Difficult Lives - Hitching Rides E-Book

James Sallis

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 297

Beschreibung

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books. We're pleased to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling your pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.

Leseprobe

Praise for James Sallis

‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’ – Independent on Sunday

‘He’s right up there, one of the best of the best’ – Guardian

‘Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared-down prose is distinctive and powerful. The result is a small masterpiece’ – Sunday Telegraph

‘Atmospheric and utterly spellbinding’ – Daily Mail

‘Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work… peculiar and visionary’ – London Review of Books

‘James Sallis is a master of the short, sharp crime novel’ – Shots Magazine

‘Sallis’s spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’ – Telegraph

‘Sallis is a wonderful writer, dark, lyrical and compelling’ –Spectator

‘One of the very best writers in the crime fiction genre’ – Crime Time

DIFFICULT LIVES

To

Paul Oliver

Introduction to the New Edition

One looks back on work published over 25 years ago with a mix of parental pride (‘Gee, look what the kid could do’) and terrible premonition. Difficult Lives, which emerged in a series of apartments from a short-story writer in the throes of turning novelist, came about because I’d been reading deeply into the work of these singular writers and, when I looked about for information about them, found little. I began to pull and patch together what I could. The resulting essays appeared in literary journals – High Plains Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Western Humanities Review – and, having decided to hang out on the street corner together, became a book. Published in 1993 by Gary Lovisi at Gryphon Books, it put on fresh clothes for a new edition seven years later and, before joining the perhaps 150 species that fall into extinction daily, was kindly received.

Like my vintage guitars and banjos, these pieces look pretty beat in today’s light, but they have a sound all their own. Reading over them, for each time I marvel at having got something just right, soon I founder upon awkward phrasing or blowsy, overblown sentences. Neither are these appreciations simply bits of my personal history; they are as well dots on a line, part of the continuum of criticism theretofore and subsequently afforded these writers. Though little enough was available at the time I wrote, a few sandwiches and salad plates, these days one might feed multitudes from the biographies, commentaries and criticism available. We have two Thompson biographies, innumerable essays, introductions and the like, Garnier’s fine new, English-language version of his Goodis book, three biographies now of Himes.

So here’s a third edition of Difficult Lives. That some material may have been brought into question, become commonplace, even been supplanted by later workers in the field, concerns me little; these essays did their work, which was to knock at doors and windows to urge just such interest in these writers. For this reason I’ve elected to make no updates incorporating new material and information. Though the Himes essay, for instance, led in time to a fullblown biography, during the writing of which I’d learn so much more, I see no reason to attempt reconstructing my original, less complex, less informed vision of his work; what’s written here should be allowed to stand on its own. Thus revisions for this edition have been chiefly editorial, judicious cuts hither and yon, a reshaping of misbegotten phrases or sentences, deletions of some of the repetitions and redundancies of that stuttery younger writer.

Writing has forever been how I find my way to what I truly think. These essays are no exception and, reading them now, distinctly I recall sitting in circles of light in a room outside Dallas or in a two-room upstairs flat in Fort Worth, tapping away at a typewriter with stacks of second-hand paperbacks on the table by me, poking at the seams and innards of these books, trying to puzzle out the clockwork of them, find the muscle, the mystery.

We can’t, of course. Each time we think we have it, it shifts and turns in our hands, changes shape, becomes something else. That’s the grace and beauty of this weirdness we call art. That’s why, as readers, as writers, we go on.

Here again, then, are a few shapes thrown against the wall.

Phoenix

January 2016

Introduction

Many years ago, in temporary self-exile, burrowing under covers with endless cups of tea as hot as I could bear them in my unheated two-room flat off Portobello Road in London, I first read the novels of Hammett and Chandler, all of them, I think, in a single week’s time.

My other great passion of the time, equally new, was French literature, and Gide’s description of the detective story as a form in which ‘every character is trying to deceive all the others and in which the truth slowly becomes visible through the haze of deception’ seems to me still the finest description both of the appeal these stories have at their deepest level and of the way, confused by sense and memory, confounded by our own and others’ notions of things, we actually live our lives.

