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Bad Boy
"I was going to catch hell whatever I did. I might as well try to enjoy myself."
--Jim Thompson
At thirteen Jim Thompson was learning how to smoke cigars and ogle burlesque girls under the tutelage of his profane grandfather. A few years later, he was bellhopping at a hotel in Fort Worth, where he supplemented his income peddling bootleg out of the package room. He shuddered out the DTs as a watchman on a West Texas oil pipeline. He outraged teachers, cheated mobsters, and almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff's deputy. And somewhere along the way, Thompson became one of the greatest crime writers America has ever known.
In this uproarious autobiographical tale, the author of After Dark, My Sweet and Pop. 1280 tells the story of his chaotic coming of age and reveals just where he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of human misbehavior. Bad Boy is a bawdy, brawling book of reprobates--and an unfettered portrait of a writer growing up in the Southwest of the Roaring Twenties.
--Jim Thompson
At thirteen Jim Thompson was learning how to smoke cigars and ogle burlesque girls under the tutelage of his profane grandfather. A few years later, he was bellhopping at a hotel in Fort Worth, where he supplemented his income peddling bootleg out of the package room. He shuddered out the DTs as a watchman on a West Texas oil pipeline. He outraged teachers, cheated mobsters, and almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff's deputy. And somewhere along the way, Thompson became one of the greatest crime writers America has ever known.
In this uproarious autobiographical tale, the author of After Dark, My Sweet and Pop. 1280 tells the story of his chaotic coming of age and reveals just where he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of human misbehavior. Bad Boy is a bawdy, brawling book of reprobates--and an unfettered portrait of a writer growing up in the Southwest of the Roaring Twenties.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1953
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613 people want to read
About the author
Jim Thompson
161 books1,652 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. In these works, Thompson turned the derided pulp genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism.
The writer R.V. Cassills has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson". Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."
Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky and was nicknamed "Dimestore Dostoevsky" by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.
James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. In these works, Thompson turned the derided pulp genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism.
The writer R.V. Cassills has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson". Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."
Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky and was nicknamed "Dimestore Dostoevsky" by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.
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April 23, 2021
Talk of shabby people and their shabbiness, could there ever be a writer who captures the world of shabbiness more than Jim Thompson? The underbelly's underbelly - the beaten down, the psychopathic, the desperate, carousing around in their filthy cars, eating slop and drinking booze in their filthy houses; where brutal, cruel men and women pound on one another with their foul-mouths and fists.
Is it any wonder that in such a world out-of-control violence is so prevalent? All twenty-nine of Jim Thompson's novels are loaded with misdeeds - beatings, shootings, kidnapping, theft, murder, just to name a few. What can anybody expect in novels featuring characters with mean-spirited, dirtball personalities, personalities filled to the brim with psychic mud?
And one may ask: What was the background of the author of these twisted, dark tales of crime? Fortunately for us, Jim Thompson wrote his autobiographical Bad Boy, the story of his growing up in Oklahoma and Texas during the very early years of the 20th century.
Bad Boy receives five stars not because it is great literature on the level of Thomas Mann or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but because it is Jim Thompson's hard-boiled, pretension-free account of his early life in all its raw, sometimes tender, and sometimes humorous detail.
Here is an example of the type of episode we encounter in the book, this particular episode involves Jim, about age ten, teaming up with his two older cousins: "One of our more successful enterprises was the electrification of certain privy seats around the town. My cousins did the wiring, and supplied the dry cells. I, lying with them in a nearby weed patch, was allowed to throw the switch at the crucial moment. There are no statistics, I suppose, on the speed with which people leave outdoor johns. But I am certain that if there were, the victims of our rural electrification project would still be holding the record."
There is a homespun quality about young Jim's observations of friends and family. Jim describes his grandfather in loving detail and starts out by saying: "Grandfather, or "Pa" as he was known to the entire clan, was an old man from my earliest recollection - just how old even he did not know. Orphaned shortly after birth in a period of indifferent vital statistics, he had been handed around from one family to another, worked always, fed seldom, and beaten frequently. For all that his memory could tell him he had been born big, raw-boned and doing a man's work."
