Jim Thompson (writer)
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James Myers Thompson (Born September 27, 1906, Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory - Died April 7, 1977, Los Angeles, California) was an American writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.
Thompson was best-known for more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, in the late-1940s and mid-1950s. Despite some positive notice, by writer-critic Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did his 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 an unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism.
Writer R.V. Cassills 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". (Polito, 373) Similarly, in the introduction to Now And on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "[t]he 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." (King, ix; emphasis his)
Thompson admirered 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[1] in his themes.
Jim Thompson's life was nearly as colorful as his fiction, which was semi-autobiographical, or, at least, inspired by his experiences.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early Life and Career
Thompson's father was a county sheriff in Oklahoma. He ran for state congress, but was defeated in the election, and shortly thereafter, left the sheriff's office under a cloud due to embezzlement rumors. (The theme of a once-prominent family overtaken by ill-fortune would feature in some of Thompson's works.)
The Thompson family moved to Texas. Jim Thompson began writing early: A few short pieces were published in his mid-teens. He was intelligent and well-read, but had little interest in or inclination towards formal education.
In Fort Worth, Texas, Thompson worked as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas during prohibition. One biographical profile reports that "Thompson quickly adapted to the needs of the hotel's guests, busily catering to tastes ranging from questionable morality to directly and undeniably illegal." Bootleg liquor was ubiquitous, and Thompson's brief trips to procure heroin and marijuana for hotel patrons were not uncommon.[1] He was soon earning up to $300 weekly, far more than his official $15 monthly wage.
For about two years Thompson worked long and often wild nights as a bellboy while attending school in the day. He was smoking and drinking heavily, and at nineteen he suffered a nervous breakdown.
In 1926, Thompson began working as an oil field laborer. With his father he began an independent oil drilling operation that was ultimately unsuccessful. Thompson returned to Fort Worth, intending to attend school, and to write professionally. 1929 saw the publication of Thompson’s autobiographical "Oil Field Vignettes" under the pen name "James Dillon." He attended the University of Nebraska beginning in the same year, as part of a program for gifted students with “untraditional educational backgrounds”. By 1931, however, he had dropped out of school.
Thompson married in 1931; the couple eloped due in part to his girlfriend Alberta’s family disapproving of Thompson. Their first child was born in 1932.
For several years Thompson occasionally wrote short stories for various true crime magazines. Generally, he would rewrite actual murder cases culled from newspapers, but in a first person voice. In this era, he wrote other pieces for various newspapers and magazines, usually as a freelancer, but occasionally as a full-time staff writer.
In the early 1930s, Thompson was the head of the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project, one of several New Deal programs intended to aid Americans during the Great Depression (Louis L'Amour worked under Thompson's direction in this project). Thompson joined the Communist Party in 1935 but had left the group by 1938.
[edit] Writing career
In the early stages of World War II, Thompson worked at an aircraft factory, where he was investigated by the FBI because of his early Communist Party affiliation. These events were fodder for the semi-autobiographical, debut novel, Now And On Earth (1942), featuring little of the violence and crime that later permeated his writing, though it did establish his bleak, pessimistic tone; it was positively reviewed, but sold poorly. His second novel, Heed The Thunder (1946), found Thompson steering towards crime; it details a warped and violent Nebraska family, partly modeled on his own extended clan.
When these early novels generated little critical attention, Thompson gravitated to the less-prestigious, but more lucrative crime fiction genre with Nothing More Than Murder; afterwards moving to Lion Books, a small paperback publisher. Lion Book's Arnold Hanno was his ideal editor, offering him essentially free rein about content, yet expecting him to be productive and reliable; Lion published most of Thompson’s best-regarded works.
Thompson's stories are about grifters, losers, and psychopaths, some at the fringe of society, some in its heart. Their nihilistic world-view being best-served by first-person narratives revealing a frighteningly deep understanding of the warped mind. There are no good guys in Thompson's literature, most everyone is abusive, opportunistic, or simply biding time until able to be so.
Despite some positive critical notice, Thompson's novels essentially were lost in the crowd, among dozens of peer writers who also were churning out crime novels; only after his best writer's years did Thompson achieve a measure of fame. Yet, that neglect might stem from their style: the crime novels are fast-moving and compelling, but sometimes are sloppy and uneven. Thompson wrote quickly (many novels written in a month), using his newspaper experience: concise, evocative prose with little revision or editing.
