Jim Thompson

James Myers Thompson was an American novelist and screenwriter, born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, the son of a county sheriff. His family later relocated to Texas, and he published his first short stories while still a teenager, supporting himself for a time as a hotel worker before a breakdown at nineteen and a stint as an oil-field laborer. He became one of the defining voices of American hardboiled crime fiction, publishing more than thirty novels, mostly original paperback editions, from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. His best-known novel, The Killer Inside Me (1952), remains a touchstone of American noir writing for its unflinching first-person voice. Thompson died in 1977.