Jim Thompson

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  • Bibliography:
    43 Books
  • First Book:
    January 1952
  • Latest Book:
    January 2023
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Book List in Order: 43 titles

  • Cropper's Cabin

    Tommy Carver may be every inch the angry, rebellious young man his teachers and parents accuse him of being. But sometimes, there are reasons for a fury like Tommy's. Tommy's relationship with Donna, the daughter of a man he hates almost as much as...

  • The Killer Inside Me

    Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas.  The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring.  But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put ...

  • The Alcoholics

    Dr. Peter S. Murphy needs fifteen thousand dollars by the end of the day, or the city of Los Angeles can say goodbye to the El Healtho clinic. A recovery center for the most severe cases of alcoholism in the state -- even if no one ever does quite se...

  • The Criminal

    Everyone in Kenton Hills knows that short-tempered, tongue-tied Bob Talbert wasn't the one responsible for the brutal crime that ended Josie Eddleman's life. Nevermind that he was the last one to see her alive. But in a town filled with the likes o...

  • The Kill-Off

    Luane Devore's days are numbered. All her neighbors in the declining seaside resort town of Manduwoc want her dead. Some, like her young husband Ralph and his girlfriend Danny, want the thousands of dollars she keeps hidden under the mattress she spe...

  • The Getaway

    The basis for the film by Sam Peckinpah, The Getaway is a Dantesque tour of the American underworld, a place where no motive is pure, no stranger is innocent, and no tie is too sacred to be betrayed in a nightmarish split second....

  • Forever After

    The life insurance money -- wasn't that reason enough for Ardis Clinton to kill her husband? That and his annoying neglect of his loving. But Ardis has the plan -- with her dimwitted boyfriend and a meat cleaver she'll be on easy street. But sometime...

  • The Grifters

    Jim Thompson's classic The Grifters is one of the best novels ever written about the art of the con, an ingeniously crafted story of deception and betrayal that was the basis for the critically acclaimed film by Stephen Frears and Martin Scorces...

  • Pop. 1280

    Nick Corey is a terrible sheriff on purpose. He doesn't solve problems, enforce rules or arrest criminals. He knows that nobody in tiny Potts County actually wants to follow the law and he is perfectly content lazing about, eating five meals a day, a...



  • Hardcore

  • More Hardcore

  • Fireworks

  • Child of Rage

    Child of Rage is one of Jim Thompson's most bitter and sexually explicit novels. Includes an interview with Thompson's paperback publisher, two color photographs by Harry O. Morris, photographs of Thompson, and a bonus novella by Thompson, this is...

  • After Dark, My Sweet

    A classic crime novel about a kidnapping scheme gone wrong from Jim Thompson's, America's "Dimestore Dostoevsky." William "Kid" Collins was once a respected boxer. Now he's a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution.One ...

  • A Hell of a Woman

    Frank "Dolly" Dillon has a job he hates, working sales and collections for Pay-E-Zee Stores, a wife named Joyce he can't stand, and an account balance that barely allows him to pay the bills each month. Working door-to-door one day, trying to eke mon...

  • Nothing More Than Murder

    Joe Wilmot can't stand his wife Elizabeth. But he sure loves her movie theater. It's a modest establishment in a beat-down town--but Joe has the run of the place, and inside its walls, he's king. Without the theater, he'd be sunk. Without his leaders...

  • 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, a...

  • A Swell-Looking Babe

    It was supposed to be only a temporary job -- something to pay the bills until Dusty could get his feet back on the ground and raise enough money for medical school. After all, there's nothing wrong with being a bellboy at a respectable hotel like th...

  • Recoil

    Patrick Cosgrove used to think he'd do anything not to be a prisoner of Sandstone State Reformatory. Fifteen years on the inside for a victimless crime, under the care of a warden whose penchant for violence is legendary -- surely nothing could be wo...



  • Wild Town

    In trouble more often than not, guilty of assault, manslaughter, and honorably discharged from the military by the skin of his teeth, David "Bugs" McKenna can't seem to help doing the right thing at the wrong time--or the wrong thing, every chance he...

  • King Blood

  • Heed the Thunder

    In the rural town of Verdon, Nebraska, in the early days of the 20th century, you can't go ten feet without running into one of the Fargos. So, Grant Fargo argues to his grandfather Lincoln, it's perfectly all right that he's desperately in love with...