Yet, at his best, the novels were among the most effectively- and memorably-written genre pieces. He also managed unusual —and greatly successful— literary tricks, e.g. halfway though A Hell Of A Woman, the first-person narrator, Frank "Dolly" Dillon mentally breaks down; the sides of his personality then take turns narrating the story's chapters, alternately violently psychotic (telling the sordid tale that actually happened) or sweet-natured and patient (telling the idealized fantasy that did not happen).
In the final page of the original manuscript, the two sides of Dillon's broken personality appear together, as two, separate columns of text. The publisher disliked that, and, instead, alternated the two narrations in one, long paragraph, alternating standard, Roman type and italicised type; Thompson disliked that change, thinking it confusing and difficult for the reader.
For most of his life, Jim Thompson drank heavily; alcoholism often was in his works, most prominently in The Alchoholics (1953), which is set in a detoxification clinic for alcoholics. Donald E. Westlake, who adapted The Grifters for the screen, observed that alcoholism had a great role in Thompson's literature, though it tended to be inexplicit. Westlake described typical personal relationships in Thompson novels as pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night; behavior common to the alcoholic Thompson's style of life, but which he ellided from the stories.[2]
In 1952, The Killer Inside Me was pubished, it arguably is Thompson's finest and best-known novel. The narrator, Lou Ford, is a small-town sheriff who appears amiable and pleasant and slightly dull-minded. Yet, in reality, Sheriff Ford is very intelligent and always is fighting a nearly-constant urge to act violently. Ford describes his urge as the sickness (always italicised), which Ford ascribes to childhood sexual abuse by a former housekeeper who was abruptly dumped by his father after ending their affair of the heart. Lion Books unsuccesfully attempted to have The Killer Inside Me nominated for a National Book Award; it was eponymously adapted to the cinema, in 1976, by director Burt Kennedy, with Stacy Keach as Sheriff Lou Ford.
Savage Night was published in 1953, it generally is ranked as one of his best novels, it also is one of Thompson's oddest literary offerings. Its narrator, Carl "Little" Bigger, is a small, tubercular hitman, whose mind is deteriorating with his body. In reviewing Savage Night, Boucher said it was "written with vigor and bite, but sheering off from realism into a peculiar surrealist ending of sheer Guignol horror. Odd that a mass-consumption paperback should contain the most experimental writing I've seen in a suspense novel of late." (Polito, 339) Savage Night contains an interlude —whether or not it is fantasy or dream, hallucination or flashback is unclear— when Bigger meets a verbose traveling Bible salesman who cuts up and reassembles the Bible to manufacture new books. That salesmen also claims to operate a "cunt farm" where he grows the more interesting parts of a woman's body.
In 1955, Thompson moved to Hollywood, California, where Stanley Kubrick commissioned from him the screenplay adaptation of Lionel White's novel Clean Break to be filmed as The Killing, Kubrick's first studio-financed movie. Although Thompson wrote most of the script, Kubrick credited himself as screenplay writer, cheating Thompson with only the vague "additional dialogue" writer credit. Despite such chicanery, they perversely collaborated again, in Paths of Glory (mostly written by Thompson, again with little public credit); though they parted, they again, perversely, collaborated in the criminal story titled Lunatic at Large, a production that never materialized despite Thompson's having completed and submitted the commissioned screen treatment. Though pleased with the work, Kubrick was side-tracked by Spartacus; when Kubrick returned to Lunatic at Large, the sole copy of Thompson's manuscript was lost. Kubrick was quoted, by family and friends, as regretting the lost opportunity. Yet, in 1999, after Kubrick's death, son-in-law Phillip Hobbs found the manuscript among the dead director's documents; as of 2006, said project is in the pre-production stage, fifty years after being written by Jim Thompson.
[edit] Later Life and Death
Thompson remained in California for the rest of his life, drifting away from writing his increasingly unpopular novels and eventually to writing television programs and novelizations: anything to pay the bills.
In the 1970s, Thompson wrote his two final books, King Blood and White Mother, Black Son, neither of which was published during his life. Even his longtime supporters in the publishing industry thought the books were poorly written. Also in 1970, Thompson was flown to Robert Redford's Utah residence. Redford hired him to write a motion picture script about the life of a hobo during the Great Depression. Thompson was paid $10,000 for his script Bo, though it was ultimately never produced.
Motion picture writer/director Sam Fuller expressed an interest in adapting The Getaway for the screen, and Polito notes that Fuller so admired the novel that he quipped, half-seriously, that he could use the novel itself as a shooting script. Eventually, Sam Peckinpah was slated to direct ‘’The Getaway’’.