Jim worked a string of menial jobs, bellboy being one, a job making a deep impression on how the future crime author viewed life. Here is Jim's description: "It was the bellboy who was always in closest contact with this hurly-burly world, a world always populated by strangers of unknown background and unpredictable behavior. Alone and on his own, with no one to turn to for advice or help, he had to please and appease those strangers: the eccentric, the belligerent, the morbidly depressed. He had to spot the potential suicide and sooth the fighting drunk and satisfy the whims of those who were determined not to be satisfied. And always, no matter how he felt, he had to do those things swiftly and unobtrusively. Briefly, he had to be nervy and quick-thinking."
Although Jim Thompson writes of the sweetness in his youth, make no mistake, right from the start, Jim had to do battle with bouts of hunger and a craving for hard liquor. Life was tough and a boy growing up had to be nervy and quick-thinking. And once a man, nervy and quick-thinking both became pressing necessities for Jim Thompson, who was poor and obliged to support a family. And, on top of obligation to wife and children, Jim had to find time to fulfill his passion for writing.
Man, I'm so glad Jim Thompson did find the time to write all his crime novels. He's one of the more powerful voices in the world of American literature, a voice speaking to us today as powerfully as ever.
March 14, 2014
Thompson earned money to go to college by selling bootleg whiskey for Al Capone's network.
Take THAT, Don Fucking DeLillo.
Take THAT, Don Fucking DeLillo.
July 31, 2023
Jim Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) published his autobiography Bad Boy in 1953 fairly early in his writing career, which spanned 1946 through 1973 (not counting post-humous publications). “May you live in interesting times,” some say ironically, and Thompson lived an interesting life and had numerous occupations before he dove headlong into writing. This book (Bad Boy) is about Thompson himself and is a folksy Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn type recollection of his childhood and early adulthood. He starts by recounting how “the Thompson family fortunes had undergone an unusually terrifying nosedive and we had moved into a particularly execrable section of Oklahoma City.” As he explains, the family fortunes changed more often than the weather and the only real constant was change. But the one constant he says: “I was going to catch hell no matter what I did. I might as well try to enjoy himself.”
He recounts pranks his sister Maxine pulled and that he caught the blame for. He recounts pranks kids at school played on each other and particularly on him. He would come home from school nightly “with large chunks missing from my person and attire.” His cousin Glenn was one for pranks and letting others have it. Pop as he called his father had a law business and sometimes had a grocery store and sometimes was a politician, but always had a mind for booze. “Pop was practically self-educated, his financial position was more often than not insecure, and he was careless about dress and the social niceties.” In short, he was a character. “Pop was a wizard in large affairs, but in mundane matters he was a flop.” He even became a fugitive from justice for two years and Thompson tells us that he would have walked into the Rio Grande and kept on walking until his hat floated. His father’s friend, Tom Conners, strung up cans with rocks all over the backyard to prevent scavengers from getting the crops in the back and, when the wind threw the strings and cans and stones around, came out caught in the web of strings, yelling curses, and firing his gun.
Grandpa, who Thompson calls “Pa” distinguished from “Pop” (see above) got the same treatment in Thompson’s recollection. In short, he too was a crazy quirky colorful character. Pa was fifteen when he joined the Union army, but by the end of the war, he was “a full-fledged sergeant, an inveterate gambler, a confirmed drinker and a stout apostle of the philosophy of easy-come easy-go. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he was certain that it must pay a great deal and have very little physical work attached to it.”
Thompson’s wry sense of humor is everywhere in this autobiography. He tells us at one point that “fate must have provided Ma with a steel-lined stomach as recompense for depriving her of all sense of taste. In no other way can I account for her ability to eat heartily and healthfully of her own fortunately imitable cooking. As for the Thompsons, I think we certainly should have died except for Pa’s constant dosing of us with whiskey.”
Thompson became a bellboy, a wildcatter, a roustabout, a flop who helped out with gambling, and just about anything else he could fall into. He lived more life in his Twenties than anyone could imagine and could have ended up doing just about anything other than writing. The writing here is always folksy and ironic, filled with Thompson’s peculiar sense of humor, and you can see how many characters he grew up with and encountered and who later developed into the many and varied characters in his novels.
