Thu 26 May 2011
JIM THOMPSON – Savage Night. Lion #155, paperback original, 1953. Reprinted several times, including Black Lizard Books, softcover, 1985, 1991.
When a good friend described Jim Thompson as “over-rated” to me not too long ago, it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually read anything by Thompson in a quarter century. So I picked up his most nightmarish novel, Savage Night to have another look at it.
Damn, it’s good.
Night is the chilling story of a freakishly petite and young-looking hitman pressured into that preordained failure, the One Last Job. Charlie “Little” Bigger lands in a small town for a tough job that turns into a paranoid hell, then into a surreal spin where neither he nor the reader quite knows what’s going on we just realize something pretty awful is happening here, and when I applied the adjective nightmarish, it was with a full appreciation that Savage Night could stand right up there with the scariest of traditional “horror stories.”
It also benefits from the kind of writing we look for most in two-bit novels: efficient prose that goes beyond prosaic efficiency to achieve a quality completely unlooked-for in pulp fiction:
Bigger sees a puritanical old woman and “I couldn’t figure why some dairy hadn’t hired her to sour their cream for them. ” A self important character gets a compliment and “swelled up like a poisoned pup.” And then there’s the short sequence where Thompson’s narrator enters a house:
Now that passage should be taught in every Creative Writing course in the Free World: a quickly-carried couple of sentences that (a) move the story along, (b) describe the setting, (c) tell us something about the guy who lives there, and (d) tell us something about the narrator at the same time.
Amazing. This is the sort of writing that gave Thompson his belated reputation, and it serves very well for a tough, fast story that still scares me.
May 27th, 2011 at 7:32 am
Jim Thompson “overrated”? That’s not possible.
May 27th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Overrated is a funny word. It usually means the speaker does not like whatever he/she is referring to.
As a critic, I am able to see beauty and flaws in anything. It is a sad life really.
I understand why Thompson is so highly admired, but I don’t enjoy reading his work. “It’s not you, it’s me.” I try to explain to the crushed Thompson novel.
Jim Thompson belongs among the top writers of noir, but then the style of noir does not appeal to all.
Dan, forgive your friend for his/hers sins. Or better yet mention an overrated author your friend admires.
May 27th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
I really loathed “The Killer Inside Me.” I just don’t seem to be attuned to this sort of book (psycho-noir). I suspect I wouldn’t like Savage Night either, but I’ll have to try another title or two. One can certainly see the influence on modern crime fiction.
It amazes me that squeamish reviewers used to think Chandler was so tough, when he’s a romantic at heart. With Thompson I feel more plunged into the nihilistic void.
May 27th, 2011 at 6:53 pm
By the way, I love the way the late H. R. F. Keating put it, in choosing Pop. 1280 as one of the 100 best crime novels:
“The great merit of the novels of Jim Thompson is that they are completely without good taste, and of them perhaps Pop. 1280…has the least good taste of all.”
May 27th, 2011 at 7:10 pm
Curt
If you didn’t care for THE KILLER INSIDE ME, I can’t think of another Jim Thompson book I might recommend that you try next. Not that I disagree with you. I’m like Michael, I think (Comment #2). I admire Thompson’s writing, but it’s difficult for me to say that I get a lot of pleasure from reading him. Or if I do, it’s on a different level than I usually use the word pleasure.
— Steve
May 27th, 2011 at 7:24 pm
I’ve just remembered that THE KILLER INSIDE ME has been reviewed twice on this blog:
Once by Bill Crider as a 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1654
and just before that, by Gloria Maxwell: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1653
To quote Bill about the KILLER : “No one who reads it will ever forget it.”
I think I’ll post the other two 1001M Jim Thompson reviews next. First Max Allan Collins on POP. 1280, then Bill Crider coming full circle with another review of SAVAGE NIGHT.
May 27th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
The description of “field tramps” stayed with me for a long time.
May 27th, 2011 at 7:53 pm
I’m looking for something a little less uncompromisingly uncompromising. I’m thinking Nothing More Than Murder or The Kill-Off? I might even venture to try A Hell of a Woman (yeah!). These books must have been blisteringly hot stuff in the 1950s.
