The copy editor inside me

I'm about halfway through The Killer Inside Me, and I can now state with some confidence that Pop. 1280 is Jim Thompson's best book.

There's nothing wrong with Killer's narrator/protagonist, the notorious Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford, or the depravity and calculating intelligence that lie beneath his boring exterior—nothing, that is, except that he's no Nick Corey, the less-celebrated but greater protagonist of Pop. 1280.

I haven't finished reading The Killer Inside Me yet. But I do have a few thoughts:

1) Is the horrifying beating scene in the 2010 movie version of Killer too much? The very existence of the controversy may answer the question. The corresponding scene in the book is, indeed, horrifying, but it is nowhere near as graphic or as central to the novel as the discussion and promotion surrounding the scene are to the movie.

In Thompson's world, deadpan humor, intense self-examination on the protagonist's part, and criticism of all manner of social hypocrisy are more central to the story than sex is. The Killer Inside Me is the study of a psychotic man. It's not a sex book, despite its sexual frankness and gleeful profanity. All it takes is comparison of the three editions of the novel shown at the top of this post with the cover of a movie tie-in edition (left) and, especially, with a poster from the movie itself (right) to illustrate that the filmmakers, producers, and promoters had a vision different from Thompson's.

2) Back in January 2012, I jocosely pointed out a grammatical error in a Cole Porter song. "One of those bells that now and then rings," I wrote, should be "One of those bells that now and then ring." (Porter, of course, writing to the dictates of rhyme and music, was exempt from rules of formal prose. Besides, he was Cole Porter.)

Well, some readers didn't get it, expressing benign condescension or amused  exasperation at what they imagined was my error.

Thompson, on the other hand, has Ford tell us at one point that

 "It’s one of those things that are so plain and simple you don’t see ’em."

This alcohol-sodden hack, banging out his novels on a manual typewriter in the bathroom, in other words, writing a book full of Southern dialect pronunciation, nonetheless recognized a plural subject ("those things") and knew that such a subject takes a plural verb ("are"). As I like to imagine the deceptively shambling but, in fact, highly intelligent, literate Lou Ford saying, "Just parsing through, ma'am."

I am pleased to enshrine Thompson alongside Dashiell Hammett as a copy editor's friend. Good grammar is nothing to be ashamed of. Even tough guys do it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Jim Thompson, Benjamin Whitmer, Daniel Woodrell, mood-breakers, a question for readers

I wrote earlier this week that Benjamin Whitmer's novel Pike reminded me of Daniel Woodrell with a tougher edge, maybe with a bit of Jim Thompson mixed in. I had never seen those writers mentioned together, so I was pleased when I picked up a copy of Thompson's Pop. 1280 yesterday and found that it came with a foreword by Woodrell.

"Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson's greatest creation," Woodrell writes. "Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. ... The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing the strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones."

Now, I've been to Texas just once in my life, to Houston and Galveston, and, while my charming hostess does like to say, "Y'all, hush!" I can claim only the most cursory acquaintance with the state, the region, and their quirks and folkways. But I have to think Woodrell is right because fourteen chapters in, Pop. 1280 is dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of the limited amount of Thompson's work that I've read (Savage Night,  The Getaway, part of The Grifters).

I may have more to say on this astonishing book later, but for now some thoughts on why hard, dark writing may the most difficult kind of crime writing to do well. Here's what I mean: I've read plenty of the hard stuff recently, Thompson, Whitmer, Jedidiah Ayres' Fierce Bitches, Crime Factory's Lee Marvin-themed short-story collection Lee, Eric Beetner, and Blood and Tacos. Lots of that writing is good, some better than that, but what interested me were those stories where a not-quite-right word threw the atmosphere off just enough to take me out of the story, if only for a moment. No author wants to do that, but I suspect the stakes may be especially high in noir, hard-boiled, Southern Gothic, or any other genre that depends heavily on mood.

The slip-up need not be large; all it takes is a bit of jargon or psychobabble, a grammatical error ("Lying still, strapped down tight, the hostage's eyes meet his."), or some annoying quirk of contemporary speech creeping in (level, say, as in "his confidence level" rather than "his confidence.")  

That's me; What are your mood-breakers? What lapses will take you out of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013