of the greatest crime novelists of all time.
Savage Night
Jake Winroy had no looks, no education, and little else before he’d worked his way to the top of a million-dollar-a-month horse-betting ring. But when the state’s latched onto his game, the feds take a bite and the lawyer fees eat away at the rest, all Jake’s got left is the bottle and a beautiful wife whose every word is ugly.
Jake’s to be the top witness in a major case against organized crime–if he hasn’t already kicked the bucket before the trial has its day in court. But an enigmatic mafioso known only as The Man has a plan to make dead certain Jake never gets the chance to testify.
The Man’s hired Charlie “Little” Bigger, a hit man barely five feet tall, to infiltrate the Winroy residence as a tenant and murder Winroy in cold blood. To Little, it seems like the easiest job on Earth. Until he lays eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Fay and the Winroy’s young housemaid Ruth, a woman as sensual as she is vulnerable. SAVAGE NIGHT is Jim Thompson at his most unpredictable and deeply suspenseful, in a claustrophobic thriller of one man’s fractured mind.
"Beat it" I said "Godam you if you don't get out of town and stay out, I will"
"Yeah what d'you think, the Man will say about that?"
"Beat it" I said "Godam you if you don't get out of town and stay out, I will"
"Yeah what d'you think, the Man will say about that?"
"Tell him," I said" Tell him you drove down here in a circus wagon and stopped me on the street"
He wet his lips uneasily. "Nothing to get excited about"
I almost stopped feeling sorry for Winroy, when I saw it a guy who
would live in a place like that.
The Man’s hired Charlie “Little” Bigger, a hit man barely five feet tall, to infiltrate the Winroy residence as a tenant and murder Winroy in cold blood. To Little, it seems like the easiest job on Earth. Until he lays eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Fay and the Winroy’s young housemaid Ruth, a woman as sensual as she is vulnerable. SAVAGE NIGHT is Jim Thompson at his most unpredictable and deeply suspenseful, in a claustrophobic thriller of one man’s fractured mind.
A weed is a plant out of place.
I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn’t know it, but baby was dead, and in a way I couldn’t have loved her more.
There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.
style="background: 0px 0px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: pink;
Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle.
There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.
style="background: 0px 0px; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: pink;
The Killer Inside Me
Everyone in the small town of Central City, Texas loves Lou Ford. A deputy sheriff, Lou’s known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers–the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between–as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he’s the kind of officer you’re happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday.
But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen. An urge that has already claimed multiple lives, and cost Lou his brother Mike, a self-sacrificing construction worker who fell to his death on the job in what was anything but an accident. A murder that Lou is determined to avenge–and if innocent people have to die in the process, well, that’s perfectly all right with him.
In The Killer Inside Me, 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, John Wayne Gacy, 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.