And maybe still are, judging by the reception to the recent 2010 film version of Killer Inside Me. Killer died at the box office, reaching only seventeen theaters in the U.S. and making only $217,000 (it cost 13 million to make). Some of the audience walked out on it at the Sundance Film Festival.
Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday condemned Killer (after writing that the film was “barely worth condemning”) as the latest of a “long line of Hollywood efforts to sell rank pulp as A-list material by way of a classy director and cast” and she accused the filmmakers of confusing “sadistic nihilism with moral seriousness, an especially bedeviling affliction for writers and directors who traffic in film noir at its most stylized, mannered and intellectually empty.”
I haven’t seen the film (I have limited desire to see the book visually depicted), though I imagine a film inevitably loses a lot of the power of the narration. I think in any event though that the subject matter was bound to put off many.
Of course maybe the DVD sales were big. Getting released to seventeen screens only certainly limited the potential theater audience!
May 27th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Curt:
I would be interested in the overseas take from the picture where I imagine film noir remains popular.
I am always amused when mainstream media focuses on the American theatrical box office when it usually makes up less than a third of any movies take. DVD is usually the big money maker but overseas profits can inspire some odd sequels.
May 27th, 2011 at 10:25 pm
Yes, overseas box office is a big factor, but you can be pretty certain when an American-set, English language film makes only 200,000 in the US, it wasn’t a hit overseas either.
In fact it did make 95% of its box office overseas, but that’s still only 3.8 million, on a 13 mil budget. Not a success. That’s why I queried the matter of DVD sales/rentals–to break for the filmmakers even it would have needed to ring up a goodly amount (twenty million?).
As for other noir films:
No Country for Old Men
74 mil US
97 mil overseas
LA Confidential
65 mil US
62 mil overseas
Black Dahlia
23 mil US
27 mil overseas
Seems pretty even. I think that’s often the case unless you’re talking Woody Allen films, say (his films usually make 70% or more of their box office overseas now).
Of course I’m not meaning to suggest Jim Thompson isn’t popular. For half-century old crime fiction (as most of his major books are), his books are tremendously popular. But the movie definitely seems to have rubbed some people the wrong way. Only getting distributed to seventeen theaters in the U.S. and barely breaking 200,000? What happened? Woody Allen’s new film, Midnight in Paris, made 900,000 in the US on just six screens. Looks like they weren’t able to attract that great an audience even to the seventeen screens.
May 28th, 2011 at 12:39 am
I like this comment (on the translation of “The Killer Inside Me” from book to film) from an article at The Grimmfest Blog, “You Really Don’t Want to See That! The Unfilmable Novels of Jim Thompson”:
“It is one thing for Thompson to talk of a woman’s face being pounded to ‘stew meat, hamburger.’ It is another to show it.”
I’m trying to imagine the ending of Savage Night on film. Urk.
June 6th, 2011 at 9:42 pm
[…] a comment following Dan Stumpf’s recent review of Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, I mentioned my dislike of Thompson’s influential novel […]
May 30th, 2016 at 7:54 pm
Curt, I’ve read 5 of Thompson’s books so far – all very nightmarish and twisted – but “The Killer Inside Me” was the most harsh. I’m glad that wasn’t my introduction to Thompson – it might have scared me off. My favorite so far is “A Hell of A Woman.” What a book! You think you’re reading a really good noir but it escalates into something far more experimental and interesting…
May 12th, 2019 at 8:05 am
This is one of the most unique and powerful noir books. All ingredients of the genre are there. However, in the end, they are cast aside by a surreal nightmare that engulfs the reader.
All sure footing is lost. We are faced with the darkest Munch painting.
A labyrinth with no exit.
Incredible sensation.
May 25th, 2019 at 4:31 pm
I read “The Killer Inside Me”, “Savage night”, “The Getaway”, and “Pop. 1280”. Thompson has a strong prose, indeed. The violence in his books are not the “punch in your face” style, rather the “twist in your guts” style. Very jarring. Anybody should read something from Thompson, just to see how far a text can go in brutalization of the reader.