Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

This work comprises a biography of modern crime novelist, Jim Thompson, whose works comprise "The Grifters" and "The Killer Inside Me". It combines extensive research with a novelistic style to present a chronicle of Thompson's private and public history. After an itinerant childhood during which his sheriff father was driven from office for embezzlement; and as a roughneck in the Texan oil fields of the 1920s, Thompson's leftist leanings were galvanized, leading to his membership of the Wobblies and the Communist Party. He became successful as a writer with the pulp fiction houses of the 1950s, writing a dozen of his more enduring novels in just 19 months.