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James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by 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 crime genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and quasi-surrealistic inner narratives of the last thoughts of his dying or dead characters. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters.
The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all crime 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 Dostoyevsky 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.
Thompson's life was nearly as colorful as his fiction, which was semi-autobiographical, or, at least, inspired by his experiences. Thompson's father was sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma. He ran for the state legislature in 1906, but was defeated, and he shortly thereafter left the sheriff's office under a cloud due to rumors of embezzlement. The Thompson family moved to Texas. (The theme of a once-prominent family overtaken by ill-fortune would feature in some of Thompson's works.)
Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, and 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. For about two years during prohibition in Fort Worth, Texas, Thompson worked long and often wild nights as a bellboy while attending school in the day. He worked at the Hotel Texas. 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. He was soon earning up to $300 per week, far more than his official $15 monthly wage.
He smoked and drank heavily, and at nineteen he suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1926, Thompson began working as an oil field laborer. In the oil fields he met Industrial Workers of the World member, organizer and musician Harry McClintock, who recruited him into the union. 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.
Thompson’s autobiographical "Oil Field Vignettes" appeared in 1929 (found in March 2010 by history recovery specialist Lee Roy Chapman). He began attending the University of Nebraska 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 Alberta Hesse on September 16, 1931 in Marysville, Kansas, the couple having eloped, partly owing to Alberta’s family's disapproval of Thompson. The first of three children was born in 1932.
For several years Thompson occasionally wrote short stories for various true crime magazines. Generally, he would rewrite actual murder cases he had read in 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. His 1936 piece for Master Detective Magazine, "Ditch of Doom," was recently selected by the Library of America for inclusion in its two century retrospective of American True Crime writing.
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, among others, worked under Thompson's direction in this project. Thompson joined the Communist Party in 1935 but had left the group by 1938.
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 his 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. He afterwards moved to Lion Books, a small paperback publisher. Lion's Arnold Hano was his ideal editor, offering the writer essentially free rein about content, yet expecting him to be productive and reliable. Lion published most of Thompson’s best-regarded works.
To support his family while writing novels, Thompson took a job as a reporter with the Los Angeles Mirror, a tabloid newspaper owned by the Los Angeles Times, shortly after the Mirror was founded in 1948. He wrote for the Mirror until 1949.
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 never produced.
Motion picture writer/director Sam Fuller expressed an interest in adapting The Getaway for the screen, and Thompson's biographer Robert Polito (in the book Savage Art) 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 earlier experience with Kubrick. Thompson wrote a script, but Steve McQueen (who was cast in the movie's lead role of Doc McCoy) 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 Writers Guild arbitration but the Guild ultimately ruled against him. 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."
Thompson actually appeared in the 1975 movie Farewell, My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum. He played the character Judge Baxter Wilson Grayle. 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 the famed writer's haunt, the Musso & Frank Grill) 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 United States, 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 are what left him destitute.
Thompson died in Los Angeles, aged 70, after a series of strokes 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.
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7621.Jim_Thompson |
Books
Jim Thompson - The Killer Inside Me (read by Kevin T. Collins)
Jim Thompson - The Grifters (AB read by Tony Goldwyn)
Jim Thompson - Pop. 1280 (AB read by Will Patton)
Jim Thompson - The Getaway (read by David De Vries)
Jim Thompson - After Dark, My Sweet (AB read by Joe Mantegna)
Jim Thompson - A Hell Of A Woman (AB read by Hope Alexander Willis and Jerry Monroe)
Jim Thompson - Savage Night (read by David Collins)
Jim Thompson - A Swell-Looking Babe (read by Brian Troxell)
Jim Thompson - The Kill-Off (read by Robertson Dean and Coleen Marlo)
Jim Thompson - Wild Town (read by Kevin T. Collins)
Jim Thompson - Nothing More Than Murder (read by R.C. Bray)
Jim Thompson - Roughneck (read by Bob Walter)
Jim Thompson - South Of Heaven (read by Brian Troxell)
Jim Thompson - The Rip-Off (read by Brian Troxell)
Jim Thompson - Texas By The Tail (read by Jeff Brick)
Code:
Books
http://rapidgator.net/file/48f82e7e11dbb7d971a10bd90ef61d16/The_Killer_Inside_Me.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/d666e66273614cfa8948aa968c7bc3c6/The_Grifters.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f4ff96b0866b27a6c772b073cf92d778/Pop_1280.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/82ed3f3447b3ec10e5268bbb1575f165/The_Getaway.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/b2060ee3faa62ec8261afdf1df870838/After_Dark_My_Sweet.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/c7a3bb965d305ee75f8c42a2d355f281/A_Hell_Of_A_Woman.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/261368d9a8c20574b35a9a6329fbcba2/Savage_Night.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/20d34a40510ad6233d4c4f521c6c7c15/A_Swell_Looking_Babe.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/a6cb277d87be977b9cd652b1d57689b9/The_Kill_Off.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f25f80976380c8e6e6f759937b7a3300/Wild_Town.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/42580eb715f4c2129e312ae3c909d00b/Nothing_More_Than_Murder.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/68185cff3985128677d43f2166a55b60/Roughneck.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/61760586468e6b7fde2de0eee0771b4d/South_Of_Heaven.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/1484f10948bf5275f9a87037de444b7b/The_Rip_Off.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/7719e65d8b13e237299bd64dd4cab229/Texas_By_The_Tail.rar.html |
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