In many regards, The Getaway was a frustrating repeat of his experience with Kubrick. Thompson wrote a script, but McQueen rejected it as too reliant on dialogue, with not enough action. Though Walter Hill was given the sole script credit, Thompson insisted that much of his script ended up in the film. Thompson sought writer's guild arbitration, which ultimately ruled against him. Furthermore, in the end, the film was heavily bowdlerized from Thompson's original vision, and as King writes, "if you have seen only the film version of The Getaway, you have no idea of the existential horrors awaiting Doc and Carol McCoy at the point where Sam Peckinpah ended the story." (King, x)
In Los Angeles, when Thompson's fortunes were fading, he made the acquaintance of writer Harlan Ellison, who had long admired Thompson's books. Though Thompson still drank heavily (preferring to meet at famed writer's haunt Musso & Frank's) and Ellison was a teetotaler (preferring fast food restaurants), they often met for meals and conversation.
Though Thompson's books were falling out of print in the U.S., the French had discovered his works. Though they were not runaway bestsellers in France, his books did sell well enough in that country to keep a trickle of royalties flowing towards Thompson. Incidentally, Polito also debunks the myth that Thompson was not paid well for his works: Thompson's pay, he notes, was roughly in line with what writers of similar works received during that era. Rather, Thompson's drinking and general instability is what left him destitute.
Thompson died after a series of strokes at age 71, aggravated by his long-term alcoholism. He refused to eat for some time prior to his death, and this self-inflicted starvation contributed greatly to his demise. At the time of his death none of his novels were in print in his home country.
[edit] Film Adaptations
As noted above, two of Thompson's books were adapted as Hollywood motion pictures during his lifetime, but in the end, neither was true to Thompson's spirit.
French director Bertrand Tavernier adapted Pop. 1280 for his 1981 film, Coup de Torchon, changing the setting from the American South to a French colony in West Africa of the 1930s. A Hell of a Woman was also adapted in French as Série noire (1979).
A decade later (1989-1990), Hollywood resumed its interest in Thompson's writing. Three novels were adapted during that period: The Kill-Off; After Dark, My Sweet; and, notably, The Grifters, which garnered four Academy Award nominations.
The Getaway was remade in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in the lead roles, but the film retained the happy ending of the earlier film.
In 1996, A Swell-Looking Babe was released as Hit Me, and 1997 saw the release of This World, Then the Fireworks from Thompson's short story of that name.
Aside from shift in setting, Coup de Torchon was remarkably faithful to the plot and the spirit of the novel, and remains arguably the most authentic adaptation of any of Thompson's work. A close runner-up might be The Grifters, though Westlake's script arguably blunts the impact of the climax with a brief but very significant change in a character's motivation.
[edit] Major works
- Now and On Earth (1942)
- Heed the Thunder (1946)
- Nothing More Than Murder (1949)
- The Killer Inside Me (1952)
- Cropper's Cabin (1952)
- Recoil (1953)
- The Alcoholics (1953)
- Savage Night (1953)
- Bad Boy (1953)
- The Criminal (1953)
- The Golden Gizmo (1954)
- Roughneck (1954)
- Swell-Looking Babe (1954)
- A Hell of a Woman (1954)
- The Nothing Man (1954)
- After Dark, My Sweet (1955)
- The Kill-Off (1957)
- Wild Town (1957)
- The Getaway (1959)
- The Transgressors (1961)
- The Grifters (1963)
- Pop. 1280 (1964)
- Texas By the Tail (1965)
- South of Heaven (1967)
- Child of Rage (1972)
- King Blood (1973)
- The Rip-Off (1985)
- Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson (1989)
[edit] Trivia
- Thompson was a major influence on the songwriting style of Mark Sandman, the singer for Morphine (band) and Treat Her Right; see Sandman songs like "Murder for the Money" and "A Good Woman is Hard to Find."
- Thompson appeared in the 1975 movie "Farewell my Lovely" starring Robert Mitchum. He played the character Judge Baxter Wilson Grayle.[3]
- There is a reference to Thompson's book "The Killer Inside Me" in the song "Sri Lanka Sex Hotel" on the Dead Milkmen's Beelzebubba album.
[edit] References
- ^ From an interview in the 1998 North American DVD version of The Grifters film.
- ^ From the interview in the 1998 North American DVD version of The Grifters film.
- ^ Robert Polito. "Savage Art: A biography of Jim Thompson". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. p.495
- King, Stephen; "Big Jim Thompson: An Appreciation" pp vii-x in Jim Thompson's Now And On Earth Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, New York (1994 trade paperback edition; ISBN 0-679-74013-9)
