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Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 60s (#399): A Hell of a Woman / After Dark, My Sweet / The Getaway / The Grifters / Pop. 1280
A straight flush of 5 noir masterworks by America’s “Dimestore Dostoevsky”—the crime fiction legend who revolutionized the genre with his experimental style.
"My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated." —Stephen King
Here in one deluxe clothbound volume are five chilling crime classics from the writer who blew the top off the conformity of postwar American life in novels of shocking violence and stunning psychological depth. His experimental style was as shattering as his dark stories, infusing the pulp crime novel with the energies of underground writers like William Burroughs and Hubert Selby. Already represented in the Library of America’s American Noir collection with The Killer Inside Me, Thompson now joins the masters of American crime fiction featured in the series with this volume collecting five of his best novels:
A Hell of a Woman (1954), a haunting, mesmerizing portrait of a mind unraveling under the weight of abuse endured and inflicted
After Dark, My Sweet (1955), a sucker punch of a story about an ex-fighter who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes catastrophically awry
The Getaway (1959), about a bank heist that leads to a descent into a hell worthy of Dante or Bosch
The Grifters (1963) a taut drama that sets a master of the short-con on a collision course with the one person he can’t fool: his mother
Pop. 1280 (1964), which unleashes a dangerously messianic sheriff on a small southern town.
Vividly cinematic, all five novels in this collection have been adapted for film, one of them twice. Rounding out this deluxe edition is a selection of Thompson’s early shorter works, including experimental nonfiction for the Federal Writers’ Project. At last, “the best suspense writer going, bar none,” (The New York Times) gets his due.
"My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated." —Stephen King
Here in one deluxe clothbound volume are five chilling crime classics from the writer who blew the top off the conformity of postwar American life in novels of shocking violence and stunning psychological depth. His experimental style was as shattering as his dark stories, infusing the pulp crime novel with the energies of underground writers like William Burroughs and Hubert Selby. Already represented in the Library of America’s American Noir collection with The Killer Inside Me, Thompson now joins the masters of American crime fiction featured in the series with this volume collecting five of his best novels:
A Hell of a Woman (1954), a haunting, mesmerizing portrait of a mind unraveling under the weight of abuse endured and inflicted
After Dark, My Sweet (1955), a sucker punch of a story about an ex-fighter who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes catastrophically awry
The Getaway (1959), about a bank heist that leads to a descent into a hell worthy of Dante or Bosch
The Grifters (1963) a taut drama that sets a master of the short-con on a collision course with the one person he can’t fool: his mother
Pop. 1280 (1964), which unleashes a dangerously messianic sheriff on a small southern town.
Vividly cinematic, all five novels in this collection have been adapted for film, one of them twice. Rounding out this deluxe edition is a selection of Thompson’s early shorter works, including experimental nonfiction for the Federal Writers’ Project. At last, “the best suspense writer going, bar none,” (The New York Times) gets his due.
- GenresFiction
864 pages, Hardcover
Published March 10, 2026
About the author
Jim Thompson
153 books1,697 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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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 11, 2026
A Library of America collection of five "pulp" noir novels of Jim Thompson, it displays his full range in presenting the interiority of the narrators and characters within. He efficiently, often breathlessly, delivers lean stories propelled like locomotives toward climaxes that can suddenly turn downright surreal. While, for example, "The Getaway" remained reasonably faithful as a film treatment in the 1970s, it could not deliver the surreal hell in which Doc and Carol McCoy find themselves in the final chapter of that novel—a denouement that lifts the story out of the world of pulps, elevating it into something remarkable and strange. Thompson knows when and how to distort reality, and where to let his characters unravel right before our eyes—as happens to the narrator in the final paragraphs of A Hell of a Woman.
This is a great introduction to Thompson's body of work.
This is a great introduction to Thompson's body of work.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Interesting to see how Thompson's writing developed over time and how it related to his life experience. But this is a lot of darkness to swallow at once. Take a breather between novels. Read an advance copy; forthcoming 3/2026
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July 11, 2026This is the version of One Hell of a Woman that I read, I've read the others but long ago.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews