Jim Thompson - Now and On Earth

If you put me under the gun (and I guess, considering the subject, the pun is intended), I Could probably name twenty great novelists of the "hard-boiled detective" school within half an hour. It would be my list, granted; purists might not like the inclusion of such writers as Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald, but it would also include those of whom even the purists would approve-Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Robert Parker, and so on. If you put me under the gun and asked me to name those American novelists who I believe have written great novels of the criminal mind, my list would be much shorter, and half the people on it only wrote one. Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy); Frank Norris (McTeague); Elliot Chaze (Wettermark). The three who wrote more than one are Shane Stevens, James M. Cain, and Big Jim Thompson.

Was Thompson physically big? You got me. He was from Texas or Oklahoma or somewhere like that, so I imagine him as big, but authors are a lot of times like the fat disc jockey with the thin voice-the ones who write the most virile prose are the ones who, when you finally see their photos, turn out to be pasty pudgy types who look like insurance adjustors. Never mind; he'll always be Big Jim to me, because he wrote big.

Although that needs a bit of explanation.

The settings of his novels were never big; the characters were rarely big (Doc McCoy of The Getaway may or may not be an exception); the crimes themselves were never the grand-scale jobs readers have some to expect from fellows like Frederick Forsythe with his Jackal or Jack Higgins with his Nazis out to get Winston Churchill-Big Jim's criminals, like James Cain's or Shane Stevens's, were usually caught in a web of cheap bucks and cheap fucks. But Thompson's books were daringly, breathtakingly big in scope and risk and point of attack. Edmund Wilson (who also wrote a wonderfully acerbic and totally wrongheaded essay called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?") once condemned James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as nothing more important than a jungle-beat in a lunchroom. It wasn't that he was wrong; it was just that it was a comment from a guy who had never spent much time in The Lunchrooms of America.

Nevertheless, lunchrooms did and do exist; small towns such as the one so devastatingly depicted in Thompson's Pop. 1280 did and do exist; smalltime hoods and desperate people on the run did and do exist. They may not dine at the Waldorf, but the intellectual businessmen and menopausal women who do are not all of the world.

Wilson once took Nelson Algren to task for his "cloacal approach to literature," as though shit did not exist but as those of us who are regular would willingly attest, it does. And not all of it is in the toilets and sewers. Sometimes it overflows into the streets, the lunchrooms, and the human mind.

Big Jim Thompson was and is big in my own mind because he wasn't afraid of the jungle in the lunchroom, wasn't afraid of the shit that sometimes backs up in the sewers underlying more ordinary social consciousness and interaction. No one likes it when the doctor puts on his rubber glove, asks him to bend over, and then goes prospecting but someone has to look for those irregularities that may signal tumors and cancers-tumors and cancers that may exist in the bowel of society as well as that of the individual. Dreiser knew it; Melville knew it; B. Traven knew it; Dostoyevsky knew it. Thompson also knew the truth: the literature of a healthy society needs proctologists as well as brain surgeons.

Know what I admire the most? The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the foregoing. He let himself see everything, then he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.

His novels are terrifying cameos of small-town hurt, hypocrisy, and desperation. They are urgent in their ugliness, triumphant in their tawdriness. He wrote goddam good stories, but goddam good stories are not literature. Who knows that better than I do? What makes Thompson's books literature is his unflinching flatly lighted examination of the alienated mind, the psyche wired up like a nitro bomb, of people living like diseased cells in the bowel of American society.

Thompson was not always great-but at his best he was the best there was because he wouldn't stop. The reader is captured by Thompson's feverish tales, carried on by the understanding that he will go on until the end, however ugly, mean, or horrible that end may be (and if you have only seen the film of The Getaway, you have no idea of the existential horrors awaiting Doc and Carol McCoy following the point where Sam Peckinpah ended the tale).

Someone has to examine the stool samples of society; someone has to describe those tumors from which more cultured people shy away. Jim Thompson was one of the few.

He's dead, and he doesn't backlist well, but not everyone has forgotten-thank God, they never do. The great ones seem to always find their springs and channels. And I think that is why you are here. Now, my friend, buckle your seatbelt and grab your gas-mask.

You are going into the darkness without me, without Eudora Welty, without John Updike or Truman Capote or Edmund Wilson. You are going there with a genuine maniac of the human underside. You may be revolted. You may turn away, gasping with a sickened sort of laughter. But Big Jim Thompson will not stop and my guess is this: neither will you.

Stephen King Bangor, Maine September 1985