Wild Town

By: Jim Thompson

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

In trouble more often than not, guilty of assault, manslaughter, and honorably discharged from the military by the skin of his teeth, David "Bugs" McKenna can't seem to help doing the right thing at the wrong time--or the wrong thing, every chance he gets.

But when he drifts his way into Ragtown, Texas, things seem to finally be turning around for Bugs. He gets his first job in years as the hotel detective of the landmark Hanlon Hotel. But now that Bugs owes deputy sheriff Lou Ford a favor, things are likely to get ugly, fast--and odds are, it'll have something to do with the bombshell wife of his Bugs' new employer...

In WILD TOWN, Jim Thompson returns to the characters from THE KILLER INSIDE ME that made his reputation, in a virtuoso, multi-character portrait of how one man's life can take a turn for the worse.

Not my favorite so far, but everything I needed

My biggest hitch in this book initially, was the fact that the sinister sheriff has the same name as the psychopathic sheriff narrator of The Killer Inside Me.
Apparently it was just a coincidence, as far as the books are concerned, but if there was ever a real Lou Ford, I sure wonder what he did to Jim Thompson.

The plot in this is kind of all over the place, but it makes me want to read Thompson's other books about working in oil fields.

A bit of Crime AND Punishment in West Texas.

Jim Thompson has basically written a locked-room mystery in a West Texas, frontier boom town's seedy hotel.

All the hard-boiled pieces are set. There are several femme fatales, a sheriff that seems to be brilliant and quietly manipulative, a slow-witted, hot-headed house detective, and a shabby hotel. Not my favorite Thompson, but that belittles the truth. I love all Jim Thompson's stuff. He writes from both the head and the gut. Each of his novels seem to contain a bit of Crime AND Punishment. They all seem to balance Freud with Nietzsche. Thompson is one of those novelists that for me at least proves that some of the best fiction of the 20th century was genre fiction. Wild Town seems like a modern-day Notes from the Underground. Thompson isn't just writing about crime and criminals. He is tearing apart the bones of society. He is examining the ideas and ideals of America. You can certainly read Thompson as a transgressive, crime fiction writer, but he is so much more. There is another dark river under the narrative's river and the currents and eddies of both might hydrate or drown you, but will certainly carry you into zones you haven't previously been.