He recounts pranks his sister Maxine pulled and that he caught the blame for. He recounts pranks kids at school played on each other and particularly on him. He would come home from school nightly “with large chunks missing from my person and attire.” His cousin Glenn was one for pranks and letting others have it. Pop as he called his father had a law business and sometimes had a grocery store and sometimes was a politician, but always had a mind for booze. “Pop was practically self-educated, his financial position was more often than not insecure, and he was careless about dress and the social niceties.” In short, he was a character. “Pop was a wizard in large affairs, but in mundane matters he was a flop.” He even became a fugitive from justice for two years and Thompson tells us that he would have walked into the Rio Grande and kept on walking until his hat floated. His father’s friend, Tom Conners, strung up cans with rocks all over the backyard to prevent scavengers from getting the crops in the back and, when the wind threw the strings and cans and stones around, came out caught in the web of strings, yelling curses, and firing his gun.
Grandpa, who Thompson calls “Pa” distinguished from “Pop” (see above) got the same treatment in Thompson’s recollection. In short, he too was a crazy quirky colorful character. Pa was fifteen when he joined the Union army, but by the end of the war, he was “a full-fledged sergeant, an inveterate gambler, a confirmed drinker and a stout apostle of the philosophy of easy-come easy-go. He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he was certain that it must pay a great deal and have very little physical work attached to it.”
Thompson’s wry sense of humor is everywhere in this autobiography. He tells us at one point that “fate must have provided Ma with a steel-lined stomach as recompense for depriving her of all sense of taste. In no other way can I account for her ability to eat heartily and healthfully of her own fortunately imitable cooking. As for the Thompsons, I think we certainly should have died except for Pa’s constant dosing of us with whiskey.”
Thompson became a bellboy, a wildcatter, a roustabout, a flop who helped out with gambling, and just about anything else he could fall into. He lived more life in his Twenties than anyone could imagine and could have ended up doing just about anything other than writing. The writing here is always folksy and ironic, filled with Thompson’s peculiar sense of humor, and you can see how many characters he grew up with and encountered and who later developed into the many and varied characters in his novels.
October 14, 2016
This is the only nonfiction Thompson out of the nineteen I've read. Not a memoir of his entire life, but just his early life up to age twenty two. His fiction is more entertaining but these stories hold their own. Fascinating enough to me of course I've never found a Thompson I didn't like.
March 16, 2023
Jim Thompson is legendary as a noir writer/muse. This is his memoir/novel about his early years.
At times this was compelling; at other times I wanted more insight or details. The narrative just ends abruptly, rather than wrapping up in any sort of fashion.
Does offer fascinating glimpses into the lives of this family; however, another writer (that is, one who is not famous) may have been asked for another re-write before publishing. Some details are coyly glossed over, even though they concern events from decades ago. This volume did not leave me wanting to read more memoir from this author.
At times this was compelling; at other times I wanted more insight or details. The narrative just ends abruptly, rather than wrapping up in any sort of fashion.
Does offer fascinating glimpses into the lives of this family; however, another writer (that is, one who is not famous) may have been asked for another re-write before publishing. Some details are coyly glossed over, even though they concern events from decades ago. This volume did not leave me wanting to read more memoir from this author.
March 8, 2020
Episodic and often funny "novel" or memoir about Thompson's childhood. Thompson has a dark humor that can be found in all of his books. I'll read the sequel soon.
April 5, 2009
in his novels, thompson comes off as a guy who understands the ins and outs of everything-- every person, every business, every relationship, every idea... and in this autobiographical work, it is the same way. he takes you on a really fascinating journey through the places and people and events of his youth, many of which formed the basis for his later novels (especially A Swell-Looking Babe and South of Heaven). the difference between his novels and this book, though, is that, in this, thompson also understands himself perfectly well. i read thompson to experience the terror and tension of living inside, essentially, a psychopath-- someone who is hiding even from himself, someone who doesn't know what he's capable of, what he's about to do, or even, sometimes, what he has done. his novels swirl around this negative center which keeps moving without ever knowing how or why or in what direction. all that is gone here, in favor of reflection and understanding, and as a result there is no tension. we get a colorful series of incidents and episodes, and are introduced to a wide variety of interesting characters, but it never really comes together into anything more. and it's not scary; just funny. humorous. genial.
it's just not a jim thompson novel, is all. take it for what it is: insight into the man.
it's just not a jim thompson novel, is all. take it for what it is: insight into the man.
