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Jim Thompson (1906-1977) |
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American novelist and screenwriter, best known for his paperback pulp novels dealing with the criminally insane. Jim Thompson knew that he was not destined for big success, but before he died he told his wife to protect his manuscripts and copyrights, anticipating posthumous fame. He was right, ten years after his death. Thompson's dark, violent view of the world has inspired such filmmakers as Sam Peckinpah, Stephen Frears, Bertrand Tavernier, and Quentin Tarantino. "I've loafed streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other – hell, you've probably seen me if you've ever been out this way – I've stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn't piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I'm laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people." (from The Killer Inside Me, 1952) James Meyers (Jim) Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, the son of James Sherman Thompson, the sheriff of Caddo County, and Birdie Myers Thompson, a schoolteacher. Later he claimed that he saw daylight first in the Caddo County Jail, but actually he was born over the cell block in a comfortable sheriff's apartment. His father, "Big Jim" as he was called, was a colorful figure. He foiled jail-breaks, rode with some of the most celebrated Western peace officers, and arrested horse thieves. He also was a chronic gambler and was in 1907 dismissed for misappropriating funds. Avoiding arrest, he fled to Mexico. For the next 14 years he traveled from one oil field to another with his family, and managed to acquire a fortune by 1919 before going bankrupt. In 1921 he suffered a breakdown and died in an institution 20 years later. For the disappointment of his father, Thompson was in his childhood
shy, bookish, and hated sports. After graduating from Polytechnic High
School in Fort Worth, he held numerous jobs – beginning as an oil well
and pipeline worker in the West Texas oil fields, gaining at the same
time weight and muscle. When he returned to Fort Worth he stood six
feet four inches and weighted 240 pounds. While being enrolled at the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, contributed to the Prairie Schooner. During the Depression, Thompson became affiliated with the Federal Writers Project in Oklahoma, helping to turn out guidebooks of the state. He also contributed to true crime and pulp magazines. Thompson hired his mother and sister to aid him in researching crimes and collecting facts. They also took photographs for his articles. It was during this period, when trading in liquor was illegal, Thompson got to know the local gangsters, losers, deputies, corrupt civil servants, and later depicted their world in his books. In 1931 he married Alberta Thompson; they had two children. He also joined the Communist party and made friends with other political activists, such as folk singer Woody Guthrie. In the
1940s Thompson turned to crime fiction as a way of making money. Thompson's
first novel, Now and On Earth
(1942), published by Modern Age [Books], owed much to Erskine Caldwell
and John Steinbeck. Richard Wright wrote the blurb on the jacket of the
book. In the story
the father of the protagonist dies in an asylum, killing himself by
eating the stuffing from his mattress, the fate Thompson often claimed
of his own father. Heed the Thunder came out in 1946. These early books did not gain much recognition. Thompson worked as a journalist for the New York Daily News and for the Los Angeles Times Mirror.
In the 1950s he was blacklisted during the period of Joseph McCarthy's
"crusade" against Communists. Later he was summoned to Hollywood by the
director Stanley Kubrick
to co-write screenplays. Thompson's physically dominating presence made
Kubrick nervous – moreover, the author would turn up for work dressed
in a dirty old raincoat and carrying a bottle in a brown paper back. (Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson by Peter Stanfield, 2011, p. 152) The Killing (1956), based on Clean Break
(1955) by the journalist and crime novelist Lionel White, was a
downbeat movie about robbery at a racetrack. Kubrick showed his
characteristic precision and care in the construction. Sterling
Hayden plays Johnny Clay who plans the robbery, but in the end most of
his gang is shot and he loses the money. Thompson added to the story
the sadomasochist relationship between George Peatty (Elisha Cook,
Jr.), a weakling race track cashier, and his wife Sherry (Marie
Windsor). Paths of Glory (1957), an anti-war film based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel and starring Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax and Adolphe Menjou as General Broulard, was set in the French trenches of World War I. Kubrick, who wanted a happy ending, rewrote the script with Thompson. Douglas considered it a catastrophe and he demanded that they use the original script, which was done. However, Thompson stayed in Hollywood and made scripts for the TV series Dr. Kildare and Convoy and produced one paperback novel based on Ironside. Two years before his death Thompson had a cameo-appearance as Judge Grayle in the 1975 film adaptation of Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum. Thompson's fifth book, The Killer Inside Me (1952), published by Lion Books in New York City, made his reputation. Most of the book Thompson wrote at the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, where he had found a temporary shelter at the home of his sister and her husband. The central character and first-person narrator is a small town sheriff Lou Ford, who pretends to be dim-witted. In fact is a cunning, complex, even brilliant madman, who plays cat and mouse with the world. Stanley Kubrick considered the book the most chilling account of a criminally warped mind he had ever encountered. In the film version from 1976, directed by Burt Kennedy, the outwardly amiable deputy sheriff Lou Ford says: "When things get a little rough, I just go out and kill a few people." Another sharply portrayed psychopath is found in The Nothing Man (1954), in which the protagonist, a newspaperman Clinton Brown, drinks and kills but cannot even get himself blamed for the crimes he commits. Thompson's autobiography, Bad Boy (1953), was about his chaotic coming of age, bootlegging, and how he almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff's deputy. In the 1950s Thompson wrote nearly 20 novels, without much attempt
