Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 60s (#399)

A straight flush of 5 noir masterworks by America’s “Dimestore Dostoevsky”—the crime fiction legend who revolutionized the genre with his experimental style.

“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.” —Stephen King

Here in one deluxe clothbound volume are five chilling crime classics from the writer who blew the top off the conformity of postwar American life in novels of shocking violence and stunning psychological depth. His experimental style was as shattering as his dark stories, infusing the pulp crime novel with the energies of underground writers like William Burroughs and Hubert Selby. 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 of his best novels:

• A Hell of a Woman (1954), a haunting, mesmerizing portrait of a mind unraveling under the weight of abuse endured and inflicted

• After Dark, My Sweet (1955), a sucker punch of a story about an ex-fighter who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes catastrophically awry

• The Getaway (1959), about a bank heist that leads to a descent into a hell worthy of Dante or Bosch

• The Grifters (1963) a taut drama that sets a master of the short-con on a collision course with the one person he can’t fool: his mother

• Pop. 1280 (1964), which unleashes a dangerously messianic sheriff on a small southern town.

Vividly cinematic, all five novels in this collection have been adapted for film, one of them twice. Rounding out this deluxe edition is a selection of Thompson’s early shorter works, including experimental nonfiction for the Federal Writers’ Project. At last, “the best suspense writer going, bar none,” (The New York Times) gets his due.