Of course I've read Jim Thompson before, probably the darkest of the great hardboiled crime novelists, and the most cursory knowledge of his writing bears out that title. He's a great writer with that age-old problem of having written many good books but perhaps not great ones; and he's probably too dark to gain too large a following, the way another great writer with no clear cut masterpieces, Philip K. Dick, has. Despite his obscurity, Thompson is a fascinating case study in terms of learning how fiction does what it does. Example 1. (How's that for a segue?) Lou Ford in "The Killer Inside Me" is his own kind of Satan, creating his own kind of Hell, but the motif I'm talking about comes at the end, when he's in the asylum.
Jim Thompson is an interesting writer. I first read him years ago (by which I mean, like, five years ago) after going through all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett's novels; I had an affinity for him the second I read that he thought of himself as a "dime-store Dostoevsky," and an even deeper affinity when I read on his Wikipedia page that he had gotten married in my home town of Marysville, Kansas. Whether or not the latter is true--it's not the kind of town people lie about to tenuously link it to semi-obscure pulp writers--the Dostoevsky thing is pretty far-fetched.
Dostoevsky, a lot of people will agree, had a pretty decent ability to grasp the motives and psyches of different characters. There are probably at least seven characters in "Brothers Karamazov" who could be as deep as any character in literature, memorable and unique and fairly distinguishable once you get past the weird Russian naming system. You have the holy idiot (Myshkin, Alyosha) and the nihilists (Roghozin, Dmitri, Raskalnikov) and the others, but it's the nihilists that are so memorable: Dostoevsky himself was religious and probably saw the former two as sorts of ideals, but like John Milton, it's with the devils where his talents come out to play.
With Jim Thompson, it's only devils. There are no saints, or even characters who know what saints are.
I'm only thinking about this because the other day I picked up "The Getaway"--like a lot of his novels, and like Dick too in this way, he's been adapted for film pretty frequently; this one's been made into movies with Alec Baldwin and Steve McQueen, not in that order. This one starts off a little confusing, in media res, as people who want to sound like they know Latin say, with a bank robbery; the rest of the novel is about the obvious-don't-make-me-spell-it-out-for-you (getaway.) After things go bad (but pretty much according to plan) the semi-hero, Doc McCoy and his wife, Carol, try to get to Mexico, because that's what you do, if it's 1955 and you just robbed a bank.
It's an alarmingly straight thriller for Thompson, but in the last third of the book things start to get a little out-of-character. Our protagonists end up in a subterranean purgatory, and then a fecal purgatory, and then a waterborne purgatory, before ending up in a Flann O'Brien-in-"The-Third-Policeman"-esque Hell. Despite the crime fiction trappings, "The Getaway," like "Savage Night" and its mentally decomposing narrator, is more metaphorical than strictly plot-turning thriller.
--Which is part of what makes Jim Thompson Jim Thompson. Rather than Dostoevsky, who is famous for his long novels, I would be more inclined to compare him to Edgar Allan Poe, the original master of the American macabre. These aren't crime novels so much as they are descents into a kind of very specific terror.
Hell for Jim Thompson is Kafkaesque--if the protagonist isn't dead, he's in jail, being blackmailed, in any situation where he has lost all his freedom. There's nothing left for the man to do, not because he's done, but because the situation has put him down, and the brilliance of this is that, whereas it's easy to kill off a character, especially in these situations, Thompson puts them in a situation that's worse--a tailor-made inferno.
This is what his books looked like when they were published.
The cover/content discrepancy has seldom been so high.
Jim Thompson is an interesting writer. I first read him years ago (by which I mean, like, five years ago) after going through all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett's novels; I had an affinity for him the second I read that he thought of himself as a "dime-store Dostoevsky," and an even deeper affinity when I read on his Wikipedia page that he had gotten married in my home town of Marysville, Kansas. Whether or not the latter is true--it's not the kind of town people lie about to tenuously link it to semi-obscure pulp writers--the Dostoevsky thing is pretty far-fetched.
Dostoevsky, a lot of people will agree, had a pretty decent ability to grasp the motives and psyches of different characters. There are probably at least seven characters in "Brothers Karamazov" who could be as deep as any character in literature, memorable and unique and fairly distinguishable once you get past the weird Russian naming system. You have the holy idiot (Myshkin, Alyosha) and the nihilists (Roghozin, Dmitri, Raskalnikov) and the others, but it's the nihilists that are so memorable: Dostoevsky himself was religious and probably saw the former two as sorts of ideals, but like John Milton, it's with the devils where his talents come out to play.
With Jim Thompson, it's only devils. There are no saints, or even characters who know what saints are.
I'm only thinking about this because the other day I picked up "The Getaway"--like a lot of his novels, and like Dick too in this way, he's been adapted for film pretty frequently; this one's been made into movies with Alec Baldwin and Steve McQueen, not in that order. This one starts off a little confusing, in media res, as people who want to sound like they know Latin say, with a bank robbery; the rest of the novel is about the obvious-don't-make-me-spell-it-out-for-you (getaway.) After things go bad (but pretty much according to plan) the semi-hero, Doc McCoy and his wife, Carol, try to get to Mexico, because that's what you do, if it's 1955 and you just robbed a bank.
His current imprint--Black Lizard--puts together nicer covers.
It's an alarmingly straight thriller for Thompson, but in the last third of the book things start to get a little out-of-character. Our protagonists end up in a subterranean purgatory, and then a fecal purgatory, and then a waterborne purgatory, before ending up in a Flann O'Brien-in-"The-Third-Policeman"-esque Hell. Despite the crime fiction trappings, "The Getaway," like "Savage Night" and its mentally decomposing narrator, is more metaphorical than strictly plot-turning thriller.
--Which is part of what makes Jim Thompson Jim Thompson. Rather than Dostoevsky, who is famous for his long novels, I would be more inclined to compare him to Edgar Allan Poe, the original master of the American macabre. These aren't crime novels so much as they are descents into a kind of very specific terror.
Hell for Jim Thompson is Kafkaesque--if the protagonist isn't dead, he's in jail, being blackmailed, in any situation where he has lost all his freedom. There's nothing left for the man to do, not because he's done, but because the situation has put him down, and the brilliance of this is that, whereas it's easy to kill off a character, especially in these situations, Thompson puts them in a situation that's worse--a tailor-made inferno.
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