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In the 12 days since my new novel Grave Digger Blues went on sale, I ve been thinking more about pulp fiction. Sometimes wherever I am this genre seems to reach out and grab me, like some random demons in waiting. Certainly I ve some experiences of my own that were right out of a pulp fiction nightmare. I ve written about them, and will probably write about them again. At other times, writing from the noir state of mind just helps me put things in perspective, in the same way that writing a blues song helps me communicate.
A band called the Tin Can  44s contacted me and asked me if I could share some more scans of my vintage paperback novels to help them in their development westin hotel boston of artwork for an upcoming release. and I ve been doing some research that required westin hotel boston digging through my book collection and files (but nothing new about that), so I fired up the scanner and flipped through some files and found this piece I wrote about Jim Thompson published westin hotel boston by Texas Monthly in November 1999. The idea for the story came to me all at once. Novelist Jim Thompson, widely acknowledged as the King of Noir, lived in Texas for many years, and many of the rough and tumble experiences, including his stint as a teenage bell hop in Fort Worth during the Roaring Twenties and his work and fucking off in the oil fields of West Texas, became fodder for many of his classic pulp fiction novels. westin hotel boston And here s Texas, a state that s always westin hotel boston bragging about the great, famous people who are from here, yet this fact was rarely acknowledged and even more rarely as in never celebrated.
So here s that story, in its entirety, as published in Texas Monthly, with my own scans of my copies of the novels which I loaned the magazine for their illustrations back in 1999. (Oddly enough, there did not seem to be any hardboiled westin hotel boston crime collectors in the offices of Texas Monthly at the time.)
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When Jim Thompson died in Los Angeles in 1977, his career was almost as dead as he was. Not one of his more than two dozen books was in print. His last important screen credit westin hotel boston had been for Stanley Kubrick s Paths of Glory , twenty years earlier. But during the past decade and a half, Thompson has blazed a comeback trail from oblivion to mainstream popularity and recognition as a  unique voice in American literature. Almost all of his novels are back in print, including the ultimate noir novel, The Killer westin hotel boston Inside Me , one of the scariest ever written. Even Stephen King thinks westin hotel boston so.
Generations of filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Quentin Tarantino , have admired his work. Among his eight books that have been made into movies, the best known are  probably The Getaway , filmed in 1972, and The Grifters , which was nominated for four Academy awards, including best adapted screenplay, in 1990. Too bad Jim Thompson isn t around today to enjoy his amazing comeback. In a perfect world he d be the star  attraction at this month s Texas Book Festival. At least half of Thompson s books are set in Texas, and all of them are informed by his experiences here during his teens and twenties, between 1919 and 1935—times that were quite likely the worst of his life.
He was born James Myers Thompson in 1906 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where his father, James Sherman Thompson, was the county sheriff. The following westin hotel boston year, his father fled to Mexico and parts unknown for two and a half years after being implicated in a murky scandal involving financial improprieties. The family moved around westin hotel boston Oklahoma and Nebraska for years before relocating to Fort Worth in 1919. For the next four years the senior westin hotel boston Thompson dabbled in numerous westin hotel boston schemes and ventures, including drilling  wildcat oil wells in West Texas, but by 1923 the family  was destitute. westin hotel boston His son chronicled this chapter of his life in his first book, Now and on Earth: Pop went broke and his was the irremediable brokeness of a man past fifty who has never worked for other people.
westin hotel boston Things westin hotel boston were booming in Texas, however, and sixteen-year-old Jim Thompson was able to get a job working nights as a bellhop at Fort Worth s Hotel Texas, at 815 Main Street. Rubbing up against and running errands for gamblers, gangsters, con artists, westin hotel boston rich oilmen, and lonely females in a big-city hotel gave Thompson plenty of  material for his future novels. One example is the swindle westin hotel boston known as the twenties that figures in The Grifters ; Roy Dillon (played by John Cusack in the film) uses sleight of hand to get $20 of change for a $1 bill. Thompson learned that trick and a slew of others at the Hotel Texas, a thinly disguised version westin hotel boston of which is featured in numerous Thompson novels and is the focal point of all action in his hotel novels, like Wild Town and A Swell-Looking Babe.