So as I fed coins into the electric meter and went out each morning for my day’s shopping, as my accent gradually fell into cadence with those around me, I came to perceive the detective story as a cornerstone of American literature, another of those quirky American gifts to the world, like blues before, that forever transformed it.

What these stories were about, it seems to me, had little to do with solving any particular crime or restoring moral order. Indeed, crimes were rarely solved – at best, they were understood, just as often were compounded – and much of their power derived from a recognition that there is no moral order save that which a man creates for himself. Like high art, these stories worked hard to unfold the lies society tells us and the lies we tell ourselves. They opened up the clean, well-lit American corpse and dragged its dark heart into sunlight.

Now, commercial literature is not supposed to do that. It’s expected to reinforce received wisdom, not challenge it; to reassure us that the perspectives and prejudices we hold are the right ones.

The detective story as Americanized by hardboiled writers had become in fact a fullblown outlaw literature, an extension of the frontier literature embodied in Cooper and Twain. America was symbol and actuality at the same time, ship and sea in one, and uniquely, destructively, we tried to live at both levels. Unable to abide society’s false values and order, the American loner – Cooper’s Deerslayer, Twain’s Huck Finn – moved ever farther from the encroachments of that society, ever farther to the interior, to the west, until, with Chandler’s California, there is no more frontier.

In a survey of the genre written in the 1940s, Edmund Wilson noted that the American detective story, unlike its British counterpart, concerns itself not with puzzles and solutions, but with a profound malaise which it conveys to the reader, a sense of conspiracies and corruptions – evil, if you will – surfacing everywhere.

Hammett had invested the myth, relocating demons from European castles and New England settlements to bus stops, diners, rooms in cheap hotels. Chandler in turn had given that new demonology a clear, unmistakable voice.

‘Men murdered themselves into this democracy,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, and because popular culture is history in caricature, the nation’s mind and heart in high relief, the detective story is one abiding record of that democracy, and of that nation.

* * *

I am writing, here, primarily of three novelists: Chester Himes, David Goodis and Jim Thompson. Much of what I say, of course, touches generally upon the American detective story, paperback novels and commercial fiction of the Fifties, the relation of a writer’s life to his work. I make no extravagant claims for their work as enduring literature, or few, and am every bit as interested in their failures and incapacities as in their achievements.

Himes, Goodis and Thompson dwell in a peculiar historical cul-de-sac. Certainly I don’t deny the importance and impact of their work (I am, after all, writing about them at book length), but I do claim, as an integral part of my interest, that these books could not have existed at any other time. They are sports in the truest sense, sudden mutations arising in response to specific conditions and failing to continue as a strain once those conditions have passed.

The pulps were far too formulaic to allow much individual expression, subsequent paperbacks too set in form and too overseen, but for a brief period in the latter’s early days, when demands were high for new product and no one had really figured out what these books were supposed to be, there were chinks you could drive large typewriters through. Writers who worked within certain minimal guidelines and who could get their pigs to market pretty much on time were otherwise left alone to do much as they wished. Astonishingly, they were able to make a living at this. And writing fast, without the cushion of convention, they reached down and pulled out whatever they found there within themselves, repeating this procedure from book to book so that the best of them turned from simply telling stories to pursuing personal demons, to an exploration of evil and states of mind generally considered the domain of more ambitious literature.

The American genius is at any rate a quirky one, and these are marvelously quirky books. Chester Himes’ detective novels mimic traditions of dissembling by which blacks for generations maintained lives parallel to the larger culture; his Harlem is an improvised patchwork of white preconceptions, savagery and absurdist comedy. David Goodis rewrote essentially the same book again and again, ceremonially encoding his own fall from promising writer to recluse. Jim Thompson populated his novels with smiling psychopaths: door-to-door salesmen, con artists, fugitives and deputy sheriffs whose eyes lure the reader towards a great void.

* * *

The pulps in which the hardboiled form originated were truly phenomenal, a great sea of millions upon millions of words out of whose formulaic plots and hackneyed scenes society’s true nature surfaced from time to time, like the head of a snake.

Original paperbacks continued, extended, that role. But around the poor seams and creaky joints of some of these books, a heaviness began to settle, while at their hearts gathered an intensity rarely seen in popular literature. ‘The unoccupied mind feeds on itself,’ Wallace Stevens wrote. So does the over-occupied – hence these novels, these expeditions to the interior.

