James Myers Thompson was born on September 27, 1906, in an apartment above the Caddo County Jail in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where his father was sheriff. At fourteen, amid family money troubles and frequent moves, he was first published. At seventeen he took a night job as a bellhop in a Fort Worth hotel, attending high school by day, which led to a nervous breakdown. As a roughneck in the West Texas oil fields in 1926, he encountered the Wobblies, which influenced his politics. The Depression ended a job as a collections agent, as well as two years of college education at the University of Nebraska. In 1931, newly married to Alberta Hesse, he began to hone his craft writing true-crime stories for pulp magazines; he would be forty-three when he first wrote crime fiction. In 1938, he was appointed director of the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project. Thompson achieved recognition between 1942 and 1973, publishing twenty-nine novels, all but three paperback originals. He also wrote two screenplays for Stanley Kubrick, The Killing and Paths of Glory.

Jim Thompson died on April 7, 1977. By that time, despite his popularity in the 1950s, he was virtually forgotten. A Thompson revival began in the mid-1980s with a series of reprints and was bolstered by movie adaptations ofThe Getaway, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.

Books by Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me

by Jim Thompson