The Best American Noir of the Century

Jim (James Meyers) Thompson (1906-1977) was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, and worked numerous hard, physical jobs, including as an oil-well and pipeline laborer (his father was a wildcatter), while trying to write. He received commissions from the Works Projects Administration Writers’ Project during the Depression, producing guidebooks of Oklahoma, among other works, and worked as a journalist, mainly covering crime stories.

His first novel, Now and on Earth (1942), is a tale of sex, sin, violence, and revenge. The book most readers regard as his masterpiece, The Killer Inside Me (1952), was the first of sixteen paperback originals he produced during the 1950s, his only prolific era. His other critically successful novels during the ‘50s include Savage Night (1953), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), and The Getaway (1959). After The Grifters (1963) and Pop. 1280 (1964), the quality of his work, already extremely erratic, declined rapidly. When he died in 1977, not a single book of his was in print in the United States until Quill included The Killer Inside Me in a series of classic hard-boiled novels in 1983; the following year, Black Lizard reprinted most of his other titles. While his bleak novels of psychopaths, losers, alcoholics, and unreliable narrators never achieved sales beyond a vocal cult following in his own country, he enjoyed substantial commercial and critical success in France, where he has often been regarded as America’s greatest hard-boiled writer. Several films were made from his work, with varying aesthetic success, including The Killer Inside Me, a dud filmed in 1976 with Stacy Keach as Sheriff Lou Ford; The Getaway, filmed twice (both with endings absurdly changed from very noir to happy), first in 1972 with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, then in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger; and the superb The Grifters (1990), for which Donald E. Westlake’s screenplay received one of the film’s four Academy Award nominations. Directed by Stephen Frears, it starred John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, and Pat Hingle. Thompson also wrote several screenplays, including the caper film The Killing (1956) and the antiwar film Paths of Glory (1957), both directed by Stanley Kubrick, but was cheated out of a screenwriting credit both times.

“Forever After” was published in the May i960 issue of Shock magazine.

It was a few minutes before five o’clock when Ardis Clinton unlocked the rear door of her apartment and admitted her lover. He was a cow-eyed young man with a wild mass of curly black hair. He worked as a dishwasher at Joe’s Diner, which was directly across the alley.