Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard

Jim Thompson

(1906 - 1977) James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He began writing fiction at a very young age, selling his first story to True Detective when he was only fourteen. Thompson eventually wrote twenty-nine novels, all but three of which were published as paperback originals. Thompson also wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory”). An outstanding crime writer, the world of his fiction is rife with violence and corruption. In examining the underbelly of human experience and American society in particular, Thompson’s work at its best is both philosophical and experimental. Several of his novels have been filmed by American and French directors, resulting in classic noir including The Killer Inside Me (1952), After Dark My Sweet (1955), and The Grifters (1963).

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled | 978-0-375-70031-6 (0-375-70031-5) | October 1997 | $ 15.00

"If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich could have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it. " --Washington Post

Clinton Brown is smart, good-looking, and the best rewrite man on the Pacific City Courier. The wife he divorced is still in... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective - Hard-Boiled | 978-0-375-70030-9 (0-375-70030-7) | September 1997 | $ 13.00

"I was going to catch hell whatever I did. I might as well try to enjoy myself."
--Jim Thompson

At thirteen Jim Thompson was learning how to smoke cigars and ogle burlesque girls under the tutelage of his profane grandfather. A few years later, he was bellhopping at a hotel in Fort... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-74017-9 (0-679-74017-1) | October 1994 | $ 12.95

In the 1920s the worst place you could be was in that part of Texas that some people call "South of Heaven," and the worst thing you could be doing there was laying a gas pipeline, along with six-hundred other hoboes, juice-heads, and jailbirds. But that's exactly what Tommy Burwell was... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-74011-7 (0-679-74011-2) | October 1994 | $ 11.00

Mitch Corley has a girlfriend with expensive tastes and a ruthless wife who refuses to become an "ex" without major compensation. He needs big money and he needs it fast. Which makes Texas Mitch's natural destination, since nowhere are rich men more inclined to stake huge sums on a roll of... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-74014-8 (0-679-74014-7) | February 1994 | $ 12.00

Old Lincoln Fargo has spent his life engaging in almost every vice imaginable--and his only regret is that he once stole a horse. His son Grant, a shiftless dandy with a resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, is conducting an affair with his voluptuous and volatile cousin. And behind everyone's back, Grandmother... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction | 978-0-679-74013-1 (0-679-74013-9) | February 1994 | $ 12.00

An underaged bellboy thrust into an awful intimacy with grown-up vice. An alcoholic writer trying to postpone a crack-up just long enough to finish his next book. A wildly dysfunctional Okie family floundering on the edge of mutual destruction amid the deceptive plenty of wartime California.

These are the ingredients of Jim... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73313-3 (0-679-73313-2) | January 1993 | $ 10.00

Dr. Peter S. Murphy runs a clinic to cure alcoholics. But his charges believe that the only thing that will fix them is another drink. To this bitter struggle of wills, add an orderly who doubles as a quack practitioner, a nurse who is both alluring and ingeniously sadistic, and a... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73314-0 (0-679-73314-0) | January 1993 | $ 13.00

A teenage girl is raped and murdered. A father turns his back on his son. A vicious press lord turns justice into a carnival. A terrified boy is railroaded. In the twisted world of Jim Thompson, everyone is guilty, and the worst crimes are unpunishable. Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73312-6 (0-679-73312-4) | January 1993 | $ 12.00

The place is a frontier boom town where the graft gets collected more regularly than the trash. The hero is Bugs McKenna, slow-witted, hot-tempered man with manslaughter in his past and much worse in his immediate future. The much worse begins the moment McKenna gets promoted from ex-con to hotel detective... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73315-7 (0-679-73315-9) | March 1992 | $ 15.00

For Tommy Carver, a short-tempered Okie sharecropper penned up in a sweltering cabin with a brutal father and a stepmother whose affection is anything but maternal, the question isn't when he'll explode, but who he'll take with him when he does. "My favorite crime novelist--often imitated but never duplicated."--Stephen King. Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | NON-CLASSIFIABLE | 978-0-679-73308-9 (0-679-73308-6) | January 1992 | $ 13.00

Pat Cosgrove was a convict in the state's vilest prison, and Doc Luther gave him his freedom. Cosgrove had never been loved, and Luther gave him two mistresses--one of them the beautiful Mrs. Luther. Cosgrove owed Luther his life . . . and now Luther was going to collect. Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73310-2 (0-679-73310-8) | November 1991 | $ 11.95

Is Carl Bigelow a fresh-faced college kid looking for a room, or is he a poised hit man tracking down his victim? And if Carl is really two people, what about everyone around him? Savage Night is Thompson at his best, with plot reversals and nightmarish shifts of identity. Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73311-9 (0-679-73311-6) | November 1991 | $ 13.00

The Manton looks like a respectable hotel. Dusty Rhodes looks like a selfless young man working as a bellhop. And the woman in 1004 looks like an angel. But sometimes looks can kill, as Jim Thompson demonstrates in this vision of the crime novel as gothic. Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73397-3 (0-679-73397-3) | March 1991 | $ 13.95

Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73309-6 (0-679-73309-4) | March 1991 | $ 15.00

Sometimes a man and woman love and hate each other in equal measure that they can neither stay together nor break apart. Some marriages can only end in murder and some murders only make the ties of love and hatred stronger. This book proves just that. Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73250-1 (0-679-73250-0) | October 1990 | $ 12.95

Doc McCoy knows everything there is to know about pulling off the perfect bank job. But there are some things he has forgotten--such as a partner who is not only treacherous but insane and a wife who is still an amateur. Worst of all, McCoy has forgotten that when the crime... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73248-8 (0-679-73248-9) | October 1990 | $ 12.95

Roy DIllon seems too handsome and well-mannered to be a professional con man. Lilly Dillon looks too young--and loves Roy a little too intensely--to be taken for his mother. Moira Langtry is getting too old to keep on living off the kindness of male strangers. And Carol Roberg seems too innocent... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73251-8 (0-679-73251-9) | October 1990 | $ 11.95

Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute--and about the money the old lady has stashed away--Dillon... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73249-5 (0-679-73249-7) | October 1990 | $ 13.00

As high sheriff of Potts County, Nick Corey spends most of his time eating, sleeping and avoiding trouble. If only people--especially some troublesome pimps, his foul-tempered wife, and his half-witted brother-in-law--would stop pushing him around. Because when Nick is pushed, he begins to kill . . . or to make others... Read More

Written by Jim Thompson
Trade Paperback | Vintage | Fiction - Mystery & Detective | 978-0-679-73247-1 (0-679-73247-0) | August 1990 | $ 12.95

William Collins is very handsome, very polite, and very friendly. His is also dangerous when aroused. Now Collins, a one-time boxer with a lethal "accident" in his past, has broken out of his fourth mental institution and met up with an affable con man and a highly arousing woman, whose plans... Read More