
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...

An ebullient hybrid of a literary memoir, where Thompson consorts with corpses and con-men, gets editorial criticism from a big hearted prostitute, writes a labour history for the Workers Party of America, and nearly starts an earthquake while trying to resuscitate a defunct...

