Each generation gets the crime writer it deserves. Picture the handoff: The 1920s swapped monocles for brass knuckles, as Dashiell Hammett yanked the detective story out of the parlor and into the alley. The 1930s and '40s were Raymond Chandler's territory, tarnished glamour and sentences sharp enough to shave with. Then came the postwar years, when America realized winning hadn't settled the static in its head. Out of that jittery landscape stumbled a writer with with a colder glint in his eye: Jim Thompson.

For years, Thompson haunted the edges of American letters, acknowledged by critics and crime buffs but mostly neglected by readers. His novels were found on spinning racks at the bus station, printed on paper that yellowed before turning the last page. The reputation reeked of violence and sleaze. But if you wait for the smoke to clear, you might glimpse raw existentialism hiding out in the cheap seats.

Hammett and Chandler expose crooked politicians, gangsters, oil men and police departments on the take. Thompson turns the lens inward and writes about corruption inside the American self.

Early on, a few sharp-eyed critics sensed this streak. Donald Westlake, writing in 1970, calls Thompson "a poet of the damned" whose stories turned "the greasy stuff of pulp into something near philosophical despair."

Geoffrey O'Brien, in his book "Hardboiled America," praises Thompson's relentless psychological excavation, calling him "the Dostoevsky of crime fiction." Critic Sarah Weinman credits him with turning the crime novel from puzzle to nightmare. More recently, writers such as Megan Abbott have highlighted how Thompson's novels anticipated the fractured, morally ambiguous storytelling prized by contemporary fiction.

In recent years, Thompson's profile has undergone a remarkable shift. The Library of America--official keepers of the American canon--has bundled five of his wildest novels in one ribbon-marked volume: "A Hell of a Woman," "After Dark, My Sweet," "The Getaway," "The Grifters," and "Pop. 1280."

Robert Polito, Thompson's biographer, restored the original texts and included early experiments and a timeline of Thompson's long, strange slog through the American underbrush. This recognition marks a major turning point for Thompson's reputation. It's surreal.

The author whose books once sweated next to comics and True Detective magazines now settles between acid-free pages. Thompson, bard of American decay, has been invited into the mansion.

His life could have been ripped from one of his paperbacks: a string of hustles, reversals and close calls.

He was born in 1906 in Oklahoma, the son of a sheriff who later fled the state amid a scandal. The family bounced around the southwest while young Thompson took whatever work he could find: bellhop, oil-field laborer, longshoreman. He began drinking early and never stopped.

During the '30s he worked for the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Some of his reporting--including an exposé on labor........

© Arkansas Online