July 3, 2011
Jim Thompson’s Bad Boy is tepid autobiography in the vein of Jim Tully’s early books: a series of broad-stroke anecdotes in search of a narrative. The book gets stronger as it goes, with its most famous section detailing Thompson’s encounters with the sheriff who inspired the creation of The Killer Inside Me’s Lou Ford. But this juxtaposition serves only to highlight the comparative thinness of Bad Boy: Thompson may have been haunted by his memories of this man, but in the real-life telling he is (perhaps unavoidably) the barest husk of Lou Ford.
October 7, 2017
Thompson’s memoir is entertaining, but nowhere near as good as his fiction - just a long string of raucous anecdotes from his childhood through early twenties, but with no narrative arc or any pause for context or self-analysis. Still, it was interesting to see that he mined much of his early life as the raw material for his unforgettable fiction.
September 10, 2007
A great auto-biography detailing Thompson's youth. About as wild and lively as you'd expect, but without the hard-boiled veneer of his fiction.
April 8, 2022
Bad Boy was Jim Thompson’s first take at autobiography. Although he was only forty-seven when he wrote it, he had already lived a pretty full life. This volume covers his escapades through age twenty-three.
Thompson spent his early youth in Oklahoma, where his father was a county sheriff and one of the most popular men in town. When his father ran for state office on platform that included a commitment to racial equality, he was run out of town.
With his Pop on the run in Mexico, Thompson’s mother took him north to her family in Nebraska. There, Thompson’s grandmother, Ma, forced him to go to religious revivals where the preachers scared him half to death with vivid tales of the hell that awaited him. Ma’s husband, Pa, calmed the six-year-old later with whiskey and bawdy tales.
What seems to stick most in Thompson’s mind from his time in Nebraska is his grandmother’s cooking. “All my life I have been the victim of the inhumane and unjust botching of potentially good food… Nowhere–in hobo jungles, soup kitchens, greasy spoons, labor camps–nowhere, I repeat, have I eaten anything as bad… I think the fates must have provided Ma with a steel-lined stomach as recompense for depriving her of all sense of taste.”
Thompson’s Pop spent two years on the run in Mexico, working hard labor during the day and taking correspondence courses in law and accounting at night. In those two years, he earned a law degree and a certificate in accounting. He returned to Oklahoma and successfully represented himself in the fraud case that his enemies had trumped up to run him out of town.
The family’s name was cleared, but they didn’t want to stick around Oklahoma. They moved to Fort Worth, a town of which the young Oklahoman thought little:
In Fort Worth, Thompson started ninth grade at age and twelve, and remained a freshman throughout his six year high school career. This sort of character appears often in Thompson’s writing: a man of strong native intelligence who just can’t seem to fit in or get ahead in the normal, acceptable channels of society.
During his high school years, Thompson’s father became a speculator in a dozen different businesses, always either about to get rich or about to go broke. The family was under constant financial strain, and Thompson himself had to go to work to help them get by.
He took a job as a bellhop in the city’s fanciest hotel, often starting work just after school let out and finishing just as it was time to return to class. The hotel gave him more of an education than school ever did.
His grandfather came back into his life during these years, giving the truant schoolboy whiskey and taking him to burlesque shows. You can see he was groomed from an early age to write the kinds of books he wrote.
After six years of ninth grade, Thompson drifted west, to the oil fields, where he lived mostly outdoors, building derricks, tearing them down, guarding drilling equipment, drinking, gambling, and trying honestly but unsuccessfully to stay out of trouble.
Life was rough, but invigorating. “There is always a wind in West Texas. It blows relentlessly, straight off the North Pole in winter, straight out of hell in summer.”
It was during this stint in the oil fields that he came across the real-life model of the psychopathic deputy of The Killer Inside Me.
