Nothing More Than Murder

  I guessed I might possibly have been a little hasty with Luane Devore.

  “Don’t let me influence you,” Rosa said. “Don’t do what you think I want you to. That way there is always trouble.”

  Books by Jim Thompson

  After Dark, My Sweet

  The Alcoholics

  Bad Boy

  The Criminal

  Cropper’s Cabin

  The Getaway

  The Golden Gizmo

  The Grifters

  Heed the Thunder

  A Hell of a Woman

  The Killer Inside Me

  The Kill-Off

  The Nothing Man

  Nothing More than Murder

  Now and on Earth

  Pop. 1280

  Recoil

  The Rip-Off

  Savage Night

  South of Heaven

  A Swell-Looking Babe

  Texas by the Tail

  The Transgressors

  Wild Town

  Acclaim for Jim Thompson

  “The best suspense writer going, bar none.”

  —New York Times

  “My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

  —Stephen King

  “If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”

  —Washington Post

  “Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”

  —New Republic

  “The master of the American groin-kick novel.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright 1949 by Jim Thompson

  Excerpt from The Kill-Off copyright © 1957 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1985 by Alberta H. Thompson

  Cover design by Julianna Lee, cover art: Getty Images. Cover copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.mulhollandbooks.com/jimthompson

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  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  First e-book edition, December 2011

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-316-19584-3