American culture has the sad habit of abandoning things it has loved briefly. For too many years Chester Himes’ novels remained out of print, for too many years copies of books by Jim Thompson and David Goodis curled and darkened like autumn leaves in basements and attics, molded in old bookstores and thrift shops, propped up the leg of Aunt Peg’s card table in the back room. Now, at last, we have found them anew.

Portable Worlds: The Original Paperback Novel

I was six or seven, I guess, when I first began noticing it. It sat for years on one of the end tables, not too far from a framed photograph of General MacArthur, in a living room closed off from the rest of the house except on holidays. No one ever read it, I’m sure. I no longer recall what was depicted on its cover, but I remember it with surprising physicality: the weight of it, that yellowing waxy cover, its smell, the block of urgent words on the back, Complete and Unabridged on its front. It had become an object of mystery to me, an emblem of a world beyond that Fifties house where we never locked doors and doubted no one’s values because they were, after all, had to be, the same as ours.

It was, I know now, a Pocket Books reprint of Hammett’s The Glass Key, a book which would re-enter my life some twenty-two years later in a flat off Portobello Road in London where, fortified with immense cups of tea, I read all morning, wrote all afternoon and evening.

Paperbacks had begun their subversive life five years before my own birth, in 1939, with Pocket Books’ release of ten trial titles such as Lost Horizon, Wuthering Heights and Topper. Ten thousand copies of each were printed, and the books were to be sold only in New York. With the phenomenal success of paperbacks and their rapid growth as an industry, early praise for Pocket Books’ democratic spirit in making literature accessible to the masses changed to cries of scorn and horror at this degradation of mass taste, suggesting that general attitudes were not too terribly different from those which had occasioned an 1898 editorial in The New York Times concerning the earliest paperbacks, intended for travelers:

The torn cover bears the soil of the journey, and even after the story is forgotten, the book yet spells sandwiches, cinders and satchel to tired eyes as long as it lies on the table. In desperation you stick it in the bookcase, but all the world can see that it’s a parvenu. The choice vellums draw away from it, the daintily bound essays and poems will have none of it, solemn history frowns on it, polite fiction scorns it, well-fed reference books turn their backs on the waif of the station. Even the recherché travel (its fortune in leather) fails to take pity on this poor ‘little brother of the rich.’ Though you put all the paper-covered volumes on a shelf by themselves, the result is not better, for you have incorporated a little slum district in the literary community.

True, it’s a long bus ride from Shakespeare to Swamp Girl. And the paperbacks took their little ghetto, their slum district, to heart, setting up barricades and launching a direct assault on ‘polite fiction.’

Every culture, every society, has its outlaw literature, its specific vision of life’s underside: crocodiles floating half-submerged in supposedly calm waters. Medieval Europe’s bawdy farces, Regency England’s gothics, Victorian penny dreadfuls, American dime novels and Depression-era pulps all filled this function. In a demotic society such as ours, paperbacks became the breeding ground and natural home for a demotic literature. Parenthetically it’s of interest to note that the democratization of evil (Hammett’s relocation of it to the urban, quotidian scene), that of style (the Black Mask writers) and that of literature itself (the paperback book) occurred more or less simultaneously.

From the first, paperbacks embraced their subversive role. In his remarkable tribute to them, Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks, Geoffrey O’Brien writes: ‘These novels, and the covers that illustrate them, speak of the ignoble corners of life beyond the glow of Jane Powell, Father Knows Best, and the healthy, smiling faces in magazines advertising milk or frozen dinners or trips to California.’

Even the cool, cynical tough-guy tone adopted by most of these books was an antidote to American bombast and self-touting. That tone, coupled with sharp dialog, gave hardboiled fiction a double-impact immediacy that instantly hooked the reader and ultimately found purchase in the greater culture. David Madden argues:

Events and conditions of the Twenties and Thirties were a cause that produced the Hammett ‘Black Mask’ kind of detective and they in turn were the cause of certain attitudes that produced behaviour in the Twenties and Thirties. [These stories] provided not only escape from conditions but criticism of those conditions as well. They provided simultaneously American dreams and American nightmares.