Thompson was in a bar one night in Big Springs when a brawl broke out. Someone in the crowd threw him through a plate glass window. The local cops, sick of the drunk roughnecks, decided to arrest everyone on the scene. When a particularly rough deputy hauled Thompson into his car, the future writer protested, “But I haven’t done anything! You think I like getting knocked through windows?”
“Shoulda aimed yourself better,” the cop replied.
To his surprise, the judge let Thompson off with a fine, due in three days. Outside the courthouse, the deputy let Thompson know that he would hunt him down and collect the money.
Three days later, Thompson was alone on a job forty miles from town at the end of an unmarked, overgrown, virtually impassable road. From his perch a hundred feet up at the top of the derrick, Thompson watched the deranged deputy’s car bumping through the brush, steam spewing from its radiator.
It was a hot day, and Thompson had no water, so the lawman simply waited for hours until he had to come down for a drink. Then the deputy debated aloud as to whether or not he should kill Thompson.
Thompson could see the man was serious, and that he could get away with it. There was not another person for miles in any direction. The scene is reminiscent of Anton Chigurr in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, when the psychopath flips a coin and asks a gas station attendant to call it. Heads he lives, tails he doesn’t. The psychopath doesn’t really care which way it falls, and the victim’s terror comes in part from seeing his killer’s indifference.
Thompson didn’t know whether or not the man would kill him, because the man himself didn’t seem to know. Of all the disturbing characters Thompson had come across in his rough years, this man was the most disturbing.
The deputy ultimately decided, without explanation, to drive Thompson back to town to pay his fine.
Thompson said it took him nearly thirty years to figure out how to convey the chilling terror of this deranged mind to readers. He ultimately did it in The Killer Inside Me, and again in Pop. 1280, which is practically the same book.
Bad Boy ends with the author at age 23 falling victim to the kind of scam-gone-wrong his characters would fall prey to years later in his books. The young Thompson thinks he has all the angles covered in what should be a relatively simple rip-off of some local gangsters. But there’s one angle he doesn’t see, and it’s the one that gets him. Like many of his characters, he’s forced to flee for his life.
Before he flees though, he gets one piece of advice from the editor of a local literary journal. “You write too much from your head,” the man tells him. “Just write what you see.”
At some point, Thompson took that advice, and became one of the great American crime writers of the twentieth century. But he could never have done that if he hadn’t actually seen and lived the stories his books describe.
Thompson spent his early youth in Oklahoma, where his father was a county sheriff and one of the most popular men in town. When his father ran for state office on platform that included a commitment to racial equality, he was run out of town.
With his Pop on the run in Mexico, Thompson’s mother took him north to her family in Nebraska. There, Thompson’s grandmother, Ma, forced him to go to religious revivals where the preachers scared him half to death with vivid tales of the hell that awaited him. Ma’s husband, Pa, calmed the six-year-old later with whiskey and bawdy tales.
What seems to stick most in Thompson’s mind from his time in Nebraska is his grandmother’s cooking. “All my life I have been the victim of the inhumane and unjust botching of potentially good food… Nowhere–in hobo jungles, soup kitchens, greasy spoons, labor camps–nowhere, I repeat, have I eaten anything as bad… I think the fates must have provided Ma with a steel-lined stomach as recompense for depriving her of all sense of taste.”
Thompson’s Pop spent two years on the run in Mexico, working hard labor during the day and taking correspondence courses in law and accounting at night. In those two years, he earned a law degree and a certificate in accounting. He returned to Oklahoma and successfully represented himself in the fraud case that his enemies had trumped up to run him out of town.
The family’s name was cleared, but they didn’t want to stick around Oklahoma. They moved to Fort Worth, a town of which the young Oklahoman thought little:
Texans made boast of their insularism; they bragged about such things as never having been outside the state or the fact that the only book in their house was the Bible. Texans did not need to work to improve their characters as Pop was constantly pressing me to do. All Texans were born with perfect characters, and these became pluperfect as their owners drank the unrivaled Texas water, breathed the wondrous Texas air and trod the holy Texas soil.