at polishing them. Besides novels, he wrote several short stories. In the very first issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
in December 1956 he intoduced hustler Mitch Allison ('The Cellini
Chalice'). He returned in the 'The Frightening
Frammis' in a down-and out situation: ""Just couldn't be satisfied, could you?" he grumbled
bitterly. "Sitting right up on top of the world, and it wasn't good
enough for you."" (AHMM, February 1957) Thompson was frequently broke, regularly fired for
his
boozing, and sometimes separated from his family. His problems with
liquor Thompson depicted in The Alcoholics (1953). Also The Nothing Man
portrayed the victims of drink. Three of his novels were published in the French Série Noire in 1966: The Killer Inside Me (Le Démon dans ma peau), The Nothing Man (M. Zéro), and Pop. 1280 (1275 âmes). With the exception of Nothing More Than Murder
(1949), Thompson's books appeared as paperback originals. Texts were
often cut in order to save paper and reduce printing costs. Because of moderate success he wrote fast, and repeated himself in later works, recycling amongst others The Killer Inside Me again in Pop. 1280 (1964). The awarded mystery writer and critic H.R.F. Keating selected it for his list of the one hundred best crime novels. "The great merit of the novels of Jim Thompson is that they are completely without good taste, and of them perhaps Pop. 1280 (the title refers to the population of a small town in an imaginary Potts County in deepest America) has the least good taste of all." (Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating, 1996, pp. 129-130) In the story Nick Corey is seemingly a weak sheriff, but he eventually shoots one of his tormentors. When he kicks him he comments "it wasn't real nice to kick a dying man, and maybe it wasn't. But I'd been wanting to kick him for a long time, and it just never had seemed safe till now." Several of Thompson's stories are set in the deep South, where he moved in a similar atmosphere of decay and the macabre as William Faulkner in his novels. Faulknerian twisted family relationships marked The Grifters (1963), a story about a doomed Oedipus character, Roy Dillon. He wants to have a stable life, is cheated by his mother, Lilly, and dies rather clumsily. Lilly hits him with her handbag as he takes a drink of water – the glass breaks and cuts his throat. Stephen Frears' film version of the book gained four Academy Award nominations, including best-adapted screenplay for Donald Westlake. "The film immediately sets up a parallel between the three swindlers – Lilly Dillon (Anjelica Huston), Roy Dillon (John Cusack), and Moira Langtry (Annette Bening) – by crosscutting between them and putting them on a split screen. Thompson's focus is clearly on Roy as the only one of the three who stands any chance of redemption. In the film, however, none of them are redeemable. In the novel, for example, Roy's guilty seduction of Carol introduces a moral dimension to the story, marking him as a man who does distinguish between innocence and experience, a distinction not made in the film." (The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 2005, p. 168) Thompson himself was an admirer of the classic Russian novelist
Fyodor Dostoevsky. His favorite characters were barflies, grifters,
losers, and psychopaths. There is nothing certain in his world. Or as
the writer once said: "There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I have
used them all, but there is only one plot – things are not as they
seem." (Savage Art: a Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito, 1995, p. 295) An example of Thompson's skill in finding new approaches to
crime stories is seen in The Getaway
(1959). It starts with a bank robbery that goes wrong, then returns
years later to the life of the criminal mastermind and cold-blooded
killer Doc and his wife Carol who
are chased by both the police and criminals. Thompson finally leaves
the couple at a hideout, which is a kind of surrealistic prison camp or
purgatory. "I used to like the ending more than I do now. Just the
whole perverseness of it appealed to me. But now I feel if Thompson was
going to pull such a presto chango he needed to write it better." (Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino, 2022, pp. 105-106) In the 1970s Thompson had several apoplectic strokes. He was always in need of money, and he drank it away as soon as he got any. In his last book, King Blood (1973) he returned to the figure of his father, "a heavyset young man with the profile of McKinley." Thompson died in Los Angeles on April 7, 1977. His death caused little attention and none of his work was in print at that time in his own country. Thompson remained in the U.S. a minor figure in the history of pulp fiction until some academic critics and publishers resurrected his work. His dialogue was seen as crisp as Hammett's, prose as convincing as Chandler's. Most of his novels and some of his uncollected short fiction have been reprinted. For further reading: Jim Thompson: The Killers Inside Him by Max Allan Collins and Ed Gorman (1983); 'Thompson, Jim' by Max Allan Collins, in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); 'Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson (1964),' in Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating (1987); Jim Thompson - Sleep with the Devil by Michael J. McCauley (1991); Difficult Lives by James Sallis (1993); Savage Art: a Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito (1995); Laughing Like Hell: the Harrowing Satires of Jim Thompson by Gay Brewer (1996); 'Jim Thompson (1906-77) US,' in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, compiled by Mike Ashley (2002); Maximum Movies, Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson by Peter Stanfield (2011); 'Jim Thompson and the Lost Souls of the Serie Noire,' in Origins and Legacies of Marcel Duhamel's Serie Noire, edited by Alistair Rolls, Clara Sitbon, Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (2018) - See also other writers from the hard-boiled crime fiction: Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane. Note: Thompson had a small role in the film Farewell, My Lovely (1975), based on Raymond Chandler's novel Selected works:
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