Mulholland Classic
25 total works
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 Worth, where he supplemented his income peddling bootleg out of the package room. He shuddered out the DTs as a watchman on a West Texas oil pipeline. He outraged teachers, cheated mobsters, and almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff's deputy. And somewhere along the way, Thompson became one of the greatest crime writers America has ever known.
In this uproarious autobiographical tale, the author of After Dark, My Sweet and Pop. 1280 tells the story of his chaotic coming of age and reveals just where he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of human misbehavior. Bad Boy is a bawdy, brawling book of reprobates--and an unfettered portrait of a writer growing up in the Southwest of the Roaring Twenties.
In this uproarious autobiographical tale, the author of After Dark, My Sweet and Pop. 1280 tells the story of his chaotic coming of age and reveals just where he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of human misbehavior. Bad Boy is a bawdy, brawling book of reprobates--and an unfettered portrait of a writer growing up in the Southwest of the Roaring Twenties.
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.
Because the Baptist minister's children in a small North Carolina town have difficulty conforming to the roles their father wishes them to play for public consumption, fifteen-year-old Neal feels he must hide his consuming interest in jazz music.
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.