Thompson also befriended notorious bank robber and gangster Airplane Red Brown, who made a big impression on him. Brown would serve as the inspiration for the protagonist or a major character in many of Thompson s novels, including Airplane Red Cosgrove in Recoil, Allie Ivers in Bad Boy and Roughneck , and professional thief Doc McCoy in The Getaway .
During the wild and woolly oil boom and Prohibition years, bellhops at places like the Hotel Texas didn t just carry luggage westin hotel boston for the guests; they also procured bootleg booze (Thompson used to carry a couple of extra half-pints in his socks), hookers, and drugs. A bellboy who was killed while scoring drugs for a guest is at the center of the short story The Car in the Mexican Quarter, one of Thompson s few private-eye stories: The Lansing is one of the biggest hotels in town, but I knew that it stood for a lot of dirty work from its employees. One suicide a year is plenty for a big hotel and the Lansing had one almost every month.
Things have changed in Fort Worth since Thompson lived there. westin hotel boston The Hotel Texas is now the Radisson Plaza, and the wildest thing that went on while I stayed there recently was a convention of Seventh Day Adventists. The fifteen-story luxury hotel was completed in 1922, and despite having been extensively remodeled inside, it still exudes a sense of grandeur and history. President John F. Kennedy spent his last night there, in room 850.
To be fair, the Hotel Texas never had a lock on decadent behavior in downtown Fort Worth. It was located in a part of town known as Hell s Half Acre—a concentration of brothels, saloons, gambling halls, westin hotel boston and like enterprises that had catered to cowboys and cattlemen back when Fort Worth was a major stopover on the Chisholm Trail.
Thompson s father used to regale him with stories about the infamous lawmen and outlaws he d known, many of whom spent time sampling the delights of places like Two Minnies, where customers in the downstairs bar could view the naked prostitutes prancing about upstairs through the glass ceiling. Two Minnies was long gone, but there were still plenty of holdovers from the days of Hell s Half Acre when Jim Thompson walked these redbrick streets. In his autobiographical novel Bad Boy , Thompson westin hotel boston recounts a day he spent with his Grandfather Myers in downtown pool halls, arcades, and burlesque houses:
Great story material, but working seven nights a week while attending Polytechnic High School devastated Thompson s health. Whiskey, cocaine, and three packs of cigarettes a day kept him going. After two years of this hellish routine, he suffered a total physical and mental breakdown at the age of eighteen.
In more than a few Thompson novels the protagonist s spiral of doom and dissolution westin hotel boston is propelled by an Oedipal streak a mile wide. It doesn t take a degree in psychology to guess that Thompson wrote to get back at his father for his various failings, not to mention the torturous routine he himself had to endure to support his family. He created numerous wicked caricatures of his father. Both The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 are narrated by a slow-talking, joke-spinning West Texas deputy sheriff who is actually a serial murderer.
A bleak, menacing backdrop is a staple of noir fiction, but Thompson westin hotel boston s portrayals of Texas and Texans are so bleak and bitter that they veer into the category of surreal cartoons. As he explains in Bad Boy:
. . . Texans were distasteful—or so I soon convinced myself. I studied their mannerisms and mores, and in my twisted outlook they became Mongoloid monsters. I saw all their bad and no offsetting good.
Interestingly, as Thompson s narratives move westward, his tone mellows considerably. In Texas by the Tail, written in the mid-sixties, his con man narrator westin hotel boston berates Houston for, among other things, its weather and its racial politics. He definitely favors Fort Worth over Dallas:
Neighboring Dallas started an evil rumor about its rival. westin hotel boston Fort Worth was so rustic, the libel ran, that panthers prowled the streets at high noon. Fort Worth promptly dubbed itself the Panther City, and declared the lie was gospel truth.
Certainly, there were panthers in the streets. Kiddies had to have somethin to play with, didn t they? Aside from that, the cats performed a highly necessary westin hotel boston service. Every morning they were herded down to the east-flowing Trinity River, there to drain their bladders into the stream which provided Dallas water supply.
Thompson s own sympathies ran along similar geographic lines. In 1926, after recuperating from his first stint as a bellhop, he hitchhiked to West Texas on a strange pilgrimage that took him to the very same oil fields and towns where his father had gambled away his family westin hotel boston s future. He spent the next two years laboring at backbreaki