Original paperback covers of Jim Thompson novels and photograph of Thompson (and cat) from Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito

Jim Thompson lived hard and wrote with rawness, intensity, and a diabolical zeal for experimentation. His noirs—charged with psychological complexity, gut-wrenching twists, and lurid detail—leaped off the pulp racks primed, his biographer Robert Polito writes, to take the tops off unsuspecting readers’ heads. Critically and commercially neglected in his lifetime, Thompson built a posthumous cult following on the strength of hard-boiled classics like A Hell of a Woman, The Grifters, and The Killer Inside Me—many of which found new audiences in electrifying film versions.

In the newly published Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 60s, the “Dimestore Dostoevsky” (as crime maven and former LOA editor-in-chief Geoffrey O’Brien called him) shows his undiminished ability to startle, intrigue, and bewitch—as he infuses the crime potboiler with sometimes breathtaking literary experimentation. Below, Polito, who edited the LOA volume, discusses the scope and significance of Thompson’s art and careers (plural), from hardscrabble boyhood in pre-statehood Oklahoma to 1970s New Hollywood.

Library of America: You wrote an acclaimed biography of Jim Thompson, Savage Art. How did you become interested in Thompson’s life and work, and how did the biography take shape?

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito

Robert Polito: Looking back, I somehow researched and wrote Savage Art at the right moment—maybe the only possible moment: just a few years later, nearly all of the major figures of his life would be dead.

I first encountered Jim Thompson when many readers of my generation discovered him, after poet Barry Gifford started to reprint his books at Black Lizard, an imprint of the Creative Arts Book Company in Berkeley, California. Prior to that for me he was mainly a mysterious credit line on Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Paths of Glory.

The first book of his I read was A Hell of a Woman, and the novel stunned and overwhelmed me. For all the violence, Frank “Dolly” Dillon’s voice is modulated so precisely, his scams, his comic humiliations, as well as his simpering rages. He’s a dazzlingly realized door-to-door salesman for the Pay-E-Zee Stores in a city that seems a lot like Lincoln, Nebraska. But the narrative architecture of the novel is ultimately what astounds. As Dillon unravels, so does his story. Following his murder sprees, A Hell of a Woman splinters, and he confronts us with whole chapters in rival pulp modes, part Horatio Alger, part aspirational nonsense. The novel eventually rips apart into simultaneous rival endings of alternating lines of roman and italic type, each as brutal as the other.

Original paperback covers of Jim Thompson novels: The Getaway, After Dark, My Sweet, A Hell of a Woman, Pop. 1280, and The Grifters

Now, this was a paperback original published by Lion Books with a lurid cover and blurb (“SHE LURED HIM INTO THE WORLD’S OLDEST TRAP”) that sold for 25 cents, mainly in bus stations and drugstores, yet is also perhaps aesthetically the most radically experimental American novel of the early 1950s. Savage Art aimed to probe where such a distinctive—all but impossible—novel might arise, both in someone’s life and in the historical and cultural life of the nation. Along the way, I spoke to over two hundred people who knew Thompson: his family, high school and college friends, comrades in the Oklahoma Communist Party, colleagues on the Federal Writers Project, collaborators in Hollywood, and his editors and publishers.

I learned how personal his ostensibly genre novels were. Thompson, for instance, held pretty much every job his characters would, and if he didn’t, his sheriff father, James Sherman “Big Jim” Thompson, did. (The Pay-E-Zee Store? Well, as a student at the University of Nebraska, Thompson circulated door-to-door collecting overdue accounts for the Kay-Bee Clothing Store.)

I also learned a lot of American history that my high school and college courses omitted, all the way from Oklahoma prior to statehood through the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Savage Art tracked a chronicle of America across the twentieth century from the perspective of this strange man.

Many of us have wondered about Thompson’s first readers who picked up [his novels] from the racks expecting readymade diversion, only to find themselves in the middle of a book intent on taking off the tops of their heads.

