Death might be forestalled if he took proper care of himself. Otherwise, he had no more than three days to live.
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
—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
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 1952 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1980 by Alberta Thompson
Excerpt from The Grifters copyright © 1963 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1991 by Alberta H. Thompson
Foreword copyright © 1988 by Stephen King
Cover design by Allison J. Warner, copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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www.hachettebookgroup.com
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First e-book edition, November 2011
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-316-19602-4