cheap hotel room. They read that way and I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Thompson, at his best, is almost always in perfect command of his work. I say start with A Hell of a Woman if you're only going to read one or two. But this one should not be much behind that if you're pushing on. It's the one everybody talks about and then you understand.

In case it's not at the library.

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Savage Art (1995)

The thing I like best about Robert Polito's biography of Jim Thompson is the light it sheds on Thompson's work. What I consider the best of that work—A Hell of a Woman, say—is not necessarily as celebrated as a few, and one in particular: The Killer Inside Me. Granted, Savage Art is a biography, and Polito's critical assessments have to be extracted. But until this I had flailed away at reading Thompson without direction, and often disappointed. Thompson's catalog runs to 30 or better titles, and there are some fairly stinkers in the mess. I know because I read two of them—The Alcoholics and The Criminals, bought for their titles obviously. I was thus happy to see Polito dismiss them quickly, which had the effect of making me more inclined to believe him generally. And he's a good writer in his own right. Thompson lived a singularly depressing life, but Polito's own hard-bitten voice keeps things moving along. Lots of interesting stuff about Thompson and his life, of course. I wasn't surprised but still fascinated to learn that Thompson was a binge writer, locking himself away for intense bursts of work. His best usually has that magical quality of first drafts that somehow came out just right (see also: Sherwood Anderson, Philip K. Dick). It's so rare and unusual it's something to appreciate itself (for all his reputation for that kind of thing, for example, I think Jack Kerouac managed it only once, with The Subterraneans). Polito has also proved his critical bona fides with the two great Library of America volumes, Crime Novels: American Noir, so one always feels in good hands, and Jim Thompson is obviously right in his wheelhouse. Thompson himself is about what you would expect him to be from reading the novels, a leathery old drunk with a marked edge of desperation. A faintly Bukowski type of character, alcoholic and impoverished for much of his life. All that anxiety in the novels had to come from somewhere, of course, and Polito neatly catalogs it from start to finish. I thought the saddest part of Thompson's life, the way Polito tells it, was that Thompson always felt strongly that his work was not recognized for what it is, Stanley Kubrick's late interest notwithstanding. Thompson always held out hope for it—how could he not? At this point, I'm not sure you can overstate his position to the second half of the 20th century, in terms of the fascination for human depravity that wears a crime fiction mask. Polito and this book steered me to most of my current favorites by Thompson. For that alone I love it.

In case it's not at the library.
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