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.įor all you Petey Positives and Betty Bright sides out there peering around corners looking for humanity’s better angels, Jim Thompson is slinging a sledge hammer ready to shatter your shiny happy illusions. Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky and was nicknamed 'Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. 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.' Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. 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.

Cassills has suggested that of all pulp 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'. In these works, Thompson turned the derided pulp genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism. 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. 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. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

The grifters novel