The six short pieces in the Library of America volume shadow Thompson’s early biography in miniature. A college poem about his childhood, “A Road and a Memory,” published in the Prairie Schooner in 1930. Some hobo and Wobbly snapshots, “Gentlemen of the Jungle,” from 1931, also published in the Prairie Schooner. “A Night with ‘Sally’,” a Swiftean account of his lonely months riding the rails through Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas, soon after his marriage to Alberta, published in Oklahoma Labor in 1936, when Thompson was guidebook editor on the Writers’ Project and a member of a Popular Front organization, the Social Forum School. “The End of the Book,” the hallucinatory conclusion of his lost early proletarian novel, Always to Be Blest, published in American Stuff, an anthology of WPA writers issued by Viking in 1937. A short story about his father, “Time Without End,” published in Economy of Scarcity: Some Human Footnotes, a pamphlet of off-time creative work by members of the Oklahoma Writers’ Project, published by Cooperative Books in 1939. And “Snake Magee’s Rotary Boiler,” a fanciful extrapolation of tall-tale oil-field folklore, published in Direction in 1939.

Jim Thompson as a child (Nebraska Public Media) and Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, in 1901, a few years before Thompson’s birth (Public Domain)

LOA: Jim Thompson found literary success relatively late in life, after decades of hardscrabble work in oilfields, factories, and, briefly, as the head of the Oklahoma Federal Writers’ Project. Who was this younger Thompson, and how did these experiences shape his fiction?

RP: Thompson established his reputation deep into his middle age. He was around forty-six when he wrote The Killer Inside Me. His few prior novels only anticipate the novels celebrated in this LOA volume in retrospect, the weird bits we now notice around the edges of his proletarian novel, Now and on Earth (1942), and his regionalist agrarian novel, Heed the Thunder (1946).

Here let me quote Arnold Hano, his extraordinary editor at Lion Books, on first meeting Thompson in 1952. “He was trying to explain the gap, where his writing career had been, and it hadn’t been anyplace for so many years. . . . I know now he was exaggerating. But I understood him to say that there was a nine-year period when he was totally out of it. He told us he was dry then, he wasn’t drinking at all, and as far as I know that turned out to be true.”

Jim Bryans, another Lion editor, similarly found Thompson “courtly and pleasant” at that meeting. Yet “there was a load of bitterness somewhere in there. . . . He was not unaware he had something special—modest, not a braggart, but he had a sense of his own gifts.”

If Thompson had died before the fall of 1952, he might now only amount to scattered footnotes—in academic inventories of proletarian and agrarian fiction, say, or New Deal histories, for his directorship of the Oklahoma Federal Writers’ Project.

Jim and Alberta Thompson in the 1940s (San Diego Journal)

But inside his crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s he found a way to remember and use everything that had ever happened to him, public or personal. His family, especially his father and his wife, his Marxism, the Writers’ Project, American history, notably Indigenous Americans, the Civil War, and the legacies of slavery, and all those incredible jobs.

LOA: Thompson was hugely prolific, and the LOA volume presents five of his greatest books (his classic The Killer Inside Me was included in LOA’s acclaimed American Noir collection, which Polito also edited). Can you describe your selection process for Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 60s? What does each book contribute to our overall appreciation of Thompson?

RP: I wanted to focus Thompson’s continuous experimentation, as well as intimate his range as a writer. Narrowing his achievements down to just five novels—or six, if you tally The Killer Inside Me—wasn’t at all easy or obvious. The LOA volume features three of his most brilliant and horrifying first-person novels, A Hell of a Woman, Pop. 1280, and After Dark, My Sweet, as well as two of his strongest third-person novels, The Getaway and The Grifters.

Outliers and American Vanguard Art was the title of an innovative and overdue 2018 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, curated by Lynne Cooke, that spotlighted artists in the margins and mainstream of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spanning Florine Stettheimer, Bill Traylor, Lonnie Holley, Howard Finster, Betye Saar, Henry Darger, and Kara Walker, among many others. The exhibition combined a historical survey with a deep dig into some exemplary figures along the spectra of outsider and avant-garde, popular culture and modernism, the “high” and the “low.”