Madden implies here that this fiction, this genre, actually changed our perception of the world, giving us new templates for our lives, a new, twentieth-century, urban mythology. Our enduring fascination with hardboiled stories and their immediacy of voice, with the subterfuge and subterranean suspensions of guilt at their heart – this, and particularly the recent resurgence of noir fiction – bear him out.

Fifties paperbacks, O’Brien writes, likewise were a microcosm of American fantasies about the real world, investing ordinary streets, dives, tenements and cheap hotels with mystery, with a kind of obdurate poetry. Popular culture, after all, is history in caricature; these books are thimble-size monuments, frozen sections of our culture’s history, ‘the dream America made of itself, a few decades ago’ and the nightmares welling up beneath. If we look hard (O’Brien goes on) we can still discern in these tiny figures the heroes and demons of a generation, the archetypes of an era haunted by unspeakable violence and tormented by desires it cannot fulfill.

Shamelessly exploitative, they made their points with a maximum of directness. No trace of subtlety was permitted to cloud the violent and erotic visions that were their essence, and that very lack of subtlety lifted them out of this world.

Tawdry – with just a hint of transcendence.

* * *

The style of our own time, when we look back years from now, may well be like something from MTV, mannerist, hard-edged and a bit surreal, wildly eclectic: iconic images that seem to have no center, no meaning. Pound was right, every age demands its image; and the Fifties are those paperback covers – ‘flat, bright, violent surfaces devoid of character but brimming with emotion’ – posted like warnings at the threshold: Enter At Your Own Risk, Abandon Pretense All Who Enter Here, No Serious Readers Allowed.

Mysteries in 1945 comprised half of all paperbacks published. By 1950 this figure was down to 26%, 13% by 1955. A new beast had come about and now slouched towards the drugstores, sidewalk news stands and truck stops of America. Ephemeral as the newspapers and candy wrappers in whose shadow it sprouted, it was not a mystery in any traditional sense yet came spring-loaded with action, awash with violence and illicit (if mostly implied) sex.

Harry Whittington in 1948 had quit his government job of sixteen years and, leaping in ‘fully clothed, where only fools treaded water,’ set up as a writer.

At that precise moment, the publishing world was being turned upside down by the Fawcett Publishing Company. When they lost a huge reprint paperback distribution client, they decided to do the unheard of, the insane. They published original novels at 25 cents a copy. Print order on each title: 250,000. They paid writers not by royalty but on print order. Foreign, movie and TV rights remained with the writer. They were insane. They were my kind of people.

Once called ‘king of the paperback pioneers,’ Whittington published dozens of novels in all categories, stark westerns, tightly plotted action-suspense stories, unrelievedly noir fiction – edge literature, all of it. Like others such as David Goodis, suddenly he found it possible to sustain himself writing more or less what he wished, producing a body of work unified by its author’s preoccupations and instinctive feints. He had wanted to be the next Fitzgerald but after writing a mystery story on Monday, mailing it in on Tuesday, and receiving a check for $250 on Friday, switched horses. For better than two decades Whittington sold every word he wrote; at one point he contracted to provide a 60,000-word novel each month for over three years.

It all seemed so great at the time: Doing what I wanted to do, living as I wanted to live, having the time of my life and being paid for it. I worked hard; nobody ever wrote and sold 150-odd novels in twenty years without working hard, but I loved what I was doing.

Cornell Woolrich is another writer who early dreamed of becoming the new Fitzgerald, and who remains a kind of exemplar of the paperback novelist. Initial promise and success with chronicles of the Jazz Age such as Cover Charge (1926) and Children of the Ritz (1927) were followed by a long decline: failure at Hollywood scriptwriting, an ill-fated brief marriage, alcoholism, self-imprisonment in cheap hotel rooms and the ruins of his memory. Yet finding in the mid-Thirties, in mystery publications like Black Mask and Dime Detective, a voice for his own loneliness, fear and despair – a container he thought might hold them – Woolrich went on to turn out a dozen novels, several of them remaining continuously in print, and well over 200 stories and novellas, one of which provided the source for Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Michael Avallone’s thumbnail biography of Woolrich could easily be a description of one of Goodis’ or Thompson’s characters, and oddly synopsizes the world of the paperback novel:

[He] lived some forty years of his lifetime in a hotel room; he had no close personal friends and the Big Romance always eluded him; some of his most memorable works are dedicated to such lifeless things as hotel rooms, typewriters and the utter sadness of the human condition; later on in life he discovered John Barleycorn and the empty days and nights of his withdrawal from society echoed and re-echoed with the typical alcoholic miseria of broken appointments, paranoiac harangues and self-lashing which ended in the usual weeping haze of Where did I go wrong?

