Jim Thompson: The Grifters (Orion Crime Fiction-Paperback)

I remember seeing the movie as a wee lad in Jamaica, back when Anjelica Huston looked more human and less like a bad CGI animation from a Harry Potter movie. Annette Bening was hot too, which she still is, only in a different way, and John Cusack was perfectly cast as Roy Dillon, even if he was never, in my opinion, anyway, handsome. Roy Dillon, was supposed to be, among other things, abnormally good-looking.

So here I am thirty-one years old, pseudo-Jamaican, living in Charleston, SC, and I'm reading Thompson's ultra-simple prose and wondering why I like this book since it seems to have no literary merit. I'm also reading Robert Alain Grille's Repitition which I find tedious and trivial and pretentious. Maybe Thompson is ruining me the way Faulkner ruined me for a time. The edginess, the casual seaminess, the easy amorality, is so very easy to identify with. Maybe this is how I will start writing now. Maybe my characters will have only basic internal monologues, be completely without compassion or shame.

I've spent alot of time looking in real-world bookstores for Mr Thompson's books (I don't usually buy online unless it's something I can't find in a store where I can actually touch and open the book). They have been hard to find and I have no idea why.





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Lucky Number Slevin




The good things about this movie:
The dialogue with its would-be David Mamet coolness that only sometimes succeeds, Lucy Liu with her freckles, Josh Hartnett who has a sense of humor mature enough to make you like him in this role, Ben Kingsley's performance, Ben Kingsley's role, Morgan Freeman's performance in a sucky part, the title-credits, the name "Slevin Kellavra".

The bad things about this movie:
The dialogue with its would-be David Mamet coolness that so often falls short, Lucy Liu with her minor-league talent, Josh Hartnett with his smugness, the fact that everybody in this movie is an asshole. Yes, even Lindsay, who is too dumb to live.

The Plot:
Slevin (Josh Hartnett) gets "mistaken" for a guy who owes a lot of money to rival crime lords "the Rabbi" (Ben Kingsley)and "the Boss" (Morgan Freeman). In order to pay The Boss his $96,000, he is asked to take out The Rabbi's son in retaliation for The Boss's son having been assassinated by the aforementioned Rabbi earlier. It's both more and less complicated than it sounds. Nothing in this movie approaches, or is meant to approach, real life, but it manages to get away with it on actor charisma and tight editing. You won't be bored, and you probably won't want your money back.

"I liked the fact that the good guys are bad-asses, and that the bad guys really do get what they deserve (everything they love taken from them, then death)." That's not really a spoiler...

Rated R for some nudity, some explicit sex, a few curse-words, a little blood and brain-matter.

If you really liked this movie you should buy these:


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It's interesting that movies and books with/about the Southern United States or Southerners so often have quirky sexual themes. The Grifters' Lily Dillon has a quasi-incestuous relationship with her son, Roy, for instance, then there is the "entrapment" of the soldier in The Beguiled, Faulkner's work is riddled with sexually precocious youngsters, rapes and "almost-rapes", sexual bargaining and compromise, and, of course, there is Deliverance. It all has to do with family and clannishness (especially if you consider a plantation a clan, which they kind of were). I am not familiar with enough of this side of the south to say why exactly, or to put my finger on how it all works, or even if it exists purely in fiction.





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I've spent years looking for a Jim Thompson book. I can't find them in the local library or at the local B&N, and it wasn't enough of a priority for me to spend too much time or money. Currently reading The Grifters. He has the most straightforward, possibly bland, prose-style I have ever seen outside of the work I did when I was 15 or 16 years old.


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