Hardcore

by Jim Thompson

Here are three classic novels by Jim Thompson, “that master of the American groin-kick novel”. Lucid, idiomatic, musical in their speech rhythms, these are novels that go to the hard core of man’s most primal 1) In THE KILL-OFF (1957), people hated and feared Luane Devore, the youth obsesses with the secret of his birth; the town handyman trapped by a strange marriage to a psychotic older woman; the gorgeous blind singer. All hated and feared her designs that threatened to destroy them – unless she was destroyed first, 2) In THE NOTHING MAN (1954), Clint “Brownie” Brown lost his manhood in the war. Now in civilian life, Brownie takes his agony and bitterness out on society with a revenge all his own, and 3) In BAD BOY (1953), Jim Thompson writes about “Jim Thompson” and his twenty tempestuous years…taking his beatings, handing them out and blasting his way past youth into manhood. Jim Thompson wrote to be read – without pretense and with an uncompromising honesty. When he died in 1977, all his work was out of print in the United States. Thompson’s fans – readers and critics – remembered him, and many of his works are now considered classics of the genre with a following that rows year by year.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian 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.

Reviews

[Geoffrey Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally got around to reading one of the short novels by the man Stephen King has called "My favorite crime novelist", The Kill-Off. The narrative voices — a different one for each chapter — work brilliantly, but the story doesn't. In the end, we're still not sure who murdered Luane Devore nor (probably) do you much care, but some of those characters' confessions of why they are so miserable are deeply moving — even if motivations are too complex and contradictory to be convincing. Not enough reward for reading about such unpleasant people, self-hating and deeply suspicious of others, in such a wretched little town.

[Lee Riggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two noir or pulp fiction novellas, and one memoir that reads much the same. Down and dirty, not too many likable characters, some humor, lots of drinking and poor choices. Interesting shifts of narration in The Kill-Off. The Nothing Man reminded me a bit of D.O.A. with the protagonist narrating his own story (actually, in this case, typing it all down).

[David Tamarin · Rating 5 out of 5]

3 classick Jim Thompson hard-boiled novels in one