Jim Thompson

William "Kid" Collins was once a respected boxer. Now he's a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution. One afternoon he meets Fay, a beautiful young widow. She is smart and decent--at least when she's sober. Soon Collins finds himself involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes drastically wrong almost before it even begins. Because the kid they've picked up isn't like other kids: he's diabetic and without insulin, he'll die. Not...

Doc McCoy knows everything there is to know about pulling off the perfect bank job. But there are some things he has forgotten--such as a partner who is not only treacherous but insane and a wife who is still an amateur. Worst of all, McCoy has forgotten that when the crime is big and bloody enough, there is no such thing as a clean getaway.

This adventurous volume, with its companion devoted to the 1930s and 40s, presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt,...

In The Killer Inside Me, America's "Dimestore Dostoevsky" Jim Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time.
Everyone in the small town...

During WWI, a French battalion is ordered on a suicide mission that is likely to fail. When it does, the general that planned the mission selects three soldiers from the battalion to be executed for cowardice, and selects their leader as their attorney.

Lily works for a bookie, placing bets to change the odds at the track. When her son Roy is hospitalized after an unsuccessful con job that leads to a beating, she finds that even an absentee parent has feelings for her child. Lilly doesn't warm to Roy's girlfriend Myra Langtry, and soon the two women compete for Roy in a battle that quickly turns dangerous.

A sheriff is on the case to solve a string of murders in his small town, knowing that he is the killer.

Jack Mosley is a burnt-out detective who is assigned the unenviable task of transporting a fast-talking convict from jail, 16 blocks to the 100 Centre Street courthouse. However, as the two head off, Mosley learns that the man is supposed to testify against Mosley's colleagues, and the entire NYPD want the witness dead. Mosley must choose between loyalty to his colleagues and protecting the witness.