A fascinating observation of three irredeemable characters. Life has thrown each one of them under a truck and left them with only the bare traces of humanity. It's hard to empathize with them, but Thompson works hard to find some connection, even if only through a desire for money. But ultimatel...
My second Jim Thompson novel. The other was Hell of a Woman, which I did not really enjoy. But Pop 1260 was more of what I was hoping for. Sheriff Nick Corey seems dumb as a stump, but then pulls off surprising, off-the-wall treachery. Surprisingly scary, too.He's hilarious in understatement at t...
I read this book laughing and cringing. In this first person narrative, Nick Corey, a small town southern sheriff, gives us an intimate portrait of his environment in the humorous tone of Twain which keeps the reader off balance in relations to his actions. The sense of impending doom mixture w...
This book was amazing – it's very much a product of its era, Though, with the attitudes of society towards the mentally ill very prevalent. The main character is a drifter who has been in and out of mental hospitals for many years, and who lives an aimless life. He has difficulty relating to othe...
first book i've read by him and i can already tell this will be a long relationship. even if i didn't like the main character that much and it was frustrating watching him ruin his life it was still a really entertaining read. the book itself was short so it was a good read during the school ye...
This is the fourth book I've read by Thompson. I have mixed feelings about this one. The story is a familiar one: A down-on-his-luck male protagonist has a failing marriage and finds ways to swindle and manipulate everyone around him. In true Thompson form, the first half of this book is a slo...
Frank isn't the flat out sociopath that the protagonist is in most of Thompson's books, but he is a scattered and anxiety ridden man who is always complaining about his life and claiming that he has few complaints (and the resemblance to Crime and Punishment is slight at best). The plot is a litt...
I didn't believe a word of this and it's not like this was a first novel, it was his 19th, so I'm thinking that he was maybe drunk in charge of a typewriter or was just having a real bad month, or something. First off, I don't like characters called Doc. Even if they're doctors. This is a persona...
Well, well, well, guess who's from Oklahoma?? Yes, Garth Brooks. Sigh, and Toby Keith. Naturally, Larry Clark. And, ya know, Jim Thompson. Was my point. I should've known that a man with such a rotten view of humanity came from the birthplace of so many rotten things, including my own rotte...
Thompson is one of the unsung greats of the crime genre in his time who has gained popularity in the 80s and since and had numerous novels adapted for film with great success. He was pushing the boundaries of violence and the portrayal of alcohol addiction by the mid 50s when this was published, ...
Back around 1996, I picked up Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito, shortly after it won a couple of awards for best biographical work. I started reading that book which I founded engrossing but decided to put it aside until I read ALL of Thompson’s published works so I would...
Dusty Rhodes is one seriously screwed-up dude. Of course when this book was first published in 1954, no one would have thought to call him a "dude," but no one would have disputed the fact that he was a young man with some pretty nasty problems--in other words, just the sort of protagonist that y...
Growing up, I always wanted to like olives. But every time I put one in my mouth I winced and spat it out. For some reason, though, I wouldn't let things lie. Almost immediately I put another olive in my mouth. A grudging, perverse acceptance soon turned to outright fanaticism. And soon I was eat...
For those of you who may need a refresher or a cluing in, Jim Thompson is the brains behind the books The Grifters, Pop. 1280, The Killer Inside Me, and The Getaway. He also wrote the screenplays for The Killing, and Paths of Glory. I recently read Pop. 1280 and rather liked it, but Recoil, which...
Ex-cop/ex-con Bugs McKenna doesn't have it easy. Bad stuff keeps a-happening to him. It's all down to occasional bouts of being a gormless bad-tempered lunkhead. After years of bad luck he manages to snag the job of hotel detective in a dustbowl Texas town and starts to settle down. He even manag...
In 1920s Texas, a smart kid named Tommy Burwell is living the hobo life, looking for work. He gets a job laying a gas pipeline with his friend Four Trey and hundreds of other rough characters, when he falls for Carol, a girl who hangs around the camp. When suspicious things happen, Tommy begins...
A Jim Thompson novel is the literary equivalent to a Robert Williams painting: outrageous, surrealistic, obscene, but above all hysterically funny. King Blood is all of those and even more. An absolutely irrepressible stream of barnyard obscenity, it didn’t reach publication until twenty years af...
Heed the Thunder is an ambitious work by Thompson who considered making this novel the first of a projected trilogy. Per Robert Polito in his biography of Thompson "Savage Art" this book is "a panoramic country life chronicle after the model of Nebraska novelists Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather, a s...
Synopsis/blurb...........Is Manuela Aloe a gift from heaven or the girlfriend from hell? From the moment Britt Rainstar starts seeing the curvaceous heiress, he finds himself menaced by vicious dogs, stalked by pistol-packing skeletons, and attacked by an unseen assailant in a hospital lobby. Cou...
Reviewed in conjunction with La DouleurSometimes you read a book that makes you feel ashamed of your life, every time you thought you were unlucky or that you deserve more or that you should get more. Whatever you have suffered, however genuine it be, suddenly becomes as nothing, its place clearl...
By sheer coincidence, today's Merriam-Webster "Word of the Day" (2/15/08) is whodunit ("a detective story or mystery story"). Coincidence, because just yesterday I finished reading Jim Thompson's The Kill-Off, from 1957. Thompson's novels rarely, if ever, traffic in "who done it" - instead, many ...
Maybe C McCarthy has taken over my mental Texas landscape, but Thompson comes off as thin. I need to check out 'The Killer Inside Me' or whatever is considered to be "The Thompson" to read, because my experiments so far have me thinking he's rather weak. Even within the genre, James Ellroy or E...
When it’s well over 100 degrees and you’re trying to find comfort in your drought addled, heat stroked confines it’s the right time to serve yourself up some 1950s crime fiction – hard boiled, naturally.Despite its weak title this short, fast moving novel has a lot going for it. The protagonist ...
John Wilmot, part-owner of a troubled theater, and his estranged wife hatch a scheme to fake her death for the insurance money. The plan seems to go off without a hitch, but pressure mounts as the wolves come after John from every angle...This sojourny into Jim Thompson's cheerful world is much ...
19-year-old Tommy Carver has spent his entire life under the thumb (and belt) of his oppressive racist father, suffering along with his step-mother Mary, a lustful woman only fourteen years older than himself and devoid of any maternal instincts. He’s spent his whole life fighting the system, but...
Started well enough, didn’t it? The Alcoholics did indeed have promise. I just picked this from a Goodreads recommendation. Doing that is interesting, because it’s essentially a random dice-roll chance of getting a good book. The Alcoholics isn’t a good book, unfortunately. It’s not horribly wri...
Thompson is a man who sees the world as a series of near misses. He views every moment in life as a step closer to a happiness and goodness that will, ultimately, be taken from you before it comes to fruition. The human condition, it seems to Thompson, is one in which we are always almost there...
He had been right so often and so long that he could not conceive the possibility of being anything else. Genially, he might charge himself with error, good-naturedly accept the blame for another's mistake. But that was just Doc-part of his masquerade. In his heart he was never wrong-never, that ...
I had become a habitué of such places, as had many of my fellow patients. By way of whiling away the time, we took turns at relating the horrific adventures which alcohol had gotten us into. One man—an actor—had inadvertently crawled into the Pullman berth occupied by a he...
Great God, the police were after her and she'd led them right to me!My foot slipped off the clutch, and the car leaped forward. I jammed my foot down on the gas. Inside of two blocks I was doing seventy, right through the early morning traffic, and God, I don't know how I kept from being pinched ...