There are numerous varieties of noir out there – your hard-boiled detectives by Hammett and Chandler, your neo-noirs by Lehane, and so many more, creating a massive spectrum of darkness. But even in the depths of dangerous, flawed protagonists, there’s something especially nasty about the “heroes” of Jim Thompson, who gives us twisted killers, con artists, helpless saps, and throws us into worlds where everyone is corrupt, sleazy, and in it for themselves. It’s noir in its purest, most unflinching sense, and done without even a hint of judgment or morality to filter it all out.
And even with all of that, The Grifters manages to stand out from the pack, giving us a queasily incestuous tension between a con man and his grafting mother, two figures who only care about the world inasmuch as it can give them what they want. No, Roy and Lilly may not have the depraved sense of violence to them that Thompson gave us in Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, but they’re equally broken, nearly sociopathic characters; these are people who have divided the world into grifters and chumps, and chumps are only as good as what you can get out of them. As Roy makes his way through women (always somehow comparing them to his mother), or as Lilly cold-bloodedly manipulates everyone around her, we get the sense that these people could care less about the world around them, and feel like empathy and compassion are for the weak.
As usual with Thompson, plot is almost beside the point here, maybe to a fault for a novel about con artists; yes, there’s a thread about Roy beginning to question this lifestyle after a con goes bad, and Lilly struggling with a very different bad situation, but both of those are far less integral to the book than you might expect. No, Thompson specialized in creating his worlds and immersing his readers into the minds of his characters, and The Grifters features that in spades. From walking you through dice cons to seeing how they react to human kindness, from careful manipulation to instinctive self-preservation, Thompson’s writing excels at creating characters and depicting their thoughts, no matter how fundamentally broken they may be.
And it’s there that Thompson makes his bid to be considered among the all time greats. It’s not his stories, which are thin and more about the internal decisions of the characters. No, it’s his unflinching, unapologetic look at cruel, heartless, despicable characters cut loose in a world that’s unprepared for them, but deserves whatever it gets. That’s what noir is at its best, and trust me, just about any Thompson is among that category. The Grifters maybe isn’t as good as Thompson’s best (for my money, of the ones I’ve read, Pop. 1280 runs away with that) – it could use a little more complexity, just a tad more fleshing out – but it’s still a lean, nasty, pulpy, fantastic read.
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