Roughneck

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