Texas, it appeared, had formed all but a minuscule part of the Confederacy, and as such had slapped the troops of Sherman silly and sent Grant’s groaning to their graves. Singlehanded–almost, anyway–it had thrashed the bully, North. Then, as a generous though intrinsically meaningless gesture, it had conceded defeat, thus ending the awful bloodshed and preserving the Union.
In Fort Worth, Thompson started ninth grade at age and twelve, and remained a freshman throughout his six year high school career. This sort of character appears often in Thompson’s writing: a man of strong native intelligence who just can’t seem to fit in or get ahead in the normal, acceptable channels of society.
Despite the sorry state of my elementary schooling, I think I might have done passably in the higher grades if I could have put my heart into it. I have almost always managed to do the things I really cared about doing. Similarly, however, and doubtless regrettably, I can do nothing at all if I do not care. And I become uncaring very quickly if I am prodded or driven, or if the people involved are distasteful to me.
During his high school years, Thompson’s father became a speculator in a dozen different businesses, always either about to get rich or about to go broke. The family was under constant financial strain, and Thompson himself had to go to work to help them get by.
He took a job as a bellhop in the city’s fanciest hotel, often starting work just after school let out and finishing just as it was time to return to class. The hotel gave him more of an education than school ever did.
You worked in the hotel, but you worked for the guests. Your earnings, your very job depended upon their good will. So why offend a wealthy drunk by refusing to drink with him? Why snub a lovely and well-heeled widow when it was so easy to please her? And what about these people, anyway? If they were all wrong–these publicly acclaimed models of success and deportment–then who was right?
His grandfather came back into his life during these years, giving the truant schoolboy whiskey and taking him to burlesque shows. You can see he was groomed from an early age to write the kinds of books he wrote.
After six years of ninth grade, Thompson drifted west, to the oil fields, where he lived mostly outdoors, building derricks, tearing them down, guarding drilling equipment, drinking, gambling, and trying honestly but unsuccessfully to stay out of trouble.
Life was rough, but invigorating. “There is always a wind in West Texas. It blows relentlessly, straight off the North Pole in winter, straight out of hell in summer.”
It was during this stint in the oil fields that he came across the real-life model of the psychopathic deputy of The Killer Inside Me.
Thompson was in a bar one night in Big Springs when a brawl broke out. Someone in the crowd threw him through a plate glass window. The local cops, sick of the drunk roughnecks, decided to arrest everyone on the scene. When a particularly rough deputy hauled Thompson into his car, the future writer protested, “But I haven’t done anything! You think I like getting knocked through windows?”
“Shoulda aimed yourself better,” the cop replied.
To his surprise, the judge let Thompson off with a fine, due in three days. Outside the courthouse, the deputy let Thompson know that he would hunt him down and collect the money.
Three days later, Thompson was alone on a job forty miles from town at the end of an unmarked, overgrown, virtually impassable road. From his perch a hundred feet up at the top of the derrick, Thompson watched the deranged deputy’s car bumping through the brush, steam spewing from its radiator.
It was a hot day, and Thompson had no water, so the lawman simply waited for hours until he had to come down for a drink. Then the deputy debated aloud as to whether or not he should kill Thompson.
Thompson could see the man was serious, and that he could get away with it. There was not another person for miles in any direction. The scene is reminiscent of Anton Chigurr in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, when the psychopath flips a coin and asks a gas station attendant to call it. Heads he lives, tails he doesn’t. The psychopath doesn’t really care which way it falls, and the victim’s terror comes in part from seeing his killer’s indifference.
Thompson didn’t know whether or not the man would kill him, because the man himself didn’t seem to know. Of all the disturbing characters Thompson had come across in his rough years, this man was the most disturbing.
The deputy ultimately decided, without explanation, to drive Thompson back to town to pay his fine.
Thompson said it took him nearly thirty years to figure out how to convey the chilling terror of this deranged mind to readers. He ultimately did it in The Killer Inside Me, and again in Pop. 1280, which is practically the same book.
Bad Boy ends with the author at age 23 falling victim to the kind of scam-gone-wrong his characters would fall prey to years later in his books. The young Thompson thinks he has all the angles covered in what should be a relatively simple rip-off of some local gangsters. But there’s one angle he doesn’t see, and it’s the one that gets him. Like many of his characters, he’s forced to flee for his life.
