Enjoy A Hell Of A Woman Picturized By Jim Thompson Contained In Copy

is the first Jim Thompson book I've read don't know why it took so long, but it was definitely an experience, The story starts out with a fairly simple and familiar noir plot, focusing on a doorto door salesman who gets smitten for a meek, but strangely attractive young woman, and hatches a plot to steal some dough from her aunt, who's a downright deplorable old witch that pimps out her niece to everyone around town.
But eventually, it evolves into this totally bizarre and unpredictable characterdriven ride, And WHOA! WHAT AN ENDING!

I'm excited to get into his other novels! Any author that has the balls to write a line like the one below, is definitely one to get excited about:

".
. . even the puke was beautiful like everything else, " Pulp fiction at its finest,

I first knew about Jim Thompson's work from seeing some of their film adaptations, things like 'The Getaway' and 'The Grifters' though I haven't read those two novels.
Once I saw 'After Dark, My Sweet', I kept it in the back of my mind to get around to reading its source material and I eventually did read that one.


which eventually led me to reading 'The Killer Inside Me', and now 'A Hell of a Woman', These two novels, surprisingly, are actually rather different in tone 'AHOAW' is less psychotic and more of a standard, if intricate, crime novel with a somewhatpsychotic sidebar, It's a great, quick read with enough passages of genuine brilliance, along with some welcome mordant humor,

I'll keep it in mind to get around to more of his work, The crime world is not really among my favorite worlds of fiction but when it's handled with distinctive style as it is here, I'm in, Dammit, I knew it! I just reviewed the whole Jim Thompson omnibus when deep down I knew that one review of A Hell of a Woman would say just about all I need to say about Jim Thompson.
It's great! An underrated classic! From the first page you know this is Thompson at his best: the girl glimpsed through a window in a lightning storm, the hardluck shyster salesmancumdebtcollector out in the rain lusting after her, and the slangtalking firstperson POV he would make famous in The Killer Inside Me, only here put to work in the service of a story, to my mind, deeper than Killer could ever be:

All of a sudden something seemed to snap inside of my head.
It was just like I wasn't anymore, like I'd just shriveled up and disappeared, And in my place there was nothing but a deep hole, a deep black hole, with a light shining down from the top,

Whoa baby, this is Thompson firing oncylinders with no brakes and a seizedup shockabsorber, black as pitch and writing from the heart, or as close to it as his sleazy choice of genre will allow.
Better still, that genre takes him places he maybe couldn't get otherwise through some sordid, creepy acts of violence and scenes of dialogue reminiscent of Crime and Punishment in their potential doublemeanings, which play on the paranoiac narrator's nerves to the point of nearinsanity.
For once, the 'dimestore Dostoevsky' appellation does not seem misplaced, The selfjustifying and selfpity is just about pitchperfect too, as is the humblepie act, which in Killer or Pop seems too selfconscious but here is so close to the line between conscious act and delusion that the narrator himself seems unsure whether to believe it or not.
And this tightropewalk between aware and otherwise may be the essence of Thompson's genius, There's a scene around the middle of Woman in which the narrator, Frank 'Dolly' Dillon, is suddenly confronted with a 'Where did you get that money' by a character we know has been playing it coy for several pages, and even though we see it coming it's chilling, because what we can't know is just how Dolly will react, given that he's been lulling himself in a dreamworld by deliberately taking things at face value.
A repeated line throughout this: 'That's how I wanted it to be, so that's how it was, '

Of course because it's Thomspon and Thompson at his most free it's never gonna be perfect, Funny thing, in Killer he had the narrator bitch about contemporary fiction writers, about their propensity to dispense with grammar and get all experimental at the climaxes to their novels, yet this is exactly what he does here and to a lesser degree in Killer itself.
Added to that a slightly hokey storywithinthestory device in which the narrator writes and rewrites an increasingly delusional autobiography is out of place here, yet works psychologically and thanks to the rapidfire style of the whole manages not to offend.
In contrast, the slangy conversational style is brilliant as good as just about anything I've read by Thompson or anyone else for that matter some of it so hilarious that I would laugh out loud and shake my head in admiration for minutes after reading the choicest parts.
So too the sex scenes: these truly are genius, for suggesting so much with so little, for staying well out of range of the censors while managing to be both thrilling and gruesome in their import, and giving ample motivation for ol' Dolly to tie the noose evertighter round his neck in his struggle to grasp his ideal image of woman.
And when it comes down to it that's really the crux of this book, and why I think it is essential for an understanding of its author: it's about the delusions inspired by sex and romantic love it's Thompson's Vertigo and, you ask me, it's the explication of a subtext that runs through all his work, and motivates most if not all of the dirty little crimes of his protagonists.
Added to that, this is pulp, shamelessly so, and all the better for it, No pretensions to literary injoking as in Killer in which the narrator, a deep thinker and bibliophile in the guise of a peabrained yokel, seems almost like a scathing selfportrait of Thompson the literary master trapped in the body of a pulp writer nah, here it's just a streettalking overreaching everyman on the road to ruin in an unnamed hellhole in middle America, and despite his cramming an impressive array of stylistic tricks into the delivery the mask never drops we never catch Thompson drawing attention to himself.