  • Now and on Earth

    San Diego in the years before World War II. James Dillon is barely scraping by working a menial job in manufacturing, trying to raise a family and support his elderly mother and sister Frankie at the same time. He drinks too hard -- just like his fat...

  • The Transgressors

    Deputy sheriff Tom Lord knows by now that far-west Texas is the place he'll always call home. He's spent too much time in the region's small towns to adapt to another place. And that's all right with him. What's not all right is being a deputy sherif...

  • South of Heaven

    Orphaned by a tragic accident at sixteen, Tommy Burwell's been scraping out a meager existence working dead-end jobs for years. When he and fellow nomad Four Trey Whitey get jobs working with dynamite, making way for a new pipeline across the deserte...

  • Texas by the Tail

    To everyone he's every played dice with, Mitch Corley seems like the luckiest guy around. But in truth, Corley's fast hands are the only gift fate's ever given him. He's never held down a steady job, and when it comes to women, his luck might just be...

  • Bad Boy

    From the beginning, Jim Thompson knew he was going to catch hell no matter what he did. And during a childhood spent at the mercy of a father whose schemes put him on the wrong side of the law as often as the right, and a grandfather who knew the bad...

  • The Nothing Man

    War changed Clinton Brown. Permanently disfigured by a tragic military accident, he's struggling to find satisfaction from life as a rewrite man for Pacific City's Courier. Shame has led him to isolate himself from closest friends and even his estran...

  • The Golden Gizmo

    "Gizmo" is the GI term for the unidentifiable -- and that's the way that Toddy Kent has begun to think of the reasons behind the rapid swing of his days. Somehow, Kent seems always to find himself regularly confronted with The Big Break every man wou...



  • Roughneck

    By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighte...

  • Rip-Off

    Britton Rainstar never knew he could love a woman as deeply as he does Manuela Aloe and be so terrified of her at the same time. It's not just that he thinks she's out of his league. It's more that the longer he stays with her, the closer to death he...

  • JUST SAY THANK YOU

  • About a Girl

    “About a Girl” Tom and his friends get together for a night out on the town after a days work. The guys have a routine that they follow and all end up meeting at a local bar called “Tail Feathers”. Once they meet there for...

  • The Moon and Me

  • Undiscovered

  • Bellboy: Blood From A Turnip

    PERIL PRESS presents: Mercury Mystery Book Magazine, February 1956 BELLBOY by Jim Thompson Oilfield roustabout, theatrical promoter, hotel-worker, editor and newspaperman -- these are a few of the things that have occupied first-rank mystery writer,...

  • Sharecropper Hell

    Nineteen-year-old Tommy Carver desperately wants to make something of himself, but he's got some mighty tall odds stacked against him -- a brutal sharecropper father, a secret love affair with his wealthy landowner's daughter, a step-mother devoid of...

  • Murder at the Bijou

    Murder at the Bijou (originally titled Nothing More Than Murder) is noir master Jim Thompson's dizzying tale of deception, adultery, revenge, arson, and cold-blooded murder in Smalltown, U.S.A., Thompson's favorite setting. In this novel, Thompson's...

  • The Osage Mill

    Kerry Dean is tapped to turn around a pulp and paper mill that is on the ropes. Corporate management is desperate. Kerry takes the assignment, but no one knows how dire matters really are until he shows up on and...



  • Barf is a dog

    Barf is a dog, but Barf is not so bright. Barf often gets into the craziest situations. Join him, the man with the big hat, and the little boy in yellow for adventure and danger in this laugh-out-loud book. You will love Barf is a dog and all his zan...

  • In big Trouble

    Meet Maxy Quinn the world's unluckiest kid, whose life has been turned upside down ever since he found a reverse four-leaf clover that gave him the worst luck ever. Could you imagine dealing with your principal living next door, a psychic lizard, or ...

  • M?rdaren i mig

  • Pulp Rats

    An update on the original 2019 edition. Jim Thompson is back, interpreting for Fos the Rat as he further relates the malevolent tales of the Big Things as reported at the annual pulp and paper mill rat conventions. And, as usual, the Rats are appalle...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Jim Thompson has published 43 books.

Jim Thompson does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Pulp Rats, was published in January 2023.

The first book by Jim Thompson, Cropper's Cabin, was published in January 1952.

No. Jim Thompson does not write books in series.
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