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Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 60s

A Hell of a Woman | After Dark, My Sweet | The Getaway | The Grifters | Pop. 1280 More

Edited by Robert Polito

Lurid and intense, Jim Thompson’s pulp crime novels were deeper and darker than other hardboiled entertainments, manic descents into taboo obsessions and submerged traumas that shocked publishers and readers alike. Melding gruesome violence with extraordinary psychological depth and inventive narrative techniques, they infused the popular crime novel with the subversive energies of America’s literary underground. […]

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Dime Stores & Bus Stations: Robert Polito on the Savage Art of Jim Thompson
February 13, 2026

Lurid and intense, Jim Thompson’s pulp crime novels were deeper and darker than other hardboiled entertainments, manic descents into taboo obsessions and submerged traumas that shocked publishers and readers alike. Melding gruesome violence with extraordinary psychological depth and inventive narrative techniques, they infused the popular crime novel with the subversive energies of America’s literary underground.

Already represented in the Library of America’s American Noir collection with The Killer Inside Me, Thompson now joins the masters of American crime fiction featured in the series with this volume collecting five suspenseful classics that explore the shadowy undercurrents of postwar American life. Vividly cinematic, all five novels have been adapted for film, one of them twice.

A Hell of a Woman (1954) is a haunting, mesmerizing portrait of a mind unraveling under the weight of abuse endured and inflicted. It is presented here in the text from the first printing, which includes provocative language and sexual imagery cut from all subsequent editions. “Everything went wrong,” laments the narrator of After Dark, My Sweet (1955), a sucker punch of a story about a down-on-his-luck ex-fighter who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes catastrophically awry. The Getaway (1959), also presented in a restored text, recounts another star-crossed crime, this time a bank heist that triggers a free fall into a hell worthy of Dante and Bosch.

Ingeniously plotted and crisply told, The Grifters (1963) sets a short-con artist on a collision course with the one person he can’t fool: his mother. The novel was memorably filmed by Stephen Frears in 1990, in a critically acclaimed movie of the same name that spurred a posthumous Thompson revival. Pop. 1280 (1964), the last major work of Thompson’s career, is a comic and chilling novel that unleashes a hedonistic, dangerously messianic sheriff on a small southern town.

Rounding out this deluxe edition is a selection of Thompson’s early shorter works, including experimental fiction for the Federal Writers’ Project, plus a full chronology of Thompson’s life and career by his award-winning biographer, Robert Polito. At last, “the best suspense writer going, bar none” (The New York Times) gets his due.

Robert Polito is a poet and the author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. For Library of America, he has previously edited the two-volume American Noir edition and a volume collecting five noir novels by David Goodis. He teaches in the writing program at the New School in New York City.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

A Hell of a Woman
After Dark, My Sweet
The Getaway
The Grifters
Pop. 1280

Appendix
A Road and a Memory
Gentlemen of the Jungle
A Night with “Sally”
The End of the Book
Time Without End
Snake Magee and the Rotary Boiler

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-843-4 814 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 399 Library of America Series

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