Paranoia is, in fact, Woolrich’s theme and fundamental plot. His characters cling to the fringes of life – living in seedy hotels, eating at greasy spoons, looking for companionship in dancehalls – and horrible things happen to them.

His plots often are wildly implausible, but Woolrich depicts his characters, and the sorry states in which they find themselves, with painful vividness; this exactness of description dramatically intensifies the prevailing sense of impotence and doom.

Film critic Michael Price once suggested that the then-current resurgence of film noir was a kind of dialectic, surfacing, it seems abruptly, in response to what was actually a decade-long opposition between the dark visions of filmmakers such as Ridley Scott and ‘film lite’ movies by Lucas, Spielberg et fils. Film lite, Price said, offers fables decked out in their parents’ clothes, pats on the back telling you it’s all going to be all right. Film noir tells you that nothing is going to be all right, ever; that individual will is illusion, helplessness the eternal human condition; that we are broken by the beasts caged within us as surely as by terrible forces (corporations, conspiracies) without.

Woolrich’s tales of despair and impotence struck a similar tone and accord with readers of the Forties, which O’Brien calls the era of ‘the Great Fear,’ doing what popular art at its best does best: limning shifts in a culture’s course before the culture itself begins to perceive those shifts, pulling out of the collective mind a few signal images to leave behind on the walls – stylized, totemic – as a record of those who once lived here.

* * *

Paperbacks were orphans, half-breeds, barnyard animals air-dropped into displays of exotic fauna, turkeys that had learned to swim, fish that could almost fly. No one knew quite what to do with them, least of all the people who were producing them and who tended to be a mixed lot themselves: burned-out bookmen, immigrants from food and other wholesale distribution, nickel-hearted entrepreneurs, renegade intellectuals.

The early paperback industry, then, was a loose, improvisational affair, operating under conditions anarchic enough to allow unexpected and remarkable freedoms – and because of those freedoms, some of the most idiosyncratic and intense work in American literature.

O’Brien writes of the cracks that writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis fell through in the ‘ramshackle industry’ of early paperbacks:

Amid all the mechanical duplication of iconography, a few writers recorded their own visions. The work of these few remains readable to the extent that they made their own variations on the public myth, variations not often noticed in a market equally receptive to the well-worn. These writers make up a strange and melancholy collection of individuals – melancholy at least in part because of the sense of dissatisfaction with their own work that so often emerges. That dissatisfaction, shared by Hammett and Chandler, seems to haunt the hardboiled genre, in contrast to the verve and toughness of the foreground. The great American nightmare of Failure is never far off.

What we have here, then, are three writers who thought like Icarus to fly but fell into a sea of original paperback novels. Three highly individual voices almost lost to the babble and hubbub of the marketplace. Three men who tried in their work to subvert again an already subversive genre and simultaneously to retrieve their lives, make some sense of them, through parlor tricks of metaphor.

All three collided with limitations of the form and with limitations within themselves, and fell – fell as we all fall, as we go on all our lives learning how to fall, hoping to achieve some measure of grace in the act.

There’s a poem by W.S. Merwin, ‘Fly,’ that I always read to students in writing classes. Merwin describes his attempts to teach a fat, good-natured old pigeon to fly, throwing the scruffy, trusting bird again and again into the air demanding that it fly until one day he finds the pigeon in the dovecote, ‘dead of the needless efforts.’

So that is what I am

Pondering his eye that could not

Conceive that I was a creature to run from

I who have always believed too much in words

Here are three men who, in their particular ways, at a particular time in the history of our nation, believed too much in words.

