Authors: Jim Thompson
Savage Night (18 page)
The Transgressors
Recoil
The Criminal
South of Heaven
The Golden Gizmo
“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
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 © 1953 by Jim Thompson
Copyright © renewed 1981 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from
Now and On Earth
copyright © 1942 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1970 by The Estate of Jim Thompson
Author photograph by Sharon Thompson Reed
Cover design by Julianna Lee. Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute 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 [email protected]. 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
www.twitter.com/mulhollandbooks
www.facebook.com/mulhollandbooks
www.hachettebookgroup.com
First e-book edition: May 2012
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-316-19610-9