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Jim Thompson | |
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| Born | James Myers Thompson September 27, 1906 Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, United States |
| Died | April 7, 1977 (aged 70) Hollywood, California, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime fiction, hardboiled, pulp, autobiography, suspense, literary fiction |
| Notable works | The Grifters After Dark, My Sweet The Killer Inside Me |
James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) was an American prose writer and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications, published 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. In the late 1980s, several of his novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
His best-regarded works include 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 the quasi-surrealistic inner narratives of the last thoughts of his dying or dead characters. A number of Thompson's books were adapted as 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 Horace McCoy ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson".[1] 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 foregoing: He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."[2]
Thompson was called a "Dimestore Dostoevsky" by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters in 1990, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.[3]
- ^ Polito, Robert (1995). Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780394584072.
- ^ 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. The emphasis is his.)
- ^ From an interview in the 1998 North American DVD version of The Grifters film.