The City of Wonderful People: a Short Essay on Jim Thompson

by

Dave Zeltserman

I’m going to come clean. Originally, I was going to write a review for a book I came across that had a number of blurbs claiming that the author was the next Jim Thompson. It wasn’t a bad book, but the problem was other than the fact that the story was written from the mind of a killer, there was no commonality with Thompson – either in style or substance. After writing the review I decided it wasn’t fair. After all, what does it mean for a book not to measure up to one of the greatest noir writers - and arguably one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century? And Thompson was certainly that. But it did get me interested in exploring what made Thompson so unique among American crime fiction.

Thompson wrote twenty-nine books that ranged from literary to crime fiction to noir. While all of his books have certain recurrent dark themes which swirl through them, only six fall under the “mind of the killer” category. Those six – Killer Inside Me, Hell of a Woman, Savage Night, A Swell-Looking Babe, Pop. 1280 and Nothing More Than Murder – take the reader on nightmarish, dizzying journeys otherwise unseen in the annals of crime fiction.

The world Thompson creates in these books is a cold and unforgiving one, filled with desolation, paranoia and violence. His protagonists appear at first to be ordinary guys (with the exception of Savage Night) – bellhops, lawmen, movie house operators, and door to door salesmen – but in fact, they’re anything but normal. They’re characters that are born broken without a chance of redemption. They might fool you for a while, but it’s a false hope. They’re unrepentant killers, teetering on the edge of madness and psychic disintegration. No better examples of this are Carl Bigelow from “Savage Night” and Frank Dillon from “A Hell of a Woman”.

Carl Bigelow, the hit man from “Savage Night”, is literally falling apart. He needs his contact lenses, platform shoes and false teeth to even approach being a whole man. He’s suffering from consumption, and with every cough, there’s less and less of him. By the end, there’s nothing left; the mental and physical disintegration is complete. Bigelow also highlights another characteristic that runs through Thompson’s dark protagonists – self delusion and deception. While there is no attempt to hide the fact that he is a cold blooded killer, other aspects of his past and persona have been hidden and twisted, and when the truth is discovered it is jolting. At several points throughout the book, Bigelow refers to the one event in his life that he is proud of – helping an elderly couple. Eventually, the truth is exposed that Bigelow had instead terrorized this couple, and the depths of his self delusion are shocking.

Frank “Dolly” Dillon, the protagonist from “A Hell of a Woman”, is a hardluck guy. No matter how hard he tries everything in his life turns to crap and always will. He’s been cheated and treated poorly at every job. Every diner serves him slop. Every waitress is an ugly slob. Every woman he marries turns out to be a worse tramp than the last. As the story opens, Frank is having money troubles due to a lifetime of being gypped. When he sees a chance to commit a double-murder and walk away with a hundred grand and Mona, what choice does he have? Mona is a sweet doll, everything his current wife, Joyce, is not. After the murders an alter ego is introduced to detail Frank’s constant struggle against high odds and low women. This new voice needs to massage and alter the truth to make it palatable. Of course, after the murders things also start to unravel. Maybe Joyce isn’t quite the harpy Frank has made her out to be. And maybe Mona is a worse tramp than all the others. And maybe Frank’s boss, Staples, knows more than he’s letting on and is going to stick it to Frank like all the rest. And just when things couldn’t possibly get any worse, of course they do! By the end (and it’s one hell of an ending!) Frank has split into two voices, one telling the awful truth, the other pure fantasy. But when the two voices collide into a single point, there’s really nothing left of him. The disintegration is complete.

The violence in Thompson’s is brutal and damning. The poster boy for Thompson’s virtuosic violence has to be Lou Ford, the deputy sheriff protagonist from The Killer Inside Me. Ford just about simmers with violence. It hisses from him like air from a ruptured balloon. Barely, just barely, he’s able to control it, letting it out in small doses. Grounding out a cigar in a bum’s hand. Using pleasantries and corny expressions as needles to make his hapless victims squirm. But when he gets involved with Joyce Lakeland all that changes. Joyce has been working as a prostitute, but she’s crazy about Ford and wants to run off with him. When she tries to force him to go along by threatening to ruin his good name in town, Ford decides he has to kill her. He’s got darker motives than that, though. Darker even than to use it as an excuse to even the score with Chester Conway, by killing Chester’s dumb son Elmer, framing it so it looks like Joyce and Elmer killed each other. The “sickness” that Ford has been holding in for so long is now out. He can no longer simply hurt people in the little ways that he has been doing. Now he has to hurt people the way he really wants to. Here’s how it is with Joyce:

“Easy,” I said, and I gave her a slap. And she still didn’t get it.

She put a hand to her face and rubbed it slowly. “Y-you’d better not do that, now, Lou. I’ve got to travel, and –“

“You’re not going anywhere, baby,” I said, and I hit her again.

And at last she got it.

She jumped up and I jumped with her. I whirled her around and gave her a quick one-two, and she shot backwards across the room and bounced and slumped against the wall. She staggered to her feet, weaving, mumbling, and half-fell toward me. I let her have it again.