Before he flees though, he gets one piece of advice from the editor of a local literary journal. “You write too much from your head,” the man tells him. “Just write what you see.”
At some point, Thompson took that advice, and became one of the great American crime writers of the twentieth century. But he could never have done that if he hadn’t actually seen and lived the stories his books describe.
November 22, 2014
Bad Boy is the first part of Jim Thompson's autobiography. What a life! Enough for a dozen novels in his first 20 years. Well written, of course, and very funny. Ghastly events, like falling five storeys down an elevator shaft, are underplayed, but for a reason. He started his professional writing career at about 14, but simultaneously held all sorts of "real" jobs, where he learned a lot about human nature, not to mention crime.
The book ends abruptly, in a strange place, in the middle of nowhere, really. I don't think I'll spoil anything if I say he's on the lam.
Now I must go back and reread Rough Neck, part two, which covers his adulthood. The main thing I remember from my first time through is the terrible house he and his wife bought for next to nothing. It turned out to be built on a centipede colony of epic proportions. My scalp still tingles thinking about it.
The book ends abruptly, in a strange place, in the middle of nowhere, really. I don't think I'll spoil anything if I say he's on the lam.
Now I must go back and reread Rough Neck, part two, which covers his adulthood. The main thing I remember from my first time through is the terrible house he and his wife bought for next to nothing. It turned out to be built on a centipede colony of epic proportions. My scalp still tingles thinking about it.
November 10, 2014
Jim Thompson’s proto/pseudo autobiography Bad Boy is not one of his better efforts and seems hardly worth the effort. If Bad Boy was your first experience with his work you might not be tempted to read more. It has been described as a series of anecdotes in search of a narrative. This pretty much sums up the book.
Though this book was a bust, there are others of Thompson’s which are brilliant. Notables would be: The Getaway, The Killer Inside me, Savage Night, After Dark, My Sweet, Pop. 1280, A Hell of a Woman, and The Grifters are all worth the time it would take to read them.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
Though this book was a bust, there are others of Thompson’s which are brilliant. Notables would be: The Getaway, The Killer Inside me, Savage Night, After Dark, My Sweet, Pop. 1280, A Hell of a Woman, and The Grifters are all worth the time it would take to read them.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
January 15, 2013
BAD BOY is more than a book, it's more than fiction or nonfiction, it's a document of a time in American history that was unlike any other. A time when the power of the nation was on the cusp of exploding forth in a wave of possibility and it's captured perfectly by one of the most linguistically creative writers the twentieth century was fortunate to have.
May 6, 2025
Bellhops: Who'd Have Thought?
It's just autobiography, but, man, the bellhop stuff is priceless.
It's just autobiography, but, man, the bellhop stuff is priceless.
August 14, 2018
Jim Thompson's "Bad Boy," is a quick and effective autobiographical account of his early life. Thompson was a hard-boiled crime writer that often seemed fit to be sold next to pornography. The depictions of the author's early life are just as grimy and tough as his novels. Bad Boy will certainly spur my mind into reading more of his words.
The only novel of Thompson's I've read was "After Dark, My Sweet." There's a moment in that novel where you have to say to yourself, "Holy- I'm reading a book about kidnappers. They might kill this kid."
Jim Thompson was fearless as a writer, this came from a childhood that involved a full-time job, whiskey as medicine, and teenage years more focused on surviving hard labor jobs on oil rigs than asking a date to prom.
Read this book.
The only novel of Thompson's I've read was "After Dark, My Sweet." There's a moment in that novel where you have to say to yourself, "Holy- I'm reading a book about kidnappers. They might kill this kid."
Jim Thompson was fearless as a writer, this came from a childhood that involved a full-time job, whiskey as medicine, and teenage years more focused on surviving hard labor jobs on oil rigs than asking a date to prom.
Read this book.
March 17, 2022
Quella di Jim Thompson è davvero la storia di un “bad boy”? Un cattivo ragazzo sempre pronto a cacciarsi nei guai e a prendere le decisioni sbagliate?
