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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote

Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov (Robot/Empire/Foundation) | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse

Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson

DID NOT FINISH. I recently had the chance to download all 29 novels written by Jim Thompson, originally spurred by learning that surrealist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos' next movie is going to be an adaptation of Thompson's late-career noir classic Pop. 1280, but also because I've been a fan of various other Thompson novels that have now been turned into movies, including After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway, The Grifters, and Michael Winterbottom's unforgettable adaptation of The Killer Inside Me. But I've been warned several times already that Thompson's oeuvre is the very definition of hit-and-miss; and indeed, after starting with his very first book, 1942's Now and On Earth, I found it so unsatisfying that I decided to just abandon it altogether and move on quickly to the next.

It's important to remember that Thompson started his career wanting to be a "serious" writer, prompted by his time in the New Deal's Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression, the home of virtually all the famous far-left social-realist political authors that were to come out of that period; and so for his first novel, he wrote a semi-autobiographical tale about down-and-out blue-collar workers that's very much in the vein of Richard Wright, Nelson Algren and John Steinbeck, and by "in the same vein" I mean a plot that can only be described as, "Everything is miserable and then it all gets even more miserable, fuck you Herbert Hoover." (Indeed, it's worth noting that this book was published just a year after Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, with Thompson clearly taking most of his cues here off that hugely influential progressive tale.)

The interesting thing about this novel is how much more gleeful Thompson is here than most of his 1930s Communist-flirting social-realist buddies to throw his reader into the absolute deepest part of the pit of filth and shit where the characters from most of these kinds of stories live; while authors like Wright and Algren had already learned by this point to lace their doom-and-gloom stories with moments of levity and poetic beauty, the very thing that allowed them to keep working in this vein well into the '50s, Thompson doesn't even get ten pages before relating a story about a mother having to pick bits of broken glass out of her baby's malted milk powder before feeding her, then being so flustered by the experience that she accidentally gives her two other kids a nearly fatal overdose of pharmacy-grade opium.

It's easy in anecdotes like these to see how Thompson ended up being such a master of the outrageous noir by this point two decades later; but it's also easy to see why he crashed and burned so badly in his attempt to be a serious social-realist writer along the lines of Steinbeck, which is what forced him into the world of low-class but reliably paying dime-store novels in the first place. I'm glad I got to take on this first novel and understand all this context about the later, more famous books by Thompson I'll eventually be reading; but now that I've done it and shared the experience here, rest assured that you no longer have to do so yourself. For now, onward and upward to 1946's Heed the Thunder, which according to Wikipedia is a transitional novel where Thompson was still toeing the progressive social-realist line, but this time sets his story among a Jesse-James-like gang of low-class criminals in Great Depression Nebraska. Keep an eye out for my review of that next month.

Jim Thompson books now reviewed: Pop. 1280