I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once. She slumped down, her knees bent under her, her head hanging limp; and then, slowly, an inch at a time, she pushed herself up again.

She couldn’t see; I don’t know how she could. I don’t know how she could stand or go on breathing. But she brought her head up, wobbling, and she raised her arms, raised them and spread them and held them out. And then she staggered toward me, just as a car pulled into the yard.

“Guhbuh-guhby . . . kiss guhguh-guh—“

I brought an uppercut up from the floor. There was a sharp cr-aack! And her whole body shot upward, and came down in a heap. And that time it stayed down.

There’s a visceral power to this violence. Something that hits you deep in the gut. Something horrifying and damning about it. And the brilliance of Thompson - even after witnessing Ford brutally beat a woman who still wants to kiss him good-bye - you find yourself rooting for him, praying that he can get his “sickness” under control. And of course he can’t. And the ride to hell with him his breathtaking.

Thompson’s world is a paranoid and dangerous one. You think they’re out to get you, and by God, they are. There are no helpful hands, no second chances - only double crosses. Say the wrong word, you’re sunk. Slip up, you’re dead. Thompson’s perverse masterpiece, A Swell-Looking Babe, follows the travails of Bill “Dusty” Rhodes. Dusty had dropped out of college to presumably take care of his invalid father, and is now working as a bellhop, working the nightshift at the Hotel Manton. When he’s not working, he’s running errands and trying to squeeze in whatever sleep he can. There’s an emptiness to him, an uneasiness. When he sees Marcia Hillis, he knows she’s the one chance he’s got of filling the void. But when she calls him to her room late one night it’s to frame him for rape. And when he knocks her out before she can scream, Tug Trowbridge comes to his aid. Tug is a hell of a guy, an ex-racketeer, always flashing around the roll of cash and tipping big. Always treating Dusty as if he’s a pal. Tug and his boys are going to take care of the situation for Dusty, and they do it by kidnapping Marcia from the hotel. Now they got complications; it’s either kill her or pay her off ten grand to keep quiet. But if Dusty were to help them rob the hotel’s safety deposit boxes, then it would be no problem. And since the night clerk is already in on it, it should be a cinch. But in this world nobody’s on the level, especially Dusty.

The thing of it is no one wrote “crazies” like Jim Thompson did. He’d sucker you in, have you believing in the guy, and then pull the carpet out from under your feet. And there you are, not knowing quite what to believe – not knowing whether the protagonist is delusional or lying to you or what. But there was more to Thompson that just that. More than simply creating the most vicious bleak characters in crime fiction. More than writing vividly arresting dialogue. More than brilliantly mixing social commentary into his harrowing tales. There was a magic to Thompson’s writing, a magic I haven’t encountered yet in any other crime fiction. The following excerpt is taken from Thompson’s fierce novella, “This World, Then the Fireworks”, and shows this magic  – and also shows Thompson at his most cynical:

I went to the funeral, but I did not stay. I strolled away from the graveside and off towards the busline, meandering casually through the hummocked greensward, the marble- and copper-bordered streets of The City of Wonderful People. It was a crowded city; neighbor elbowed against neighbor. Yet no one felt the need for more room. They dwelt peacefully side by side, content with what they had. No one needing more than what he had, nor wanting more than he needed. Because they were so wonderful, you see. They were all so wonderful.

There was Annie, for example, devoted wife of Samuel. And there was William, faithful husband of Nora. There was Henry, dutiful son, and Mabel, loving daughter, and Father and Mother, who were not only devoted, faithful, dutiful and loving, but God-fearing to boot. One had to look closely to see that they were all these things, their gravestones being only slightly larger than a cigarette package. But one always does have to look closely to see virtue, and as in this case, it is always worth the trouble.

Yes, hell. Yes, oh God, yes it was a wonderful place. The city of Wonderful People. Everyone in it was everything that everyone should be. Some had a little more on the ball, of course, than others; there was one guy, for instance, who was only humble. But think of that! Think of its possibilities! Think of what you could do with a guy like that on a world tour. Or war if prevented, as it indubitably would, you could put him on television. A nationwide hookup. You could go to the network and say, Look, I’ve got something different here. Something unique. I’ve got a guy that’s – No, he doesn’t do card tricks, he’s not a singer or dancer. Well, he does have a sense of humor, but he doesn’t tell – No, I’m afraid he doesn’t have big tits, and his ass looks just like yours and mine. What he’s got is something different. Something there’s a hell of a need for. And if you’ll just give him a chance …

They’d never go for it.

You’d have to nail him to a cross first.

Only here, only in the City of the Wonderful People, was the wonderful wonderful.

When you finish a Jim Thompson book, you can't help but feel somewhat shaken, a little unsure of where you fit in the universe. This examination of Thompson is far from complete. It only barely scratches the surface, failing to examine his other crime novels, particularly “The Grifters”, “The Getaway”, and “After Dark, My Sweet”,  which are equally brilliant and dark and unnerving. Next time you read a blurb claiming a book is “in the tradition of Jim Thompson”, take it with a grain of salt. There was only one Jim Thompson and there will never be another one like him.