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Jim Thompson, the suspense and crime novelist who died a little over thirty years ago on April 7, 1977, told his wife on his deathbed that she should hold on to his papers because, “I’ll become famous after I’m dead about ten years.” A more unlikely success story would be hard to predict. At the time of his death, none of his books were in print and his funeral was only attended by 25 mourners, so how could he know that thirteen years later, his novels would be some of the most admired genre fiction in English? Even better, how would he react to the news that Hollywood was turning three of his novels into movies? 1990 saw a Jim Thompson revival in film with the release of The Kill-Off, After Dark My Sweet, and most importantly, The Grifters.

Jim Thompson was born on September 27, 1906 in Oklahoma, and when his father, a local sheriff, was implicated in an embezzlement scandal, his family relocated to Texas. As a young man, Thompson worked as a bellhop in a local hotel. As this was Prohibition, Thompson made 20 times his regular salary by selling booze to guests. During this time, Thompson would attend school during the day, and work and drink his way through the night. He had his first nervous breakdown when he was nineteen. Thompson’s first novel, Now and on Earth, published in 1942 details these early experiences trying to keep his life together. His battle with alcoholism would be constant in both his life and his fiction.

Jim Thompson came to novel writing late in life, and before that lived on the outskirts of 1930’s America. After a stint (detailed in the autobiographical tall tale, Rough Neck) working in oil-fields in Nebraska and Oklahoma, Thompson returned to Texas where he briefly attended college and where he met his future wife, Alberta. They eloped in 1931, and a few years later he began publishing small crime stories in magazines like True Detective. Thompson was also working, along with Western author Louis Lamour, for the local WPA and was briefly a member of the Communist party in the late thirties. Only after Thompson moved to Los Angeles did his real writing begin. Now and on Earth was published to decent reviews, but sold very little. The same went for his next book, another Steinbeck influenced non-crime story called Heed The Thunder. Disappointed by the setbacks, Thompson returned to the crime story and to new themes: Failure, Rage, and Murder.

1952 saw the publication of The Killer Inside Me, Thompson’s most famous, and perhaps best, novel. Written in the first person, Killer is the story of Sheriff Lou Ford, a man (based on Thompson’s own father) who pretends to be slow-witted and amiable, but who is secretly a brilliant sociopath who can’t stop killing people. The novel does the neat trick of involving the reader in the suspense surrounding a completely loathsome character. We’re both repulsed and thrilled as Lou avoids detection. This novel also began Thompson’s most fruitful time as a writer. Over the next few years, he wrote over a dozen novels, including some of his greatest: Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman, The Nothing Man, and After Dark, My Sweet. This was also the start of his most successful collaboration, with the pulp publishing company Lion Books. Savage Night, especially, is worth noting. Another story of a man at war with his own psychoses, it tells the story of Carl Bigger, a hit man whose mental and physical collapse is mirrored by the surreal tone that the novel takes on as it progresses. The New York Times Anthony Boucher said of it, “Odd that a mass-consumptionrpaperback should contain the most experimental writing I've seen in a suspense novel of late."

In 1955, Stanley Kubrick hired Thompson to help write the screenplay for The Killing. Despite feuding with Kubrick over writing credits, the two collaborated once more for the film Paths of Glory. Again, Thompson received almost no credit. Coupled with the disappointment he met in Hollywood was the news that Lion Books was folding. Despite the praise in some quarters for Thompson’s work, he had a difficult time finding a new publisher. For years, he would blame the violence in his books for this failure. That belief, however, wouldn’t stop him from writing some of his most shocking work. The Getaway, published by NAL in 1959, is most famously known as the film directed by Sam Peckinpah starring Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen. But the movie only focuses on the first half of the novel. After committing an exciting (if typical, for a pulp novel) bank robbery, Doc and Carol flee to a rumored heaven for criminals in Mexico. Along the way they are forced to hide in Dante-like conditions: A cavern the size of coffins, a room fashioned from shit. And even when the get to El Rey’s criminal “paradise” things are not what they seem. NAL was not amused by the avant-garde flourishes, but Thompson refused to change it.

Although Thompson would live for another 13 years, 1963-4 saw the last of the really good novels, with Pop. 1280, largely a re-imagining of The Killer Inside Me, arriving in 1964 and The Grifters, the year before. The Grifters is the story of Roy Dillon and his relationship with his mother, Lily, and his girlfriend, Moira Langtry. The three are grifters of little success, each erotically involved with the other. The Grifters was also made into the best and most loyal of the Thompson movies. Directed by Stephen Frears, it was nominated for four Academy Awards.

After 1964, Thompson wrote a few more novels, but none had the same power as his work in the fifties and early sixties. He suffered from ill health due to his constant drinking, a habit he was never really able to break. In 1977 he died, largely forgotten, with his wife Alberta by his side. In 1995, Robert Polito's National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography Savage Art was published. Thompson, dead for almost two decades, was finally getting his due.