JIM THOMPSON: Sleep with the Devil

by Michael McCauley ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 1991

Weak biography of tough-guy novelist Jim Thompson, now having a reprint revival, with four movies now in release made from his thrillers, including The Grifters. This is an unusual and less than satisfying life of the famed alcoholic writer in that is drawn in large part from his books. Early in his career, Thompson wrote two autobiographical novels, Now and on Earth (1942) and Heed the Thunder (1946), which McCauley--who's edited a collection of Thompson's short fiction and a collection of his miscellany--uses as spiritual touchstones for Thompson's life, although some facts in these novels are disputed by Thompson's family. For example, Now trod on Earth tells of Thompson's father, a failed oil man, committing suicide by eating excelsior from his mattress in a nursing home, something the family says never happened. However, to Thompson, this was a psychic truth, and his inability to help his father get out of the nursing home stuck with Thompson as his most crippling failure. Aside from his many paperbacks, which focused on murderers and psychopaths, Thompson's larger fame came through credits for his scriptwork for Stanley Kubrick's early films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. McCauley singles four or five paperbacks as Thompson's best work, including The Killer Inside Me (1952) and A Hell of a Woman (1954), for each of which he got $2,000 from Lion Books. In the three-year period of 1952-1954, during which he was relatively dry, Thompson pounded out twelve or thirteen novels, and established his reputation as the equal or superior of other tough-guy crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in sounding the depths of psychopathy. His alcoholism began early, and he fought a drink every day of his adult life, but McCauley shows little grasp of the nature of Thompson's illness. Nor did Thompson, whose novel The Alcoholics, McCauley admits, is his utter worst. Fans and others will be attracted--but a more penetrative bio is deserved.

Pub Date: April 17, 1991

ISBN: 0892963921

Page Count: -

Publisher: Mysterious Press--dist. by Ballantine

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION