Jim Thompson's work has the feel of a writer trying to recreate the seaminess and ugliness of real life, and doing a fair job. That seems to be his motive: to let you in on the dark side. To some extent he succeeds, there is an ugliness in his fiction that approximates the more obvious (as opposed to the more subtle) ugly apsects of humanity, human life, human society. Most of it has no shelf-life, transcends the time in which it was written in and the generation to which he belonged, especially since Thompson's mission was never to create lovable characters who have hope and wind up happy.
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