Cannonball Read 13

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The Kill Off (1957) and A Swell Looking Babe (1954) – Jim Thompson

The Kill Off by Jim Thompson

A Swell Looking Babe by Jim Thompson

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A few months ago, I bought up a bunch of Jim Thompson audiobooks at a good price. This left me with way too many Jim Thompson books. I learned over the last couple that I read that they’re not all as intense and disturbing as the first of his I read The Killer Inside Me and Pop 1280, which is good. The Kill Off This is one of the longer Jim Thompson novels, which is funny because he just doesn’t write long novels, clocking at about 250 pages […]

Texas by the Tail (1965) – Jim Thompson

Texas by the Tail by Jim Thompson

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A few months ago, I bought up a bunch of Jim Thompson audiobooks at a good price. This left me with way too many Jim Thompson books. I learned over the last couple that I read that they’re not all as intense and disturbing as the first of his I read The Killer Inside Me and Pop 1280, which is good. Texas by the Tail A con man who can make the dice what he wants to do most times out of ten is working his […]

Carter “Doc” McCoy had left a morning call for six o’clock.

The Getaway by Jim Thompson

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The Getaway – 4/5 Stars If you haven’t read any Jim Thompson before, I think you should, and this might be a solid place to start. Things you generally need to know is that his books tend to be more brutal than you might expect. Plenty of thriller and suspense books don’t “pull punches” but rather than simply not pulling punches, his books follow through on the punches, so there’s often a slight extra layer of brutality worked in. They feel quite a bit more […]

A Writer’s Life

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito

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So it turns out that the story of Jim Thompson’s life reads much like a Jim Thompson tale. And like many Jim Thompson tales, it’s really good and sadly tragic. I don’t know how a person can do better at connecting an artist’s life to his work the way Robert Polito does. In covering the events that formed Jim Thompson, Polito brings up ramblings and characters from Thompson’s body of work that obviously influenced the man. Jim Thompson’s one of my all-time favorite writers so […]

Devil’s Night

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus

The Crow by James O'Barr

The Transgressors by Jim Thompson

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Happy Halloween! Preceding this Devil’s Night, I had a full day off and caught up on a lot of reading. It was a relief to get these three off the TBR list. All were good in their own respective ways. Blood Sugar 3 stars “A” for effort on the language, which is written in the slang of what Daniel Kraus thinks is a modern day teenager. I found it too distracting. But much like Nico Walker’s Cherry, when I was able to get used to it, […]



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