Fri 27 May 2011
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: JIM THOMPSON – Savage Night.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[6] Comments
by Bill Crider
JIM THOMPSON – Savage Night. Lion #155, paperback original, 1953. Reprinted several times, including Black Lizard Books, softcover, 1985, 1991.
Although Savage Night has never attained the cult status of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, it is an equally unnerving book, one that still has the power to shock despite the more than thirty years that have elapsed since its original publication.
Carl (“Little”) Bigger (a.k.a. Carl Bigelow), a tubercular professional killer who is all of five feet tall, is sent to murder a key witness in an upcoming trial.
His plan is to do so by enlisting the help of his victim’s wife, but he hasn’t counted on the complications that arise, including the distrust of the local sheriff and his own feelings for Ruth, the deformed girl who works for his victim.
Like Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, Bigger is oddly sympathetic. He is a cold-blooded killer, but he is at the same time a human being. He coldly seduces the wife, but his affair with Ruth is quite different. He has decent impulses, and even acts on them. The book has a number of unexpected twists in the plot, but what really interests the reader are Bigger and his inner conflicts.
The climax comes in a crescendo of violence and madness unsurpassed in the work of any other writer of paperback fiction, and perhaps even in Thompson’s other work.
The chapters become shorter as the madness and violence grow, with the last six chapters occupying only three pages of text. The final chapter is one sentence long, but it is as devastating as any conclusion you are ever likely to read.
Thompson wrote several other powerfully unique novels that should not be missed, including A Hell of a Woman (1954), Wild Town (1957; in which Lou Ford has a cameo appearance), The Getaway (1959), Pop. 1280 (1964), and Texas by the Tail (1965).
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
May 28th, 2011 at 12:43 am
That cover of A Hell of a Woman is priceless pulp. Is that old lady the luscious tomato’s mother or aunt? That dumb sap at the door with the samples case should think a minute about what that blonde will look like in forty years. But then they never do think, do they?
May 28th, 2011 at 2:33 am
Maybe the ‘Hell of a woman’ that the salesman is attracted to IS the old lady! It could be that the story ends with him walking away with her, leaving the beautiful blonde in tears. “Okay, maybe you are a hot tomato, Blondie, but can you cook? Huh? Huh?”
(I admit that this is unlikely ending, but you never know…)
May 28th, 2011 at 5:54 am
A HELL OF A WOMAN was a helluva book.
May 28th, 2011 at 1:19 pm
The Savage Night cover doesn’t seem to let readers know quite what they’re in for (it looks more like an Erskine Caldwell).
May 28th, 2011 at 1:49 pm
A collection of Lion paperbacks from this era is one worth having, not only for the covers, but for the stories themselves, with Thompson as one of their key authors.
I think they must have let him do what he wanted, with no fear of being censored or watered down. I can’t imagine any other publisher putting out a line of such tough noir-ish books, even Gold Medal at the same time.
May 28th, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Here is my interpretation of the cover of A HELL OF A WOMAN:
The young man is a vintage paperback collector arriving home with a suitcase of his latest acquisitions. His mother and his wife, since they are the typical non-collectors, are about to give him hell for spending money on books. Thus the title, A HELL OF A WOMAN.