Savage Art : A Biography Of Jim Thompson - Robert Polito

When I finished reading this biography, I felt a sense of sadness during its final pages, as Jim Thompson struggled with illness and a series of strokes. Reading Savage Art felt like following the entire epic of one man's life and his relentless passion for writing.

I must admit that the opening chapters were a little slow for me, with their detailed account of Thompson's ancestors. However, once the book moved beyond that, I came to know not only the ultimate noir writer, but also the man behind the novels: a caring father, a devoted husband, an introvert, and, sadly, a heavy drinker.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the biography is that, by learning about Thompson, I also learned about America during his lifetime. Before becoming one of the greatest crime novelists, he worked as a true crime reporter, an oil field journalist, a bellboy—where he encountered many of the criminal types that later populated his fiction—a hobo, and many other odd jobs. His complicated love-hate relationship with his father is another compelling thread running throughout the book.

For me, the biography truly comes alive once Thompson begins writing for Lion Books. As Robert Polito explains, his finest novels can be divided into two broad groups: the first-person psychopathic narratives such as The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman, Pop. 1280, and The Nothing Man; and the omniscient, multiple-perspective novels such as The Kill-Off and Nothing More Than Murder. I also enjoyed reading about Thompson's collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the adaptation of Lionel White's Clean Break (The Killing), his frustrating experiences in Hollywood, and the sadness of seeing such an original writer receive so little recognition during his lifetime.

Fortunately, that story has a happier ending. Roughly a decade after his death, Thompson's novels began to be rediscovered. They were republished by the cult Black Lizard imprint, while French films such as Série noire and Coup de Torchon helped introduce his work to a wider audience. Thompson eventually became the celebrated noir writer he had always deserved to be.

Finally, I should mention the edition itself. Serpent's Tail has done an excellent job producing this biography. I especially liked its distinctive smell, which reminded me of the old comic books I owned as a child, as well as the generous selection of photographs that accompany the text.

Jim Thompson - The Kill-Off

As in many of Jim Thompson's novels, The Kill-Off focuses on lost and morally compromised people. The novel follows a woman who believes that her neighbors want to kill her and take her money. However, Thompson does not present his protagonist as an innocent victim. She is a gossip who constantly spreads rumors about the residents of her small town, and the reader soon realizes that some of her neighbors may indeed have reasons to dislike her. At the same time, the other townspeople are hardly portrayed as honest or admirable individuals. Thompson creates a world in which it is difficult to find anyone completely innocent, and where the line between victim and culprit becomes increasingly blurred.

Likewise, as in many of Thompson's other novels, The Kill-Off contains autobiographical elements and appears to be fueled by the author's resentment toward certain people around him. Thompson often worked through his personal frustrations and conflicts in his fiction. As Robert Polito points out in his biography Savage Art, and as Arnold Hano, Thompson's editor at Lion Books, once observed, Thompson had a tendency to work out his problems in his novels.

Ted Lewis - Get Carter

English gangster stories are well known, from modern works such as Gangs of London to Gerald Kersh's Night and the City. However, Ted Lewis's Jack's Return Home, later adapted into the film Get Carter, stands as one of the most important British gangster noir novels.

The novel features one of the most striking openings in crime fiction. Jack Carter returns to his hometown following the death of his brother Frank, and this homecoming immediately triggers a flood of childhood memories. The motif of arriving in a town is hardly new, but Lewis employs it with remarkable skill. The first-person narration feels authentic and convincing, giving the reader the sense of rediscovering the town and its inhabitants alongside Carter.

The entire novel unfolds at a slow-burn pace. Gangster violence, threats, and confrontations alternate with recollections of Carter's childhood, memories of his brother, and almost poetic observations of everyday life in northern England. The past constantly intrudes upon the present, giving the novel a melancholy quality that distinguishes it from many American hard-boiled crime novels.

Lewis also makes effective use of retardation, or the deliberate postponement of narrative resolution. The mystery surrounding Frank's murder is not revealed all at once but gradually unfolds through a series of encounters, conversations, and conflicts. Foreshadowing is present throughout, creating an atmosphere in which the reader senses from the very beginning that something dangerous lurks beneath the surface of every exchange.

Particularly impressive is the novel's depiction of English social deprivation. Industrial towns, alcohol, crime, and a pervasive sense of social decline are not merely a backdrop but an integral part of the story itself. The characters are not simple gangster-fiction stereotypes; they possess their own histories, flaws, and motivations, making them feel fully human.

Jack's Return Home is more than a story of crime and revenge. It is a novel about returning to the past, about a town that shapes its inhabitants, and about a man who, in his search for the truth behind his brother's death, sinks ever deeper into a world he once tried to escape.

