Imagine you’re holding in your hand—were such a thing possible—the premise of the crime novel, laid out by the likes of James M. Cain and
Raymond Chandler. And now, turn it upside down. Now you’re there: the seedy world of Jim Thompson, one of the undisputed masters of pulp
fiction—a true original of the genre, who added his own twisted vision to transport his
novels to lurid extremes—to a universe filled with outsiders, tied to nothing, unnoticed by society, and
driven to commit dark acts; his world is a bleak one with occasional lapses of sadistic humor. Jim Thompson’s work captures the essence of noir perfectly.
At its best, a Thompson novel is atmospheric in its darkness; there is a
prevalent sense of doom. The landscape—often small towns in Texas or Oklahoma—is made up of filling stations, juke joints, cheap diners, dusty roads, old
farmhouses, hobo camps, mental institutions, and county jails, all presented in
an almost surreal light. Nothing is as it seems.
The groundbreaking masterpiece in the Thompson canon is The Killer Inside Me, first published in 1952. This novel cemented Thompson’s reputation as an imaginative risk taker who would play with the conventions of
the genre. The book is notable for its unreliable narrator, Lou Ford (arguably
one of the best unreliable narrators of all time).
Lou Ford is a small town sheriff who seems a bit slow, tells bad jokes, and is,
by all outwardly expression, a corny dullard. But all in all, seemingly a nice
enough guy. As the novel progresses, however, Ford turns out to be not quite as
dull or as ordinary as the locals think. There is something about Ford that isn’t quite right, and the reader is privy to this through a change in his narrative
voice, which, somewhere along the way, starts to get an edge. The sickness, as
Ford calls it, is about to resurface. Ford is a psychopath hiding behind a
small town badge, and his sickness is his need to kill, destroy, and control
all that is around him. Sheriff Ford is also very smart: reading science and
medical texts for fun, he is adept at realizing just how insane he is. Add to
this his expertise in manipulation—with his mind or through extreme physical violence—and you have a brilliant character brought to life by Thompson’s wonderful narrative gifts.
Thompson gives The Killer Inside Me its pulse with these gifts of narration, dialogue, and expert pacing. His
sentences reel the reader into Ford’s dark world, putting us inside of Ford’s festering mind. It is not a pleasant place to be. Ford is the ultimate
outsider; his connections to reality are severed and yet he still has a twisted
logic that makes some sense.
At one point Ford tells a witness (before killing him), “We’re living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing
crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are
preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for
themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good People are
fighting to keep us from it. It’s not good for us, you know what I mean?” Philosophical for a pulpy crime writer, these sentiments by Ford also reveal a
touch of Thompson’s leftist leanings. (He was at one point a member of the Communist Party.)
As The Killer Inside Me progresses, the narrative becomes more fractured as Ford spins out of control
and the body count rises. Everyone who comes into contact with Ford meets a grisly ending (including the
sucker punch to end all sucker punches) as the book ends in a crescendo of
violence. Near the end Ford thinks the thesis for The Killer Inside Me: “what are you going to say when you are drowning in your own dung and they keep
booting you back into it, when all the screams of hell wouldn’t be as loud as you want to scream?”
Thompson lived a crazy life that heavily influenced, and was just as weird as,
his fiction. Born in 1906 in Anadarko, a small Oklahoma town, Thompson was
immersed in the seedier side of American life growing up. His father was a
crooked sheriff, who had massive problems with money. Allegations of
embezzlement forced the family to leave Anadarko. This would be an unfortunate
pattern that dogged the Thompson family throughout Jim’s childhood. At times they would be flush, at other times completely destitute.
One would be hard pressed not to find a connection between Thompson’s father and his characters.
As he got older, Thompson worked a variety of different jobs that also provided
rich experience for his novels. He was a bellhop at a hotel where he would
provide customers with booze, women, and drugs, which in turn provided Thompson
with an easy supply of cash and allowed him to rub shoulders with small time
hustlers and gangsters. In stark contrast, Thompson worked as a writer for the
Oklahoma Federal Writers Project where he wrote tourist manuals.
A notoriously heavy drinker and smoker, Thompson’s lifestyle of late nights, constant moving around the country in search of
work, and internal demons played a role in the author’s creativity, but also in his decline. He was known to drink quarts of whiskey a
day—if he couldn’t find good booze he would drink homemade concoctions favored by hobos. On more
than one occasion Thompson was hospitalized for alcohol abuse, nervous
breakdowns, and suffered from delirium tremens. These influences inevitably
fueled Thompson’s outlook on life, which he poured into his dark fictional universe.
Compared to most of his more famous novels, South of Heaven has a protagonist that the reader actually cares about, unlike, say, the
devilish Elisabeth Wilmot in Nothing More Than Murder who encourages her husband to cheat on her so she can blackmail him and commit
murder, or the unstable cop Nick Corey in Pop 1280, who plays the fool while
murdering anyone who gets in his way, all the while spouting off horrible
catchphrases. South of Heaven actually has an enjoyable character.
Tommy Burwell is a tough kid trying to make his way on a west Texas gas pipeline
job during the early 1920s. The pipeline job is a dangerous way to make a
living. Accidents are plentiful and gruesome deaths abound. Burwell’s fellow workers are messed up on canned heat (a mixture of alcohol and
gasoline). Burwell must navigate this shaky territory while trying to not be
killed accidentally or by the crooked people he works for. The work is as
uncompromising as the corporate powers that run the job. Hobos who die on the
job are buried in the dirt anonymously.
South of Heaven is rich with fascinating details of men on the edge. Thompson’s use of slang, or the wonderful, gruff expressions of the day, are expertly
written (Alcoholics are ‘juice heads,’ the dynamite crews are known as ‘powder monkeys,’ the destitute are ‘mission stiffs’). It’s like a John Steinbeck novel without the polish. The plot can be convoluted at
times, but the action rarely falters. Just as he uses Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me to show his leftist leanings, Thompson uses the character of Burwell to voice
his own opinions on the American ideal of huge companies using the less
fortunate to shape our landscape. The exploitation of the men remains a
constant theme throughout the novel. The expansion of the pipeline comes at a
cost. Burwell knows this better than anyone as he figures out a way to survive
and defend the couple of friends he has made along the way.
Thompson was fascinated by the role of the outsider in society. It is no
surprise that he admired the work of Dostoevsky. The alienation of man from
country, self, and others is present in both writers. Although Thompson is much
more base and crude, the connection remains. Thompson, like Dostoevsky, had the
ability to communicate the effects of society on a man’s soul.
Unlike when he died, Thompson is now considered a major influence on the arts.
His vivid imagination of the criminally insane has influenced filmmakers from
Stanley Kubrick (he helped write the screenplays The Killing and Paths of Glory) to Quentin Tarantino to Sam Peckinpah to Bertrand Tavernier. Novelists like
Stephen King and James Ellroy have been influenced by his dark prose, and you
can hear echoes of Jim Thompson in the lyrics of Tom Waits. Fortunately, with
most of his books in print today (when he died they were all out of print)
Thompson remains a towering influence when it comes to chronicling our violent
nature and evil desires.