Jim Thompson: Dime-Store Dostoevski

‘Nobody else ever wrote books like these,’ Barry Gifford says of him.

When Jim Thompson died in 1977 at age 70 after more than fifty years’ work as a professional writer, every one of his 29 novels was out of print.

Disposability, of course, was a given: Thompson wrote paperback novels, candy wrapper books that supplanted the pre-war throwaway pulps and prefigured, then briefly paralleled, B-movies and ephemeral TV. These books were jobbed out to distributors who lugged them by the carton to bus depots, drugstores and the like and offloaded them onto wire racks studded with colorful tin badges bearing the various publishers’ logos; once read, like beer cans they were tossed away.

In one four-year period in the Fifties Thompson produced thirteen novels while co-writing, with Stanley Kubrick, that director’s first feature film, The Killing. By the Sixties the paperback original was largely a thing of the past, and so, it seemed, sadly, was Jim Thompson; in the last years of his life he began and abandoned over a dozen novels, working up portion after portion for his agents then, with no interest from publishers forthcoming, moving on to yet another.

Only in France, where Thompson’s books remained more or less continuously in print and received an acclaim similar to that given Hammett, McCoy, Cain and other major roman noir writers, did Thompson’s work endure. A handful of American writers and readers remembered that work with a mixture of fondness and awe: its starkness, its savage, unrelenting voice and emotional contortions. One of those was poet, novelist, biographer and part-time publisher Barry Gifford, who on a trip to Paris came across a batch of Thompson novels in a bookstore bin and recalled reading, at age 12, The Killer Inside Me. Returning to the States with a sackful of French editions, he began seeking out surviving copies of the originals and, in 1984, under the Black Lizard imprint, brought out new editions of four Jim Thompson novels in garish, waxy covers reminiscent of the original ones. Nine further Thompson titles followed from Black Lizard, along with similar work by David Goodis, Harry Whittington, Fredric Brown and others. Donald I. Fine responded to growing interest in Thompson’s work with two novel collections and with Fireworks, an anthology of ‘lost writings’ spanning sixty years. More recently Vintage Books, assuming Black Lizard’s catalog, has brought out many of Thompson’s novels in uniform editions, along with cognate work of Himes, Goodis, Whittington and others.

‘At the outermost edge of American literature, in a swamp previously inhabited only by Hubert Selby and William Burroughs, Jim Thompson awaits reclamation,’ wrote the editors of that anthology, Robert Polito and Michael McCauley. ‘Buried under the shabbiest conventions of pulp fiction – all but three of the 29 books he published between 1942 and 1973 were paperback originals – and picking at the banality with offhand brilliance, his novels pursue the most debased imaginative materials. Reading one of them is like being trapped in a bomb shelter with a chatty maniac who also happens to be the air raid warden.’

Now, it seems, the salvage is well underway. The swamp’s being dredged daily for bodies, and they come up out of it in pieces, corrupt and at the same time somehow simpler, purer, staring at us with a fixed, terrible regard: the novels of Jim Thompson.

* * *

I killed Amy Stanton on Saturday night on the fifth of April, 1952, at a few minutes before nine o’clock.

That’s from The Killer Inside Me, not from the book’s beginning as you might think, but from nearer its end, the eighteenth of twenty-six chapters, much of the novel’s narrative having spiraled down to that single, damning action within which the narrator finds a freedom he’s never before known. And here, following a chapter of backpedaling and seeming asides, is the actual murder:

And I hit her in the guts as hard as I could.

My fist went back against her spine, and the flesh closed around it to the wrist. I jerked back on it, I had to jerk, and she flopped forward from the waist, like she was hinged.

Her hat fell off, and her head went clear down and touched the floor. And then she toppled over, completely over, like a kid turning a somersault. She lay on her back, eyes bulging, rolling her head from side to side.

She was wearing a white blouse and a light cream-colored suit; a new one, I reckon, because I didn’t remember seeing it before. I got my hand in the front of the blouse, and ripped it down to the waist. I jerked the skirt up over her head, and she jerked and shook all over; and there was a funny sound like she was trying to laugh.

And then I saw the puddle spreading out under her.

I sat down and tried to read the paper. I tried to keep my eyes on it. But the light wasn’t very good, not good enough to read by, and she kept moving around. It looked like she couldn’t lie still.

