Ex-cop/ex-con Bugs McKenna doesn't have it easy. Bad stuff keeps a-happening to him. It's all down to occasional bouts of being a gormless bad-tempered lunkhead. After years of bad luck he manages to snag the job of hotel detective in a dustbowl Texas town and starts to settle down. He even manages to look downright normal compared to the rest of the staff - the alcoholic overly paranoid night manager; the auditor who's sleeping with the owner's wife and skimming the hotel's funds; the twin brother grifter/bellhops.Yes, things are sure starting to look good for our boy Bugs until an accidental death in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then the blackmail notes start to arrive.This is noir all the way, but it's less darker or surreal than Thompson's major works. In fact, there are times when it's downright funny. Something weird going on here. One of Thompson's more infamous characters, Lou Ford - the evil, grafting deputy pretending to be a dumb yokel deputy in The Killer Inside Me - has a major role in this book. But Wild Town is neither a sequel (for obvious reasons) or a prequel. It just happens to be set in a parallel universe where Ford grew up to be a grafting, slightly less evil deputy in another small town. I'm not complaining, as Ford's interactions with Bugs are the best scenes in the book. It just seems kinda odd.
Jim Thompson has basically written a locked-room mystery in a West Texas, frontier boom town. All the hard-boiled pieces are set. There are several femme fatales, a sheriff that seems to be brilliant and quietly manipulative, a slow-witted, hot-headed house detective, and a shabby hotel. Not my favorite Thompson, but that belittles the truth. I love all Jim Thompson's stuff. He writes from both the head and the gut. Each of his novels seem to contain a bit of Crime AND Punishment. They all seem to balance Freud with Nietzsche. Thompson is one of those novelists that for me at least proves that some of the best fiction of the 20th century was genre fiction. Wild Town seems like a modern-day Notes from the Underground. Thompson isn't just writing about crime and criminals. He is tearing apart the bones of society. He is examining the ideas and ideals of America. You can certainly read Thompson as a transgressive, crime fiction writer, but he is so much more. There is another dark river under the narrative's river and the currents and eddies of both might hydrate or drown you, but will certainly carry you into zones you haven't previously been.
What do You think about Wild Town (2014)?
I struggled through this one after the reasonable good setup where Bugs McKenna is released from jail by Deputy Lou Ford ( recurring character of Thompson's) and given a job as a hotel detective. Plenty of noir dealings and double dealings, but the plot and the narrative shifts are almost incomprehensible at times. The ending, where Lou Ford spends five pages describing what really happened, pretty much confirmed my sense that Thompson had lost control of the narrative and had to tell us what he'd fail to show in the course of the novel. Not his best.
—Steven
Not the best Thompson (see The Criminal for a perfectly formed noir), but still a sizzling, hot little thriller. Hard to engage with the characters here, and they are almost caricatures, drawn without the usual Thompson eye for subtle shades of colour. The plot is rather thin, but plot was never really the point of Thompson's work - it's the zingy one liners, the oppressive noir atmosphere, and his Dostoevsky like ability to draw complex, layered and morally compromised characters. Everyone in Wild Town has something to hide, but it's made pretty obvious pretty quickly what it is. Jim Thompson was incapable of writing a bad book, and this is still worth reading, just not up there with his best.
—Dylan
