Arranged in a rough chronological order, the first section from his 1930s and 1940s writing, includes quite a bit of nonfiction written in a fictional vein. In "The Strange Death of Eugene King," Thompson takes on the voice of a transient looking to solve the murder of another transient, a technique popular in thriller magazines of the era apparently. "Oil Field Vignettes" and "Thieves of the Field" both provide first-hand insights into the oil industry that I'd likely never have thought much about otherwise. The first is mostly character sketches of oil workers--one who likes complete silence, one who is scared of drilling, and one who is constantly marrying bad women who take advantage of him and leave him. There's something of a folk tale quality to these bits, as in the stories told in "Thieves," where Thompson ruminates on how pipe can be (and is) stolen and sold. "Snake Magee's Rotary Boiler" is a tall tale about a blown-up boiler that sends a man clear back to bed.
The True Detective pieces show how Thompson became the writer he did. There's a quality of the unknown, as is typical of mystery in each of the true crime pieces, a mystery with a twist usually at the end. "Ditch of Doom" explores the life of an insane man who murders his wife--or is it a planned murder for his former wife? "Oklahoma's Conspiring Lovers" follows the unfortunate story of a man beat up by a horse--who in fact is not beat up by said horse. "Illicit Lovers and the Walking Corpse" tries to figure out how a man's wife survives being accidentally killed by the man--and just how many wives the man has.
"A Penny in the Dust" is an unfinished novel from the period. Seemingly autobiographical in its first passages, it lacks for polish, but the ickiness typical of Thompsom becomes apparent in the final scene provided.
"Character at Iraan" recounts life among oil workers between jobs, as they sleep in a cheap hotel, gamble, and drink. Although published in Prairie Schooner, the piece does not seem to fulfill its literary pretensions.
The second section focuses on Thompson's writings during the 1940s and 1950s, which would have included the time of his most productive output. "Death Missed a Beat" is a straight story about a man who in an effort to get to work on time the next day picks up a hitchhiker to drive him and ends up the object of a murder. "Murder Came on the Mayflower" is a short account of an early colonial murder. "Exactly What Happened" plays to a weird twist in a story in which a man attempts to rob his boss by pretending to be a coworker. "The Threesome in Four-C" is an account of a man who has gone insane because of his conscience. "The Dark Stair" is the basis for Thompson's book No More Than Murder; a true story, the mystery hinges on the contents of a movie. "Forever After" revolves around a woman who, tired of her marriage, plots the murder of her husband via her lover but who, as in "Exactly What Happened," finds the situation reversed on her. "John Stink" is about a Native American whose tribe takes him for dead, so much so that when he finds his way out of the shallow grave they take him for a ghost they must ignore so that he'll go away. "Blood from a Turnip" centers on a watch that hustlers attempt to turn for a profit.
"The Cellini Chalice," one of the longest stories in this section, shows Thompson at his top form, as he is in his better novels. The story centers on a hustler named Mitch. He cons a chalice off a woman who thinks him a vagrant in need, a chalice that is worth much more than she knows. Alas, Mitch isn't an antiques expert, so he thinks he fares well getting a thousand dollars for it but is disappointed when he finds out it's worth at least fifteen times that. Mitch learns that there's another chalice like it and aims to get it with the woman's help. What he doesn't know is that the woman is in on the con--of him. Many pages later, Mitch finds himself in some extenuating circumstances that require him to use all the street smarts he has to extricate himself from.
"The Frightening Frammis" picks up where the previous story left off, once again following Mitch on his efforts to con people out of cash. Having been the victim of a recent swindle, Mitch feels down on his luck, but he soon falls into an opportunity to earn fifty thousand dollars. This story doesn't have the same weight as the previous. The circumstances that lead to Mitch's opportunity seem too haphazard: he's hitchhiking, a couple picks him up, the man dies, and Mitch just happens to look like him, and there just happens to be fifty thousand in the car, and so on. Mitch's wife seems too forgiving, after all that he's put her through in both this story and the last. As such, the plot twists overpower the sense of characterization, and the story loses punch, which is a reason I have tended not to care as much for genre fiction in the past.
The same point could be used to denote why "Pay as You Exit" and "The Flaw in the System" are disappointing. The first involves a hitchhiker who aims to rip off the woman he manages to stop by flattening her tire, only to find out that she might well be just as dangerous as he is. The second involves people at a company who are conned.
"An Alcoholic Looks at Himself" seems a bit disorganized, but it is a sad, autobiographical portrait of Thompson as a drinker, a man who has squandered chunks of his life and talent in an effort to get the next bit of the liquid elixir. I say disorganized, but it is in chronological order. It's just that, being "real life," there doesn't seem much in the way of an arc or growth--it's just random discussion of drinking, stopping, then drinking again.
"The Tomcat That Was Treetop Tall" is a crime story about a man who decides to rip off a couple in a bar and the man who decides to stop him. Here, the story's violence seems as if it is on the page for thrills rather than for a purpose inherent to the story.
We then move to the last two decades of Thompson's life and writing. The middle of the book seems the strongest part; by this era, Thompson's work has become something of a parody of itself. "A Horse in the Baby's Bathtub" revolves around an incest story. A young man who is, in his mind, clever and smart, takes an interest in his father's new bride, his stepmom. He kills off dad and takes up with her, but his interest in her is, in part, one of contempt. In the end, he opts to do some violence to the family next door, who has lost a child--and that's where one learns the meaning of the tale's title.
"The Red Kitten" is the start of a longer work--a promising start. A man marries a woman, but with an understanding that the inheritance the two of them will get requires them to stay married. The will is set up in such a way that it essentially forces the two to despise one another but stay married--or find some way to knock the other off. Alas, the piece ends there.
"The Slave Girl in the Cellar" is a summary of a true crime story, a case of modern slavery. The piece is interesting for the case itself.
"Sunrise at Midnight" is a strange piece, a piece that seems in many ways like male wish fulfillment. The first section focuses on a man married to a stripper who is forced into her profession by a crooked cop. But just as the husband begins to build a plan for taking care of matters, the story backtracks to that same man taking an interest in helping out a much-younger woman in a dead-end job. After he buys her new clothes and sets her up rather well, she insists on going to bed with him against his will and then they get married. The man loses his job as a reporter and thus fall the events that force his wife into stripping--and the man into seeking revenge. Like so many of the pieces in this last section, this one seems unfinished.
I didn't much care for "Hell" from Ironside, the one published piece in the last section, a lyrical exploration of killing and crime.
"This World, Then the Fireworks" closes off the collection and might be the most finished of those works falling in the last section. Full of familiar Thompson tropes, the piece seems a bit over the top. It involves a set of twins who witness their father killing a cop who discovers said father cheating with the cop's wife. The wife commits suicide, the dad goes to jail, and the kids grow up to be troubled. They get into the grift, but their main desire is somehow to avenge or to understand their father's deed. And so goes the tale as the male twin opts to get involved with a female cop.
The book made me feel like Jim Thompson's best material was long form and mostly during the period for which he is most famous, when he wrote so many books in such short order. I wouldn't have bothered with the text were it not one of the few available to me to read on my Jim Thompson list. This is a collection, I'd say, largely for Thompson scholars, who can used it to see how his writing developed.
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