Once I felt something touch my boot, and I looked down and it was her hand. It was moving back and forth across the toe of my boot. It moved up along the ankle and the leg, and somehow I was afraid to move away. And then her fingers were at the top, clutching down inside; and I almost couldn’t move. I stood up and tried to jerk away, and the fingers held on.

I dragged her two-three feet before I could break away.

That’s vintage, distilled Thompson. Starting out as standard pulp violence, suddenly it becomes something else, something reptilian, the narrator’s apartness and near-paralysis underscored by precisions of description and by the claustrophobic feel of the whole thing, discontinuities of thought and action (that disembodied hand, serial use of the word jerk) coupled with chant-like repetitions and those unrelenting ands.

The Killer Inside Me, with its psychopathic deputy sheriff, is generally acknowledged as Thompson’s masterpiece. Its one clear contender, in many ways a twin, is Pop. 1280, a marvelously sustained comedy. Both novels have been filmed – the second brilliantly, transplanted to French West Africa, by Bertrand Tavernier as Coup de Torchon – but Thompson’s distinctive voice is what makes these books, and the discrete vocabulary of film relinquishes much of that.

Pop. 1280’s first-person narrator, like Killer’s Lou Ford a lawman, sheriffs over a godforsaken, retrograde plot of land called Pottsville, ‘twelve hundred and eighty souls’ bunched together and lost in the wastes of West Texas. Every bit as bleak as that of Killer, the book’s dark vision comes wrapped in the swaddling clothes and dissembling monologue (monotone, as well) of Nick Corey’s interior life, at the apex of a demotic comic tradition reaching back through Twain to Bierce and Artemus Ward. Here is Pottsville’s ordained savior, introducing himself in the first of twenty-four chapters:

Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just about as pretty as a man could sit. Here I was, the high sheriff of Potts County, and I was drawing almost two thousand a year – not to mention what I could pick up on the side. On top of that, I had free living quarters on the second floor of the courthouse, just as nice a place as a man could ask for; and it even had a bathroom so that I didn’t have to bathe in a washtub or tramp outside to a privy, like most folks in town did. I guess you could say that Kingdom Come was really here as far as I was concerned. I had it made – being high sheriff of Potts County – as long as I minded my own business and didn’t arrest no one unless I just couldn’t get out of it and they didn’t amount to nothin’.

And yet I was worried. I had so many troubles that I was worried plumb sick.

I’d sit down to a meal of maybe half a dozen pork chops and a few fried eggs and a pan of hot biscuits with grits and gravy, and I couldn’t eat it. Not all of it. I’d start worrying about those problems of mine, and the next thing you knew I was getting up from the table with food still left on my plate.

It was the same way with sleeping. You might say I didn’t really get no sleep at all. I’d climb in bed, thinking this was one night I was bound to sleep, but I wouldn’t. It’d be maybe twenty or thirty minutes before I could doze off. And then, no more than eight or nine hours later, I’d wake up. Wide awake. And I couldn’t go back to sleep, frazzled and wore out as I was.

Well, sir, I was layin’ awake like that one night, tossing and turning and going plumb out of my mind, until finally I couldn’t stand it no longer. So I says to myself, ‘Nick,’ I says, ‘Nick Corey, these problems of yours are driving you plumb out of your mind, so you better think of something fast. You better come to a decision, Nick Corey, or you’re gonna wish you had.’

So I thought and I thought, and then I thought some more. And finally I came to a decision.

I decided I didn’t know what the heck to do.

By book’s end, of course, he’s more or less decided that he does know, like Miss Lonelyhearts (and with equally disastrous consequences) taking on responsibility for the world, or at least for Pottsville: ‘Why else had I been put here in Potts County, and why else did I stay here? Why else, who else, what else but Christ Almighty would put up with it?’

Now it is quite unsettling to open the pages of a cheap paperback novel and find yourself staring into Satan’s calm face, or Christ’s troubled one. Genre conventions themselves are supposed to protect you, holding forth a world parallel to your own but sealed off from it and, whatever the wrath and wreckage, somehow safe. But Jim Thompson’s work is one long assault on the words supposed to