The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, May 4, 2026

Notably: Just as I was finishing a 1945 Simenon–the excellent Across the Street, or La Fenêtre des Rouet, the crushing portrait of a 40-year-old virgin who lives vicariously through her neighbors across the street–the mail delivered this month’s Library of America volume: Jim Thompson’s Five Noir Novels from the 1950s & 60s. I did not know of Thompson. He was the son of a sheriff who got run out of town for embezzlement. LOA: “Born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906, Thompson worked as a hotel bellboy, oilfield laborer, and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, an experience that inspired his first published writing, Oilfield Vignettes (1929). In the early 1930s, Thompson served as head of the Oklahoma Federal Writers’ Project and briefly attended the University of Nebraska before leaving school in 1931.” He drank too much. He was a terrific writer of violent, merciless novels, a sort of Cormac McCarthy without the pretentious style. I immediately started A Hell of a Woman, more Dostoevsky than McCarthy, since the novel rushes toward the murder of an old woman (“I don’t know how anyone could have got that ugly in less than seventy years”) who supposedly has a $100,000 stash that Dolly (that’s him, the hero: Dolly, “a hard luck bastard”) and his Sophia, in this case called Mona, whom the old woman pimped for several years, can take and live happily for a day or two. I won’t spoil it because I can’t: I’m only two-thirds through, but taken enough to think Pascal and Camus may have to wait for After Dark, My Sweet (1955), The Getaway (1959) and a couple of other titles included in this collection. He played Judge Baxter Wilson Grayle in a cameo in the 1975 movie version of Chandler’s Farewell my Lovely, two years before he died. (See below.) Thompson called his cat Deadline. That alone deserves him a Nobel.

I got to thinking about that while I was whipping the dead-beats. Or trying to whip ’em, I should say. I thought, well, Dolly, you ain’t changed a bit, have you? You haven’t learned a goddamned thing, you stupid bastard. You couldn’t learn a prayer at a revival meeting. You see something you want, and that’s all you got eyes for. You ain’t watching the road at all, and the first thing you know you’re up to your ass in mud… Well, though, that wasn’t so. It maybe looked that way, but it wasn’t the way it really was. There’s just some guys that get the breaks, and some that don’t. And me, I guess you know the kind I am.

–From Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman (1954).

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