Jim Thompson - Nothing More Than Murder

In Nothing More Than Murder, Jim Thompson appears at first to be working within the familiar framework of Double Indemnity: an unhappy marriage, an affair, and a plan driven by money and insurance. Yet the novel gradually undermines that expectation. The crime ultimately gives no one anything of real value. There is no triumph, no glamorous payoff.

What truly drives the protagonist is not greed alone, but a provincial power fantasy. As the owner of a small-town movie theater, he sees himself as a local magnate, locked in petty rivalries and desperate to assert dominance. The murder becomes less a calculated financial maneuver and more an extension of his fragile need for control. Thompson strips the noir formula of its sheen and exposes the smallness beneath the ambition.

Among the writers published by Gold Medal Books, Jim Thompson remains, for me, the most compelling. Even more than David Goodis, whose work I admire but often find overwhelmingly atmospheric and steeped in a kind of relentless depression. Where Goodis immerses the reader in mood and despair, Thompson balances psychological darkness with structural control and narrative momentum. His novels feel less suffocating and more sharply observed, driven not only by emotion but by a clear understanding of character and consequence.