He ran for the state legislature in 1906, but was defeated. He moved the family to Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, and was elected sheriff of Caddo County. Thompson's father, known as "Big Jim" Thompson, was a teacher for a decade in Burwell, Nebraska before his son's birth his wife and Jim's mother, Birdie Myers, was a former student. (The theme of a once-prominent family overtaken by ill-fortune was featured in some of Thompson's works.)Īnadarko in 1901, a few years before Thompson's birth
His novels were considered semi-autobiographical, or, at least, inspired by his experiences. Thompson's life was nearly as colorful as his fiction. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters in 1990, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes. Thompson was called a "Dimestore Dostoevsky" by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. There are three brave 'lets' inherent in the foregoing: He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it." Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. Cassill has suggested that of all crime fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor Horace McCoy ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson".
A number of Thompson's books were adapted as popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. In these works, Thompson turned the derided crime genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and the quasi-surrealistic inner narratives of the last thoughts of his dying or dead characters.
His best-regarded works include The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. In the late 1980s, several of his novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow. Despite some positive critical notice-notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times-he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications, published from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. James Myers Thompson (Septem– April 7, 1977) was an American prose writer and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction. Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, United StatesĬrime fiction, hardboiled, pulp, autobiography, suspense, literary fiction
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