Make no mistake, this is sordid, It's brave. It's funny. And even though the end will have you scratching your head it gets the point across, and at least suggests a satisfying hallofmirrors effect which, while a touch too 'experimental', is well within and somehow even emblematic of the pulp tradition to which it aspires.

we smoked the hay, we started sniffing the snow, . . guzzle the juice and puff the mary and sniff the c, . . we did that and then we went on the h, we started riding the main line, . . we were blind, too paralysed to feel, too numb, but everything began to get beautiful,

Jeez, it's ridiculous, but gloriously, liberatingly so, especially when you remind yourself this is, And remember, this is the guy that wrote Kubrick's Paths of Glory he's a seriously good writer in the oldfashioned sense, But something's come over him, You want feverdream This is pretty close to it,

Lonesome, he said, The man said I looked lonesome, And I had all kinds of company, All kinds. All dead. All jumping up in front of me wherever I looked, all laughing and crying and singing in my mind,

You pull a thread out of this and it'd fall apart, And there's loose threads here plenty, But you wanna hear a howl from the throat of thethcentury Proletarian pushed to breaking point by babes and booze and survivalofthefittest consumerism, you could do a lot worse.
Could be, for all its cartoonish surreal absurdity, that A Hell of a Woman is some kinda 'Great American Novel', The best kind camouflaged. Set to blow.


America, the land of opportunity,

There's reason aplenty to be optimistic if you set out on a professional career with a good education or have connections where you can land yourself a decent job or can cash in on a unique talent or most especially.
. . if you come from money,

But what if you lack education, connections, a special talent and don't have the dough to buy a decent suit Welcome to the world of A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson'shardboiled crime novel chock full of enough psychic mud to smear over each of itspages.


The tale's protagonist and narrator, Frank "Dolly" Dillon, a thirtyyearold doortodoor salesman for PayEZee Stores, epitomizes the working stiff who never caught a break in his miserable life.
Abused as a kid, kicked out of school, forced to peddle crap merchandise doortodoor so he doesn't starve to death, Dolly is one beaten down chump,

Regarding home life, hell, if you can call it that, by Dolly's account he's had to put up with a sorry string of dirty, goodfornothing, lazy tramps.
After taking the usual needling and pounding from Staples, his softspoken, oily voice, son of a bitch manager, Dolly drags himself back to his fourroom dump and Joyce wife number three or four, Dolly's lost count each evening, where he relates:

"The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes: there were soiled sticky pans all over the stove.
She'd just got through eating, it looked like, and of course she'd left the butter and everything else sitting out, So now the roaches were having themselves a meal, Those roaches really had a happy home with us, They got a hell of a lot more to eat than I did, "

So it goes, day after lousy day, but then it happens on a rainy Thursday, his final call in the doortodoor routine after he persuades an old bag to let him inside Dolly Dillon meets Mona.
Ah, Mona, "a baby girl and sweet child and I wouldn't hurt her for the world, " After a few tender exchanges, Dolly can see this swell blonde honey is just the type of dame he could really, truly love,

A Hell of a Woman is a thriller, Exactly what you don't need, dear reader, is a reviewer spoiling the hell out of your reading pleasure by giving away too much, Thus, I'll take a shuffle to overriding themes:

MUCKRAKING JIM
The publisher blurb states, "In A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson offers another arresting portrait of a deviant personality.
" However, if we scratch slightly deeper we'll detect Jim Thompson provides a scathing depiction of the underside of American capitalism, the ways in which the entire system is rigged in favor of owners and companies and against people starting out with nothing, rigged so much it twists and deforms human nature.


Deviant personality, you say Jim Thompson would have you consider if the entire system can be judged deviant, spawning the type of men and women spilling across the pages of this novel.


Jim Thompson's first two published books were noncrime, literary novels focusing on oppressive capitalism and its destructive effects on families and the environment, If those early novels proved commercially successful, we might wonder if Jim would continue as asstyle muckraker in the tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens from the Progressive Era instead of switching to hardboiled crime fiction as a way to pay the bills.


RELIABLE NARRATOR
How much of what Frank Dillon tells us is true, how much is exaggeration or complete horsecrap I think we can trust the general outline of events but when Frank repeatedly throws in such phrases as "I'd swear to it on a stack of Bibles," and "I kid you not, dear reader," and unswervingly characterizes himself as the good, decent guy deserving all he takes, even when he takes by violence, we can be fairly certain we're dealing with.
. . hum, Frank, really a narrator that's less than reliable,

CHANGE OF RHYTHM
One curious insertion into A Hell of a Woman: such chapter titles as: THROUGH THICK AND THIN: THE TRUE STORY OF A MAN'S FIGHT AGAINST

HIGH ODDS AND LOW WOMAN author's caps.
. . by Knarf Nollid.

It's as if Frank "Dolly" Dillon uses Horatio Alger rags to riches storytelling as a way of recasting his life and shielding himself from the truth of his own ongoing failures.


SILENCE
This iss America, not only the land of opportunity but the land of logorrhea where everybody is a knowitall and blabs nonstop, And this sewer of chatter is fueled by continual consumption of tobacco and liquor, Blahblahblahblahblah. The dreaded enemy: silence. Frank Dillon falls under the social spell, thinking the more he talks, both to others and to himself, the more he'll figure out the needed solutions to all his problems.


MONEY
The ultimate means and the ultimate end of life ins USA in a word: money, "If only I had stacks and stacks of greenbacks," so the thinking goes, then my life would be an unending paradise, And what if individuals can smell all that dough but lack legitimate means to make it their own Are we to be shocked when so, so many men and women turn to shady deals, robbery, murder, manipulation, exploitation and the like as a way to realizing their dreams of living in luxury on easy street

REALITY LURKING BEHIND APPEARANCES
Frank Dillon thinks he's so smart.
But like so many others before him in American society, he find out the hard way that people and things are frequently not what they seem to be, As Jim Thompson knew from his own life, capitalism sound good in theory but it has a tendency to pit husband against wife, associate against associate, industry against community, all in an ongoing battle to rake in as much of the big bucks as possible.


MADNESS
A Hell of a Woman is a hell of a novel, As events propel themselves forward, where will it all end Escape, happiness, madness, suicide Oh, Dolly, you really did it this time!


American crime novelist Jim Thompson,.