Jim Thompson

"Doc McCoy is the most skilled criminal alive. But when for the first time in Doc's long criminal career, his shot doesn't hit the mark, everything begins to fall apart. And Doc begins to realize that the perfect bank robbery isn't complete without the perfect getaway to back it up. THE GETAWAY is the classic story of a bank robbery gone horribly wrong, where the smallest mistakes have catastrophic consequences, and shifting loyalties lead to betrayals...

"Dames and damnation. Hunger and hell -- that was his destiny in a raw, violent world of crooks, barbarians, and burlesque queens, of alcohol and flesh. ... In an age of uproar and calamity, he seized life -- and tried to strangle it by sheer brute force. That's Roughneck: bold, blunt, brilliant." --

"To his friends, to his coworkers, and even to his mistress Moira, Roy Dillon is an honest hardworking salesman. He lives in a cheap hotel just within his pay bracket. He goes to work every day. He has hundreds of friends and associates who could attest to his good character. Yet, hidden behind three gaudy clown paintings in Roy's pallid hotel room, sits fifty-two thousand dollars--the money Roy makes from his short cons, his "grifting." For years,...

"Joe Wilmot can't stand his wife Elizabeth. But he sure loves her movie theater. It's a modest establishment in a beat-down town--but Joe has the run of the place, and inside its walls, he's king. Without the theater, he'd be sunk. Without his leadership, the theater would close in a heartbeat. If it isn't the life Joe imagined for himself, at the very least, it's livable. Everything changes when Joe falls for the housemaid Carol, and the two can't...

An ex-boxer seems the perfect pawn to pull off a kidnapping planned by a sexy widow and a cop-turned-con man. When he realizes he's been manipulated, he turns the tables with a game of deceit and raw desire that can only end in death.

"John Waters' gloriously grotesque second feature is replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema's most memorably blasphemous sequences. Made on a shoestring budget in Waters' native Baltimore, with the filmmaker taking on nearly every technical task, this gleeful mockery of the peace-and-love ethos of its era features the Cavalcade of Perversion, a traveling show mounted by a troupe of misfits whose shocking proclivities...

In The Killer Inside Me, America's "Dimestore Dostoevsky" Jim Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time.
Everyone in the small town...