Savage night

I haven’t read Jim Thompson’s Savage Night. But I will, and very soon. The following from Blood & Treasure, in reaction to the ongoing brouhaha about the new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me.

Winterbottom is the first to film Thompson straight. The film version of The Grifterssoft pedalled heavily on the incest motif running through the book. Both versions of The Getaway cut out the ending, where the hero and heroine are forced into the realisation that they will soon be forced to eat each other – literally eat each other.

Interviewed here, Winterbottom seems to be making out that the scene was a kind of commentary on the character’s mental illness. This misses the point. If you read a lot of Thompson’s work you soon come to realize that it’s the author himself who was stone crazy. A taut stylist. An ace plotter. A fellow with real insight into low life, much of it from personal experience. All of that, and completely fucking bananas to go with it. This is an excerpt from King Blood, Thompson’s last published novel:

“‘Wish I had me a nickel for every puss I cut off,’ he went on, carefully reinscribing the circle with his knife. ‘An ol’ Indian trick, y’know, an’ us Kings are probably more Indian than white. Funny thing is the woman don’t hardly feel it – you don’t feel nothin’ do you?- till a long time afterward. That’s maybe because it’s mostly muscle, you know, an’ stretchy: got more give to it than a mile o’ cat gut. Why I seen a fella stretch a gal’s puss clean over her head, an’ then let it snap shut around her neck. Man, oh, man, what a sight to see!’ His body shook with laughter. ‘That gal was flingin’ herself around like a chicken with its head off: strangled to death by her own tokus.’”

At least Winterbottom never got hold of that. It was written towards the end of Thompson’s life, when he was immured in late period alcoholism and undergoing a more or less constant progression of cerebral seizures. Eventually, he decided to starve himself to death, and went ahead and did just that. Thus he avoided the fate of his grandfather, father, and son, who all died in psychiatric institutions.

But horrible things come shambling out in all his work. The hero of Savage Night – a terminally tubercular degenerate assassin – encounters a man who tells him a long, involved and plot-bending account of a farm he happens to own, a vagina farm, where he raises acres of vaginas. This is in the middle of an otherwise fairly conventional fifties noir thriller. And this character’s name is “Jim Thompson.”

I actually haven’t read King Blood either, but both should be on their way to my local library right now. I’m not buying the insanity argument, though I’ll reserve judgment. I’ve read the quote from King Blood before, and I’ve always seen it given as evidence that Thompson had jumped the shark in trying to up the ante on his hardboiled worldview. It also seems to me likely enough that Thompson was self-consciously satirizing said worldview — especially given what sounds like a fairly obvious put-on about Jim Thompson’s reputation in Savage Night (a notoriously lurid degenerate crime writer who’s raising a vagina farm?) — but I’ll let you know when I start reading.

I’ve given my estimation of Thompson before, and I stand by it. There’s no crime writer I’d rather read.

Update: The New York Times has an overview of Jim Thompson film adaptations.

Update II: Here’s the trailer:

Update III: The Independent has an overview/review of the film titled Pulp Friction.