Il latente cinismo di Thompson ci spingerebbe a crederlo, a credere alla versione rocambolesca e rutilante della vita di un adolescente allampanato e scapestrato, incapace di frenare la propria irrequietezza e il costante desiderio di evadere dalla realtà.
Ma non si può davvero pensare che sia tutto lì, neanche Thompson riesce a cedere al suo stesso incantesimo e il lettore è spinto a indagare insieme a lui, è spinto a chiedersi cosa ci sia davvero al di là di ciò che vediamo, quanti veli di ipocrisia, rabbia e violenza si possano alzare per riportare alla luce la verità, una delle tante verità della (e sulla) vita, ammaccata e disillusa forse, ma pur sempre una verità.
Continua qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...
Il latente cinismo di Thompson ci spingerebbe a crederlo, a credere alla versione rocambolesca e rutilante della vita di un adolescente allampanato e scapestrato, incapace di frenare la propria irrequietezza e il costante desiderio di evadere dalla realtà.
Ma non si può davvero pensare che sia tutto lì, neanche Thompson riesce a cedere al suo stesso incantesimo e il lettore è spinto a indagare insieme a lui, è spinto a chiedersi cosa ci sia davvero al di là di ciò che vediamo, quanti veli di ipocrisia, rabbia e violenza si possano alzare per riportare alla luce la verità, una delle tante verità della (e sulla) vita, ammaccata e disillusa forse, ma pur sempre una verità.
Continua qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...
August 7, 2025
Noir author Jim Thompson delivers a warts and all, and at times all warts, version of his early life in BAD BOY. Very readable throughout and any fan of Jim Thompson will see the seeds of his stories sprouting all over the place. Makes me want to reread the many books I’ve already read just to put them in context. At times it even reads like notes for future stories. His later years are chronicled in ROUGHNECK and both memoirs are packaged like his novels—until pulling BAD BOY off my Jim Thompson shelf I thought they WERE both novels. Rolling right into ROUGHNECK now.
February 9, 2020
Jim Thompson’s Autobiographical rendition of his early childhood to his early/middle twenties.
Reading this is like sitting down on the porch, drinking whisky with your grandfather and listening to his stories of the old days, if your grandfather was Jim Thompson.
In my opinion, Jim Thompson never wrote a bad sentence in his life and this is another great read.
Reading this is like sitting down on the porch, drinking whisky with your grandfather and listening to his stories of the old days, if your grandfather was Jim Thompson.
In my opinion, Jim Thompson never wrote a bad sentence in his life and this is another great read.
February 4, 2022
Thompson can sure tell a story. I didn’t realize this was autobiography when I picked it up. At first I was disappointed, but he is such a good story teller, I couldn’t stop. I especially appreciated his description of an encounter with the person who inspired The Killer Inside Me.
December 10, 2024
The first of Jim Thompson's autobiographical novels. What a life! Writers are always looking for 'experience', and Thompson accrued more by the age of twenty than the average man does in a lifetime. A fascinating book.
January 7, 2018
Worth a read, some good tales and the cop who scared him enough to become The Killer Inside Me, that was my favourite story...
Want to read
July 19, 2020elibrary
September 10, 2020
Jim Thompson. He wrote what he knew.
February 25, 2021
Autobiography. Slow first half. Skip if you’re not a fan of his novels.
August 17, 2024
rip holden you would have loved jim thompson so much
April 2, 2025
Excellent semi-biographical novel.
June 30, 2025
love when an autobiography comes across as mostly lying.
August 22, 2025
Didn’t realize this wasn’t fiction until halfway through. A drunken, glorious Looney Tunes of a life.
May 17, 2022
Bad Boy, one of Thompson’s two memoirs, was sadly lacking the keen psychological insight captured in his novels. It relies instead on “funny” anecdotes about his early life. And, given how much he pulls from his own life in his fiction, I often felt like I’d already heard better versions of these stories elsewhere. I can’t help but think like he was holding back, unwilling to dig into his own mind the way he digs into his characters’. even when he tells a story of the sheriff’s deputy that supposedly inspired Lou Ford, it rang false; his own father spent years as a sheriff, and I suspect he mined more inspiration from that than he lets on. I would say this can be skipped by everyone except Thompson completists.
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