Jim Thompson Biography and List of Works

American novelist and screenwriter, best known for his paperback pulp novels and his ability to enter the minds of the criminally insane. Thompson knew he was not destined for big success, but before he died he told his wife to protect his manuscripts and copyrights, anticipating posthumous fame. He was proved right ten years after his death.

James Meyers (Jim) Thompson was born in Oklahoma. His father James Thompson was the sheriff of Andarko, Oklahoma, who foiled jailbreaks and arrested horse thieves. He was also a chronic gambler and in 1907 was dismissed for misappropriating funds. Avoiding arrest, he fled to Mexico. For the next 14 years he travelled from one oil field to another with his family and managed to gain a fortune before going bankrupt. In 1921 he suffered a breakdown and died in an institution 20 years later.

Thompson received his B.A. from the University of Nebraska. He held numerous jobs - beginning as an oil well and pipeline worker - before becoming affiliated during the Depression with the Federal Writers Project in Oklahoma, helping to turn out guidebooks for the state. In this period, when trading in liquor was illegal, Thompson got to know the local gangsters, losers, corrupt civil servants, and later depicted their world in his books. In 1931 he married Alberta Thompson; they had two children. He also joined the Communist party and made friends with other political activists, such as the folk singer Woody Guthrie.

In the 1940s Thompson turned to crime fiction as a way of making money. Thompson published his first novel, NOW AND ON EARTH, in 1942. In it the father of the protagonist dies in an asylum, killing himself by eating the stuffing from his mattress, a fate Thompson often claimed for his own father. Thompson's autobiography, BAD BOY, appeared in 1953 and depicts his chaotic coming of age, bootlegging, and how he almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff's deputy.

Thompson worked as a journalist for the New York Daily News and for the Los Angeles Times Mirror. In the 1950s he was blacklisted during the period of Joseph McCarthy's "crusade" against Communists, but was later summoned to Hollywood by the director Stanley Kubrick to co-write screenplays for The Killing (1956), a downbeat movie about a robbery at a racetrack, and the anti-war film Paths of Glory (1957), set in the French trenches of World War I, starring Kirk Douglas and Adolphe Menjou. In Hollywood Thompson also wrote scripts for the Dr. Kildare series.

"I've loafed streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other - hell, you've probably seen me if you've ever been out this way - I've stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn't piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I'm laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people."
(from The Killer Inside Me, 1952)

Thompson's fifth book, THE KILLER INSIDE ME (1952), made his reputation. The central character and first-person narrator is a small town sheriff Lou Ford, who pretends to be dim-witted, but who in fact is a cunning, complex, even brilliant madman, who plays cat and mouse with the world. Stanley Kubrick considered the book the most chilling account of a criminally warped mind he had ever encountered. Another sharply portrayed psychopath is found in THE NOTHING MAN (1954), in which the protagonist, a newspaperman Clinton Brown, drinks and kills but cannot get himself blamed for the crimes he commits.

In the 1950s Thompson wrote nearly 20 novels. He was frequently broke and sometimes separated from his family. His problems with liquor Thompson depicts in THE ALCOHOLICS. Because of his moderate success he wrote fast, and repeated himself in later works, recycling among others The Killer Inside Me again in POP. 1280 (1964). Several of Thompson's stories are set in the deep South, moving in the similar atmosphere of decay and the macabre as William Faulkner in his novels. Although Thompson did not spend much time in polishing the text, he managed to create "dialogue as crisp as Hammett's, descriptive prose as convincing as Chandler's" as Barry Gifford has stated.

Thompson's novels depict a world populated by barflies, grifters, losers and psychopaths in which nothing is certain. Or as the writer once said: "There are 32 ways to write a story, and I have used every one, but there is only one plot - things are not what they seem." An example of Thompson's skill to find new approaches to the crime novel is seen in THE GETAWAY (1959). It starts with a bank robbery that goes wrong, and then returns years later to the life of the criminal mastermind Doc and his wife who are chased by police and criminals. Thompson finally leaves the couple at a hideout that is a version of Dante's purgatory, only much worse.

In the 1970s Thompson had several apoplectic strokes. He died in Los Angeles on April 7, 1977. In 1990 Grifters, a film adaptation of his work, received four Oscar nominations. In the U.S. Thompson remained a minor figure in the history of pulp fiction until some academic critics and publishers resurrected his work. Most of his novels and some of his uncollected short fiction have been reprinted. His dark, violent view of the world has influenced such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino. Thompson himself was an admirer of the classic Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

For further reading: Jim Thompson: The Killers Inside Him by Max Allan Collins and Ed Gorman (1983); Jim Thompson - Sleep with the Devil by Michael J. McCauley (1991); Contemporary Popular Writers, ed. by David Mote (1997) - See also other writers from the hard-boiled crime fiction: Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane - Note: Thompson had a small role in the film Farewell, My Lovely (1975), based on Raymond Chandler's novel

NOW AND ON EARTH, (1942)