A life on the narrow edge

AT the time of his death in 1977, none of Jim Thompson's original 23 novels - 50 by his count as in print in the US. Yet second hand book stores were doing a roaring trade in dog eared copies, and over the next 10 years the upsurge in Thompson memorabilia was to generate millions of dollars.

In a long, often turgid biography Robert Polito traces the life and times of a man who never seemed to have any luck where the getting and retaining of fame and fortune were concerned. Born in 1906 in Oklahoma where his father was a sheriff, Thompson grew up in a peripatetic lifestyle, said father being missing most of the time and frequent trips back to maternal relatives being necessary in order to preserve any kind of reasonably decent home life.

Although frequently AWOL, the father was to be the dominant character in the son's life, a love hate figure to be blended into many of the books as the hero villain. He ended up in a mental home, possibly suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and one of the many stories told about him by Jim was that he killed himself by eating the stuffing from his mattress.

Left for long periods in Nebraska in the care of his grandparents on his mother's side, Jim fell under the influence - literally - of Grandfather Myers who, an alcoholic himself, taught his young grandson to drink hard liquor and thus laid the basis for a lifetime's inebriation. Thompson became a legendary drinker, going off on week long binges all through his life, and causing his family all kinds of worry because of it.

Suffering from wanderlust like his father, Jim drifted through Oklahoma and Texas, taking up many and varied jobs and finally becoming a hobo for a period. This last occupation led to his first attempts at fiction, stories of the road, riding the freight trains and mixing with the larger than life characters who had taken to that kind of existence in the Twenties.

Two events served to rescue him: he joined the Communist Party and then became involved in the Oklahoma Writers' Project. He also married Alberta Hesse and stayed married to her nearly 50 tumultuous years. Although his first efforts at fiction were realistic Dustbowl novels, it is his crime output that is mostly read nowadays.

He wrote 12 paperback originals for the Lion & Fawsett imprints over a 19 month period, among them his best known books: The Killer Inside Me, After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway and The Grifters.

The amounts he earned from them were ludicrous, and he was always hard up. Moving between New York and Hollywood, he emulated his father by leaving his family - Alberta, two daughters and a son - more often than not in the lurch. He wrote screenplays of The Killers and Paths of Glory for Stanley Kubrick, did an amount of television work, the novelisation of television series, and drank himself into befuddlement.

The last years of his life were miserable. Incapacitated by the ravages of drink and nicotine, he was in and out of hospitals, suffered a number of strokes and was a continuing prey to bleeding ulcers. In most of his brushes with Hollywood, he came off worst, but the year before he died he appeared as Judge Grayle in the film Farewell, My Lovely with Robert Mitchum, one of the best of the Chandler adaptations.

The Polito book is plodding in its minutiae of a life that was full of anger and a baffled form of despair. Thompson was obsessed with his father, spoiled by his mother, and seemed to possess an incestuous regard for his two sisters.

His books are powerful depictions of mostly psychotic people, but as their creator became more frustrated, the content degenerated into out and out sleaze, until in final volumes like King Blood and White Mother, Black Son the distastefulness became full blown pornography.