728 The American Century: Literature since 1945pursuit of vigilante justice in a series of novels whose titles suggest their tone and
tenor: My Gun is Quick (1950), Vengeance Is Mine (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1952).
The unrestrained violence, which approaches sadism at times, and overt sexuality
register a loosening up of popular attitudes and tastes after the war. The right-wing
politics and the paranoia about “reds” in particular reflects the Cold War atmosphere
in which the books were written. Altogether, there may be doubts about the value of
the Hammer novels, with their fantasies of irresistible male potency (women are
constantly ripping off their clothes in the presence of the great detective), but there
can be no doubt about their impact and influence.
Jim Thompson is a much darker and more impressive writer than Spillane,
although he also shows a taste for psychopathic violence. His noir fiction contains
few detectives. What it has in abundance, however, is unreliable narrators and
protagonists whose mental state constantly verges on and often topples over into
psychosis. The condition they inhabit is measured by the scatological mathematics
of Thompson’s 1959 novel, South of Heaven: “shit and three are nine ... screw and
two is four and frig makes ten.” Typical is the narrator of The Killer Inside Me (1952),
Deputy Lou Ford. Ford pretends to be a simple-minded hick, when in fact he is a
ruthless, sadistic killer, responsible for the murders he is supposed to be investigating.
The world this smiling villain inhabits is a bleak one, where human nature festers,
corrupts, and disrupts. The narration is sly, fooling the reader much of the time as
well as the other characters. And the narrative tone, darkening the brutal, gaudy
landscapes the deputy negotiates, is cold, comic, and caustic, exposing what looks
like an almost universal hypocrisy. Nick Corey, the narrator of Pop. 1280 (1964) is a
twin to Ford: another polite, even amusing law officer who happens to be murderously
corrupt. Typically for Thompson, the story Corey tells bypasses the tenets of good
taste, with monstrosities of action and narration that serve as a harsh abrasive,
a corrective to all our assumptions about human dignity. “You might think it wasn’t
real nice to kick a dying man,” Corey says to the reader, after he has done just that.
“Maybe it wasn’t. But I’d been wanting to kick him for a long time; and it just never
seemed safe until now.” In other novels, Thompson introduces us to con artists
(The Grifters (1963)), lowlife criminals (The Getaway (1959)), and people cracking
up in a figurative prison of tough talk, “lowdown” behavior, and smalltown scheming
(After Dark, My Sweet (1955)). The family offers no refuge here; it is riven with
incestuous desires and violence. In King Blood (1954), for instance, the protagonist
is aroused in the act of beating his mother. People are on their own in a world of
“sickness,” trying to cope while maybe knowing that, as Lou Ford puts it, “all of us
started the game with a crooked cue.” The task of coping is inevitably a hopeless one.
Nowhere is this more evident than in two of Thompson’s most troubling fictions,
A Hell of a Woman (1984) and Savage Night (1953). So, the narrator of A Hell of a
Woman copes in the end by going insane. The “I” of the story splits into two voices:
“I laughed and laughed when I read that story. I felt safe. from what? not the thing
I needed to be safe from.” The narrator then throws himself out the window.
And Savage Night has an equally chilling finale. The narrator this time is a diminutive
hit man, Charlie “Little” Bigger. Holed up in an isolated house with a woman sentGGray_c05.indd 728ray_c 05 .indd 728 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM