Hardboiled American Crime and Worldwide Noir Fiction discussion

I think we're in for a real treat this month. In the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the foregoing: He let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."

Wikipedia does a good job of introducing Jim Thompson, the writer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Tho..., and the 1964 book of his we're reading this month, only one of several well-regarded novels he wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop._1280.

I plan to immerse myself in this book by mid-May, but feel free to begin it as soon as you like. Please come here to write what your first impressions of the novel are as soon as you have any.

Looking forward to reading Pop. 1280.

Zain

Me too. My copy is on its way USPS. I think the edition I'm getting is the second one on our masthead.

My copy arrived and I have begun reading. Oh, man is this awesome! Not at all what I expected though. This is some of the funniest material I've ever read in any genre. It's about a guy who on a surface read doesn't seem too bright trying to keep his job as elected sheriff of Potts County, the forty-seventh biggest county in a state with forty-seven counties, population 1,280. Well, minus some by book's end.

Here is a sample of the kind of humor:

Maybe I didn’t tell you, but this Ken Lacey I was going to visit was the sheriff a couple of counties down the river. Me and him met at a peace officers’ convention one year, and we kind of cottoned to each other right away. He wasn’t only real friendly, but he was plenty smart; I knew it the minute I started talking to him. So the first chance I got, I’d asked him advice about this problem I had.
“Um-hmmm!” he’d said, after I’d explained the situation and he’d thought it over for a while. “Now, this privy sits on public property, right? It’s out in back of the courthouse?”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s exactly right, Ken.”
“But it don’t bother no one but you?”
“Right again,” I said.
“You see, the courtroom is on the downstairs rear, and it don’t have no windows in back. The windows are up on the second floor where I live.”
Ken asked me if I couldn’t get the county commissioners to tear the privy down and I said no, I couldn’t hardly do that. After all, a lot of people used it, and it might make ’em mad.
“And you can’t get ’em to clean it out?” he asked. “Maybe sweeten it up a little with a few barrels of lime?”
“Why should they?” I said. “It don’t bother no one but me. I’d probably call down trouble on myself if I ever complained about it.”
“Uh-hah!” Ken nodded. “It’d seem right selfish of you.”
“But I got to do something about it, Ken,” I said. “It ain’t just the hot-weather smell, which is plenty bad by itself, but that’s only part of it. Y’see, there’s these danged big holes in the roof that show everything that’s going on inside. Say I’ve got some visitors in, and they think, Oh, my, you must have a wonderful view out that way. So they look out, and the only view they get is of some fella doing his business.”
Ken said, “Uh-hah!” again, kind of coughing and stroking his mouth. Then, he went on to say that I really had a problem, a real problem. “I can see how it might even upset a high sheriff like you, Nick, with all the pre-occu-pations of your great office.”
“You got to help me, Ken,” I said. “I’m getting plumb frazzled out of my wits.”
“And I’m going to help you,” Ken nodded. “I ain’t never let a brother officer down yet, and I ain’t about to begin now.”
So he told me what to do, and I did it. I sneaked out to the privy late that night, and I loosened a nail here and there, and I shifted the floor boards around a bit. The next morning, I was up early, all set to spring into action when the proper time came.

The solution was every bit as funny as the problem, but if you want to find out what it was, you're gonna need to procure your own copy of this fine, funny book. In the meantime, I'm gonna keep readin' and laughin'.

There is some unsettling racism in the book. Chapter 14 in particular is hard to take. But then I remembered the novel is not set in 1964, the year it was published. It's set in the early 1900s. Racism was a fact of life then, and the author doesn't shy away from that at all. The novel, apparently, is in part historical fiction.

I've finished this wonderful book. Here is my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...