HARDCORE

by Jim Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1986

Three reprints by the late Jim Thompson, apparently in their first hard-covers. Thompson, at his best a blisteringly imaginative crime novelist (he also did the scripts for Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory and the novel from which Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway was filmed), is having a great rebirth among reprint houses. Partly this stems from his luster as a married loner and a drunk (an illness featured in his still unreprinted paperback The Alcoholics and in Bad Boy, a memoir included here), partly from his very real mesmeric abilities as a storyteller. At his best he outwrote James M. Cain at his most violent, amoral, terse and fast-moving, but he seldom had the energy to finish a novel with the same power as his openings. And unlike Cain, he was self-doomed to original paperback publication and never reviewed. After he died at 77, on April 7, 1977, his wife of 47 years said: ""He lived for his writing. He wrote every day, eight hours a day, even when the words wouldn't come."" The Nothing Man herein is about a psychopathic reporter, castrated during the war and given to blackout drunks, who is nailed for some murders; the ending is more than a trifle sentimental. The Kill-Off uses multiple first-person narrators, quite successfully. Bad Boy is about the first 20 years of ""Jim Thompson,"" his early days as a re. porter, a bellboy and seller of bootleg whiskey. Will these books live? Thompson is already regarded as a classic American writer in France, where his novel Pop. 1280 was recently filmed as the well-received Coup de Torchon.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Donald Fine

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION