Roughneck

The hardboiled sequel to the autobiographical Bad Boy, from the author Stephen King calls “my favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.

A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, Roughneck chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction's most enduring writers, in a larger-than-life literary memoir—or wildly entertaining tall tale—as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so good.

Praise for Jim Thompson

“The best suspense writer going, bar none.” -The New York Times

“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.” -Chicago Tribune

“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it . . . His work . . . casts a dazzling light on the human condition.” -The Washington Post