James Naremore - More Than Night : Film Noir In Its Contexts

There are so many books about noir today that reading some of them can become almost tedious. Many authors try to provide a definitive definition of noir, but the more definitions one reads, the more elusive the term becomes. Is noir a mood? Is it a cycle of crime films influenced by German Expressionism and French Poetic Realism? Is it the story of a lost protagonist, a man seduced by a femme fatale? Or is noir simply a brand name, a marketable label that has come to be applied to almost everything?

This is precisely why James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts feels so refreshing. Naremore largely avoids offering a single, definitive definition of noir. Instead, he examines how the concept emerged, how it evolved, and how different generations of critics, filmmakers, and audiences have understood it.

The strongest part of the book is its first half. Here Naremore discusses the origins of noir, its artistic influences, and its key figures. Particularly fascinating are the chapters devoted to B noirs, John Alton and his classic book Painting with Light, as well as the discussions of directors such as Anthony Mann and films like T-Men and He Walked by Night. Alongside film history, Naremore also explores the literary roots of noir through the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and James M. Cain.

Naremore also pays attention to the critics and theorists who helped shape the modern understanding of noir. Among them, a special place belongs to Paul Schrader and his influential essay Notes on Film Noir, which for decades served as a starting point for many discussions of the subject. Naremore often agrees with earlier writers, but at the same time he questions their assumptions and demonstrates how difficult it is to reduce noir to a single definition or a fixed set of characteristics.

The book also examines the political context surrounding noir, especially the anti-communist witch hunts in America, as well as the later development of post-noir and neo-noir cinema. Naremore is, in my opinion, at his best when discussing the history and ideas of noir. He is less engaging when he provides detailed plot summaries or close analyses of individual scenes.

Nevertheless, despite occasional digressions, More Than Night remains one of the best books on noir that I have read. Rather than attempting to settle the debate over what noir is, Naremore demonstrates why that debate has continued for decades.

Jonathan Latimer - Headed For A Hearse

I first discovered Jonathan Latimer in Julian Symons's Bloody Murder, where one of his novels was described as unusually explicit for its time. I believe the book in question was Lady in the Morgue. This sparked my interest, and I began looking into Latimer's life and work.

Before becoming a well-known novelist, Latimer worked as a crime reporter and became acquainted with gangsters such as Al Capone and Bugs Moran. He later went on to write screenplays for classic noir films including The Glass Key, The Big Clock, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

For that reason, I decided to buy Headed for a Hearse. It turned out to be a solid crime novel that successfully combines elements of the hard-boiled tradition, the English detective story, the locked-room mystery, and screwball comedy. It may not be a forgotten classic, but it is certainly a book worth reading.

Bill Crane is an engaging and witty detective, and the plot unfolds like a ticking time bomb. A wealthy man has been convicted of murdering his wife and has only seven days left before his execution. In a desperate attempt to save his life, he hires the expensive attorney Fickenstein, setting in motion an investigation filled with twists, humor, and unusual situations.

Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls

 

Nikolai Gogol was a genius of Russian literature, perhaps best known for his unfinished masterpiece (or “poem,” as he called it) Dead Souls.

In it, he uses a technique known as ostranenie (defamiliarization) to make people and events appear strange and unfamiliar, introducing Chichikov, a man who wants to buy dead souls and trade them. This leads to absurd situations, but also occasional tragic moments.

Although the novel is dense and often moves in different directions, it contains purely poetic and philosophical passages that run through the work.

The trade in dead souls can be interpreted in several ways: as a depiction of bureaucratic hell, as a metaphysical descent into the depths of the human soul, or as an absurd social satire.

Although Gogol was respected in his time, even by the Russian emperor, some parts of the work were censored, and others were later shortened or discarded by Gogol himself. Because of this, especially in the later sections, the text feels somewhat uneven and strangely fragmented.

The Routledge Companion To Crime Fiction

This extensive study of around 400 pages in large format is intended for scholars of crime fiction, and it is often quite dry and demanding to read. It takes a transnational approach and looks more toward the future than the past, which is not necessarily my personal preference, but it is still interesting reading. This is especially true when it cites passages from other studies such as John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction, Heather Worthington’s Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, Maurizio Ascari’s A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, and Dennis Porter’s The Pursuit of Crime.

The chapter on crime fiction and graphic novels was somewhat disappointing, as I expected it to present comics such as Alack Sinner and Sam Pezzo. The chapters that suited me best were Genre, Crime Histories and Prehistories, Crime Fiction in the Marketplace, and perhaps also Plotting and Clues, maybe because they deal precisely with what a crime fiction study should focus on: criminal fiction itself.