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 eating them directly out of the jar.I think it's fair to say, too, that I've had to acquire a taste for Jim Thompson. Let's face it -- the man's uncompromising view ain't changing for you, so you'd better shift your own view till you agree. To this day, though, I'm not sure what it is about even his classic works that leaves me with a slight taste of disappointment in my mouth.Yet always -- always -- I find myself going back for more. And I can say with my hand on my heart that once I've finished reading all his works, I'll go back to the start and read them all again.Some writers just get you that way, I guess. And for what it's worth, I'm glad Jim Thompson's got me. And so to The Criminal, which I have to say I assumed to be a very early work of his. It has the feeling of a writer experimenting with his voice -- his world view, even. But in fact, by this time he had already written The Killer Inside Me, Nothing More Than Murder, and Savage Night -- all of which you could pick out of a line-up as a Thompson novel from a mile off.But The Criminal is another beast entirely.Its story is of a young girl raped and murdered in a small town. The boy who lives next door is implicated in the crime, and nobody in town can quite believe that he is guilty. The girl was sexually precocious, and the intercourse she engaged in with the boy -- and others -- was entirely consensual. But external forces seem to want to force the hand of justice. The newspapers and the D.A.'s office seem to have their own agendas.When I say it feels like an author discovering his voice, what I mean is that while the world depicted in The Criminal is a noir-soaked, unforigiving one, it seems a lightweight depiction all the same. It wears no knuckle dusters and it definitely pulls its punches. Its characters are largely stupid, self-serving and amoral; but the story never plumbs the depths of, say, Pop. 1280 or A Swell-Looking Babe. The reader's head is not forced down into the gutter and held there until the final pages.What sets The Criminal apart from Thompson's more powerful works is its narrative style. Whereas the big hitters are exercises in suffocating madness, with the reader forced into a psychopath's company and never given respite from their warped psyche, The Criminal flits around from character to character, chapter by chapter, with the story allowed to build around the individuals' testimonies.Indeed, it is a kind of 'message novel.' Thompson even goes so far as to spell it out:"It's difficult to place a rope around a man's neck: the law, slowly evolving through the centuries, winding its way up through dungeons and torture chambers, emerging at last into the sunlight, intended it to be difficult [...] the law has changed, but people have not. They are still lingering back in the shadows; thumbs turned down on the fallen, hustling wood for the witch-burner, donning their bedsheets and boots at the first smell of blood."It almost seems trite of me to say that it's a message that still resonates today. It is, at least, a message that will resonate in any noir aficionado's dark and cynical heart.But as a message novel, it does lack punch. Most of the characters are only given one chapter to reveal themselves. It seems hurried, just like the police investigation itself, and the characters are never given room to breathe. It could use about another hundred and fifty pages.And I don't say that about many books, believe me.The only other Jim Thompson novel that I've been out and out let down by so far is The Kill-Off, another character-flitting novel that reads more like a dark-hearted soap opera.Whether this narrative style was an attempt by Thompson to write 'important' novels or not is hard to say. But ironically, his greatest literary -- yes, literary -- achievements were within the strict confines of the pulps, with audacious experiments and tricks that any self-indulgent high-falutin' wordsmith could only dream of. He took the pulps further than they had any right to go. His first-person descents into warped but real personal hells were unlike anything else of the kind I've read.Maybe that's why I still find myself needing to psyche myself up for them somewhat, and why I can never quite work out if I actually enjoyed them. And also why I keep coming back for more. Jim Thompson was so ahead of his time, and beyond his contemporaries, that I'm still not sure I'm ready for him yet.But one day, Jim, one day I'll get there...
This is one of the Thompson books I hadn’t read before so had a chance to come to it fresh and was a bit surprised as it is essentially a polemic. The title is almost entirely ironic. I say almost because we are never given a clear sense of whether the “criminal” in question, the teenaged Bob Talbert, committed the rape and murder of which he is accused. What is clear, though, is that all of the other narrators in the novel are criminals because they are guilty of lying, or abuse of power, or some species of crime in a similar genus as Bob is clearly being railroaded toward a conviction. The novel then is an attack on the judicial system, the media (specifically newspapers of the time), and the court of public opinion.Thompson uses multiple first person narrators, which is a technique that showed up in a couple of other noirs from the same era that I’ve read recently: Fearing’s The Big Clock and MacDonald’s The Beach Girls (and as a side note I’m kind of curious who first used this technique in noir fiction, so if you know please chime in!). Here it does more than provide a range of perspectives on the case at hand because Thompson never provides a narrative viewpoint that has some objectivity from which to judge the various narratives. What each of the narrators does is convict themselves of their crimes via their narration. It’s a bit odd because who are they narrating to? It’s not as if they are telling their version to an investigator who is questioning them. Quite the contrary. These are freely offered, after the fact accounts, that make no effort to exonerate their narrator. In fact, they do the opposite. These narrative accounts reveal their narrators in the worst light, and it as if they do not realize that they are doing so. Fascinating technique.
What do You think about The Criminal (2014)?
The revolving POV (point-of-view) novel doesn't always work, but in the hands of Jim Thompson it's brilliant. The story of a wrongfully accused teenager for the rape-murder of the girl next door is told through everyone's increasingly more outrageous perspective as the book goes on, including an eyewitness account from a little black boy (President Abraham Lincoln Jones, who was probably fifty blocks away from the scene of the crime). Not one of Thompson's more major novels but brilliant in its own right.
—Andy
A Jim Thompson novella, a story of the effects a rape and murder has on several players involved with the case told from all points of view, except the dead girl, building a picture of a town and of events where nobody is really innocent of anything through shrewd observations of human behaviour. This is Thompson in 1953 writing about the death of the American dream, the death of the fallacy of small town innocence, the death of the traditional family, pretty much the death of everything except the person who died. Once more, he's ahead of his time. An enjoyable and thought provoking little piece, it's not going to blow you away but it will keep you flicking pages trying to discover the truth from a series of unreliable narrators.
—Tfitoby
A teenage girl is found raped and murdered and a boy who was known to have sex with her is the prime suspect. The newspaper turns the case into a circus and the town turns against the boy? Did he do it? And will it even matter when the dust settles?This wasn't quite what I expected from old Mr. Happy, Jim Thompson. Yeah, it has the feel of a lot of Jim Thompson books in that all people are bastards but it wasn't quite as bleak as the others. Sure, the Talbert boy went through the wringer and his parents and the lawyers didn't have a picnic but the main characters got off kind of light.The thing that I really liked about The Criminal was the use of a variety of viewpoint characters. The Criminal is a pretty short book but Thompson used close to ten viewpoint characters and gave each a unique voice. While it didn't have the usual brutality of a Jim Thompson novel, The Criminal did a great job at showing Thompson's skill as a writer. I wouldn't say it's a top tier Thompson, it's shoulders above some of his weaker efforts. It's an easy three stars.
—Dan Schwent