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

I thought of this show often as I was assembling the Thompson volume, as Cooke focused something crucial about American art, writing, and culture, past and present—the traditions of American fiction, for instance. American fiction originates in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or The Transformation, a novel where a man thinks he hears voices telling him to kill his family. There’s an obvious lineage from Brown to Thompson—a lineage that cuts through Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

If there is a second LOA Jim Thompson volume, I know I would want to include the novels that on many days seemed totally inevitable selections: Savage Night, among his most powerful first-person psychopathic fictions; The Criminal and The Kill-Off, both dynamic multiple-narrator novels; A Swell-Looking Babe, his pulp Oedipus Rex; and even Ironside, his surprise novelization of the Raymond Burr TV series that—come what may—circles nuclear armageddon.

Portrait of Jim Thompson (Nebraska Public Media) and Thompson (far right) with fellow WPA writers Joe Paskavan and Louis L’Amour in Oklahoma City in the 1930s (National Endowment for the Humanities)

LOA: “There are thirty-two ways to write a story,” Thompson once remarked, “and I’ve used every one. But there is only one plot—things are not as they seem.” How do you read this statement as a capsule description of Thompson’s art? What is he revealing in his books?

RP: When I first read that “one plot” observation years ago, I thought instantly of The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, Thompson’s first-person novels about lawmen who turn out to be psychopathic killers. Thompson’s father, of course, was a sheriff in territorial Oklahoma who would eventually be removed from office for embezzling funds. Those novels dig into in the suspicion that Sheriff Thompson was not who he appeared to be. Thompson’s crime novels similarly aren’t at all what they seem to be; from the covers you’d imagine disposable reads to lull away an afternoon or a bus ride. Many of us have wondered about Thompson’s first readers who picked up The Killer Inside Me or A Hell of a Woman from the racks expecting readymade diversion, only to find themselves in the middle of a book intent on taking off the tops of their heads.

Jim Thompson in later years (Nebraska Public Media)

LOA: Thompson’s writing is characterized by its intensity, violence, and amorality, and madness and the minds of killers occupy central territory in his novels. To what extent did he push the envelope in his era, and has his work retained its ability to shock and disturb?

RP: Shock and subversion are often sentimentalized—today what isn’t lauded as “shocking” and “subversive,” no matter how predictable, tame, ultimately consoling and self-flattering? The words now almost constitute a heartwarming cultural category of their own. As Thompson taunted the traditional crime novel audience in The Nothing Man, “I suppose it will baffle the hell out of the average whodunit reader, but perhaps he needs to be baffled. Perhaps his thirst for entertainment will impel him to the dread chore of thinking.”

Still, Thompson stays recalcitrant, and volatile. I would point to his astonishing formal audacity—his sort of insidious pop-modernism. He was the “Dimestore Dostoevsky,” as the beautiful formulation of Geoffrey O’Brien tags him. And I would also point to his sly skills with empathy, particularly in his first-person novels, where he deftly beguiles a reader into identifying with the vilest people and actions.

LOA: Thompson’s novels have been widely adapted for screen, including Stephen Frear’s highly regarded rendition of The Grifters that helped to launch Thompson’s posthumous resurgence. Can you discuss the cinematic side of Thompson? What about his writing lends itself to film treatment?

Stills from Coup de Torchon (dir. Bertrand Tavernier, 1981) and Série Noire (dir. Alain Corneau, 1979)

RP: A fascinating question, as there’s an obvious sense that Thompson’s slippery novels are intrinsically unfilmable. Most of the movie adaptations merely lift the plots of his books, and the plots are probably their least interesting aspects. For all the casual ferocity, the central grotesquerie of The Killer Inside Me is Lou Ford’s sinuous voice. Yet how do you represent that voice on film? Thompson’s novels demand a lot of cinematic resourcefulness from screenwriters and directors.

One of my favorites is Alain Corneau’s Série Noire (1979), his version of A Hell of a Woman from a cunning script by Oulipo novelist Georges Perec—every conversation a sinuous shroud of French clichés. Another favorite is Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (1981), a devastating adaptation of Pop. 1280 that ingeniously translated Thompson’s Texas setting to French West Africa. Director Stephen Frears and scriptwriter Donald E. Westlake smartly tilted The Grifters (1990) into an elegant essay on sexual corruption with radiant performances by John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening.

But even these great films can’t substitute for Thompson’s novels.

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. He teaches in the writing program at the New School in New York City.