I've heard the name Jim Thompson over the years, most associated with one of my favorite movies, "The Grifters", but never read anything by him. Fortunately a local thrift store had a bunch of different trade paperbacks by Thompson and they were free. I started with "pop. 1280" and what a surprise, definitely noir, in my opinion, with somewhat of a strange, but satisfyingly ending. I look forward to reading more of his novels. ( )

A small town sheriff in Arkansas goes to a lot of trouble to maintain his leisurely lifestyle.

This is an extremely dark book. Much darker than you'd assume from the description on the cover, and it only gets darker the more you think about it. The view of the world represented here is bleak. The book deploys the violence and sex typical of its pulpy roots, but it's not a guilty pleasure here, or even a titillation. It's more like a condemnation of everything: the reader, the author, the genre, the world. Dang. ( )

Wow! That was one great piece of writing.
( )

3.5. this would have been 4 stars, just 'cause of the talent it took to twist and turn this story. But I disliked the characters so much, and everything they stood for: white trash, small minds, racism, bigotry, and everybody screwing everyone else, figuratively and literally.

It starts out being about a lazy, do-nothing sheriff in a tiny town in Texas, early in the 20th century. He seems like an innocent person, all guile, but as the story goes on there's little glimpses of another character hiding behind the one that's been shown so far. For example, he'll come out with this learned phrase, but then he'll just drop it when the person says what? and then he'll do really mean things like kill somebody and then he gets away with it so what I'm wondering is, is he supposed to be the devil? because in another part he talks about how the rich people can get away with breaking all kinds of laws and murdering and the law always lets them get away with it so he figures it's his job to go after the little people when they break the law. So it's really hard to figure what the author meant by this story.

It was enjoyable. Here's some quotes:
P.145
I start feeling sorry for people, like Rose, for example, or even Myra or Uncle John or, well, lots of folks, and the way it eventually works out is it'd be a lot better if I hadn't felt sorry for them. Better for them, I mean. And I guess that's natural enough, you know? Because when you're sorry for someone, you want to help them, and when it sinks in on you that you can't, that there's too God-dang many of them, that everywhere you look there's someone, millions of someones coming and you're only one man and no one else cares an' an'....

P.210:
and suddenly The emptiness was filled with sound inside, with all the sudden terrible things that the emptiness had brought the People to. There were the helpless little girls, crying when they're own Daddy's crawled into bed with them. There were the men beating their wives, the women screaming for Mercy. There were the kids wetting the beds from fear and nervousness, and their mothers dosing them with red pepper for punishment. There were the Haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy. There was the near starvation, the never bein' full, the debts that always outrun the credits. There was the how-we-going-to-eat, how-we-going-to-sleep, how-we-going-to-cover-our-poor-bare-asses thinking. The kind of thinking that when you ain't doing nothing else but that, why you're better off dead.because that's the emptiness thinking and you're already dead inside, and all you'll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weeping and wailing, the torture the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.

I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our creator to create such downright hideous things in the world so that something like murder didn't seem at all bad by comparison. Yea, verily, it was indeed merciful and wonderful of him. ( )

This was one of the strangest books I've read in a long time. I have no idea how to review it and what to say about it. It's kind of funny, crazy, strange, and doesn't have much of a plot, just some things happen and then it ends. Some people seem to have liked it a lot. I can't really say that I did, but I won't say that I didn't, either. ( )