Mulholland Classic Series

Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and boring but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his 'sickness'. It nearly got him put away when he was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that. But now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to surface again and the consequences are brutal and devastating. Tense and suspenseful, The Killer Inside Me is a brilliantly sustained masterpiece of the roman noir.

The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 August 1985

Roy Dillon is young, good-looking and devastatingly charming. He's also a completely amoral con man. Lily, his mother, works for the mob. Moira Langtry, Roy's mistress, is always looking for the main chance, and so is Carol Roberg, the nurse brought in to look after Roy when a bad choice of mark means he has an unfortunate encounter with a baseball bat and a bad case of internal bleeding. Together they make up a perverse quadrangle of love and greed in a coruscating novel of corruption.

After Dark, My Sweet

by Jim Thompson

Published November 1986

Bill Collins is young, good looking, agile and strong but he's a drifter with mild multiple neuroses, in and out of institutions, and dangerously violent on occasion. When he gets involved with the hard-drinking Fay Anderson and the deceptively pleasant ex-police officer everyone knows as Uncle Bud in a ruthless kidnap plot, everything goes to hell in a hurry, and the end, for Bill, is inevitable and shattering. This is a tour de force of paranoia and violence from the master of the crime noir novel.

Nothing More Than Murder

by Jim Thompson

Published 6 August 1985

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.

A Swell-Looking Babe

by Jim Thompson

Published November 1986

The Manson looked like a respectable hotel; Dusty Rhodes looked like a selfless young man working as a bellhop; and the woman on the tenth floor who arrived on the midnight train looked like a slumming angel. But appearances can be deceptive - deceptive enough to lead to robbery, treachery and murder ...

A Hell of a Woman

by Jim Thompson

Published December 1984

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 found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.

Savage Night

by Jim Thompson

Published January 1986

Charlie Biggers comes to Pearsdale, Long Island, under the name Carl Bigelow, to stay at Jake Winroy's boarding house. Jake is recently out of jail, about to testify against some organized crime figures. In this story of shifting identity and organized crime, Jim Thompson takes the term "plot twist" to a new level.

The Rip-Off

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 March 1989

The Getaway

by Jim Thompson

Published 11 September 1972

He was 41 years old and as down-home polite as any man you'd want to meet. boyish grin, easy manners. Nice guy for a bank robber. In fact, there was hardly a person alive who didn't fall for Doc McCoy's charm. the ones who saw through him died hard and fast. Funny thing about Doc, his conscience was his gun.

Texas by the Tail

by Jim Thompson

Published October 1990

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 the dice. The only problem is that Texans are sore losers--and they have cruel and ingenious ways of getting back at anyone who cheats them.

Recoil

by Jim Thompson

Published 6 August 1985

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.

South of Heaven

by Jim Thompson

Published 4 October 1994

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 doing, even though he wasn't smart enough to know better. Even though "South of Heaven" is another term for hell.

Combining a tale of escalating savagery with a dead-eyed group portrait of men at the edge, Jim Thompson has produced a masterpiece of the American dissolute.

Now and on Earth

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 February 1994

The Alcoholics

by Jim Thompson

Published February 1987

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 misplaced patient whose main problem is his lack of a frontal lobe, and the result is one of Jim Thompson's most harrowingly funny yet deeply sympathetic novels.

The Kill-Off

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 November 1987

The Golden Gizmo

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 February 1989

Toddy Kent was born with a talent for finding easy money, but Toddy's gift has the habit of deserting him when he needs it most. When he discovers a seemingly limitless ( and illicit) source of pure gold, Toddy's wife suddenly is murdered and he himself is on the run from a sinister man with no chin and a singing Doberman.

Wild Town

by Jim Thompson

Published November 1986

Roughneck

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 January 1989

The Nothing Man

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 January 1988

Clinton Brown is smart, good-looking, and the best rewrite man on the Pacific City Courier. The wife he divorced is still in love with him, as is the alluring and well-heeled widow who will do anything to make him happy. But Brown is missing something, and without that one thing there's no possibility of happiness--no possibility of anything but knocking back the booze and punishing anyone foolish enough to try to take away his loneliness. What Clinton Brown lacks may be enough to make him murder.

Heed the Thunder

by Jim Thompson

Published 1 January 1991

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 Pearl has just signed the family property over to the Almighty.

In the literature of the American prairie, few families are as brawling, as benighted, or as outrageously vital as the Fargos of Verdon, Nebraska. And when Jim Thompson chronicles their life and times, the result suggest Willa Cather steeped in rotguut--and armed with a .45.