WILD TOWN

Jim Thompson throws a wicked plot curve in WILD TOWN, his 1957 West Texas noir featuring Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford, who stars in Thompson's deeply disturbing portrait of a psycho, THE KILLER INSIDE ME (1952).

Thompson sets everything in WILD TOWN up like a classic noir and you think you have everything figured out, you know where this one's going because, hey, you've read other books like this and seen dozens of films noir. The main character here is Bugs McKenna, an ex-con with a checkered past when it comes to steady employment. Bugs isn't the sharpest tool in the shed but he wants to get a decent job, settle down and try to put the mistakes of his past behind him. When he hits the West Texas oil boom town affectionately know as "Ragtown", he's confronted by Lou Ford who, rather than run the ex con out of town, sets Bugs up with a job as a house detective at the Hanlon Hotel.

The hotel, like almost everything else in Ragtown, is owned by Mike Hanlon, a crippled older man who lives on the top floor of the hotel with a much younger hot-to-trot wife. You get the picture pretty quick. Ford is setting up Bugs to kill Hanlon so the corrupt lawman can run away with Mrs. Hanlon. But Thompson starts peppering the plot with unexpected curve balls.

Ford offers up his girlfriend, Amy, to Bugs, a proposition that Bugs readily accepts. Bugs also beds both Mrs. Hanlon and Rosalie Vara, a hotel maid who, although black, is passing for white. The hotel manager discovers a discrepancy in the books. There's $5,000 in cash missing and suspicion falls upon the outside auditor hired for the job. The auditor dies while in the presence of Bugs, but Bugs is innocent of the crime.

 Money, money, who's got the money? You can forget that narrative thread. It's a pure McGuffin that Thompson brushes off rather off-handedly in one short chapter. Okay, so now Bugs must proceed with the plan to kill Hanlon, right?

To say anything else will spoil the surprises in store in the final chapters of the book. Suffice it to say that some characters' motives aren't as clear as they appeared to be at first and what started out as a set-up-a-patsy-for-a-kill thriller unexpectedly turns into something else entirely. It's as if Thompson started out to write one kind of story and changed his mind half way through, taking things in a completely different direction.

Authors are entitled to do that and despite the twists, WILD TOWN is still a first rate noir thriller. I do have one problem though. Lou Ford, who was absolutely reprehensible in THE KILLER INSIDE ME, is a bit more sympathetic here. He's still a shit heel but he comes through in a surprising way in the end. It's a niggling little bit of inconsistent characterization but I suspect that when Thompson wrote WILD TOWN in 1957, he didn't imagine that many readers of pulp paperback crime novels would recall a character from a book written five years previously.

Highly recommended.