Books
Wild Town
Many of Jim Thompson’s noir novels drew on his days as a bellhop at the old Hotel Texas, when Fort Worth was rowdy and the twenties were roaring.
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Interestingly, as Thompson’s narratives move westward, his tone mellows considerably. In Texas by the Tail, written in the mid-sixties, his con man narrator berates Houston for, among other things, its weather and its racial politics. He definitely favors Fort Worth over Dallas:
Neighboring Dallas started an evil rumor about its rival. Fort Worth was so rustic, the libel ran, that panthers prowled the streets at high noon. Fort Worth promptly dubbed itself the Panther City, and declared the lie was gospel truth.
Certainly, there were panthers in the streets. Kiddies had to have somethin’ to play with, didn’t they? Aside from that, the cats performed a highly necessary service. Every morning they were herded down to the east-flowing Trinity River, there to drain their bladders into the stream which provided Dallas’ water supply.
Thompson’s own sympathies ran along similar geographic lines. In 1926, after recuperating from his first stint as a bellhop, he hitchhiked to West Texas on a strange pilgrimage that took him to the very same oil fields and towns where his father had gambled away his family’s future. He spent the next two years laboring at backbreaking, dangerous jobs in the oil fields, working in gambling joints, briefly running a diner, and hoboing.
In Bad Boy, Thompson says that becoming a writer was foremost in his mind when he lit out for West Texas. “Oil Field Vignettes,” the first of several pieces he wrote while in the oil fields, was published in Fort Worth—based Texas Monthly magazine (no relation) in 1929. Ironically, the oil business—which had broken his father—provided the means for Thompson to reinvent himself.
It had already transformed Cowtown into Fort Worth, a major hub of the Texas oil business. The black gold that bubbled beneath their ranchland made West Texas cattlemen like Burk Burnett and W. T. Waggoner—who weren’t exactly poor before—into wealthy oil barons who funneled a great deal of their prosperity through the city that had always been good to them. Jim Thompson undoubtedly encountered many of these men while working as a bellhop, and certainly breathed construction dust as monuments to their success shot skyward: the W. T. Waggoner Building (810 Houston), oilman R. O. Dulaney’s cool art deco Sinclair Building (106 West Fifth), the Petroleum Building (also built by Dulaney, 611 Throckmorton), and others, all built between the teens and the early thirties.
While train travel isn’t a frequent fixture in Thompson’s novels, most of the grifters, gamblers, and other fun-seekers he hopped bells for came into Fort Worth via the old train stations that are just a short walk from downtown: the Santa Fe Depot (1601 Jones) and the Texas and Pacific Terminal (West Lancaster Street between Houston and Throckmorton). The former, built in 1899, evokes old Cowtown more than it does the Roaring Twenties, while the latter is a magnificent 1930 art deco structure that conjures up fedoras and big-city film noir. (To take a guided walking tour called “Hell’s Half Acre to Sundance Square,” contact Bill Campbell at 817-253-5909 or dwcjr@swbell.net. A “Downtown Fort Worth Walking Tour” brochure is available from the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau, 817-336-8791.)
In 1931 Thompson married Alberta Hesse, and before long he had found a job at the Worth Hotel (at Seventh and Taylor, where the expanded Fort Worth Club stands today). Thompson was working at the Worth when Will Rogers gave him a $50 tip for retrieving his car. Despite occasional nights like that and the fact that he was working 84 hours a week with no days off, he still wasn’t making enough to get by. Things only got worse as the Thompson household expanded to include three children born between 1932 and 1938.
In a bold stroke that, in hindsight, seems to have been preordained, Thompson turned from writing for oil trade journals to writing for true-crime magazines. A gentle, well-mannered soul who loathed violence and bloodshed, he churned out lurid stories for publications like True Detective, Daring Detective, and Startling Detective, managing to eke out a living and at the same time developing many of the stylistic techniques he would employ in his later novels. In 1935, lured by a lucrative offer from a true-crime magazine, Thompson moved to Oklahoma, ending the strange, bittersweet, and often brutal saga of his Texas years.
Once Thompson got to Oklahoma, his crime-magazine job suddenly fizzled out. In 1936 he obtained a position with the Oklahoma Federal Writers’ Project and not long thereafter was appointed its director. Also actively involved in left-wing politics, he gained many influential colleagues and admirers, including Woody Guthrie, who essentially agented Thompson’s book deal for Now and on Earth, published by Modern Age in 1942. A sort of semi-autobiographical protest novel—cum—psychological study, it met with mostly great reviews but lackluster sales. His first crime novel, however, Nothing More Than Murder (1949), struck a nerve with critics and the reading public alike.
As chronicled in Robert Polito’s excellent 1995 biography, Savage Art, Thompson’s writing career is the stuff of hard-boiled literary legends: He wrote like a demon between 1952 and 1954, turning out twelve explosive novels for Lion Books. Although he never really fit into the neat category of mystery or crime fiction, the trajectory of his life from 1942 until his death in 1977 was eerily similar to that of noir giants like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who also emerged from the ghetto of pulp fiction into mainstream American culture. Such men often wrote for two main reasons: because they needed the money and because if they didn’t write, their head would explode. They also tended to live hard and drink hard, and when they were hot, they were on fire.
One night during a recent stay at the Radisson Plaza, I lay in my bed sleepless, thinking about young Jim Thompson toiling up and down these halls where the Roaring Twenties howled with a uniquely Texan decadence, leaving a young man with a hangover that would last a lifetime. If these walls could talk, I wondered, what would they say? Maybe they would say some of the things that are said in the pages of Jim Thompson’s books. In Bad Boy he wrote:
It was a weird, wild and wonderful world that I had walked into, the luxury hotel life of the Roaring Twenties.…a world whose one rule was that you did nothing you could not get away with.
There was no pity in that world.…
At the end of Thompson’s life his declining health made it all but impossible to write—and no one seemed interested in his style of writing anyway, since all his books were out of print. Shortly before he died he told his wife, “Just you wait. I’ll be famous after I’m dead about ten years.” Wherever he is now, Jim Thompson must be enjoying a hell of a last laugh.
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