The Grifters

Description

Roy Dillon is young, good-looking and devastatingly charming. He's also a completely amoral con man. Lily, his mother, works for the mob. Moira Langtry, Roy's mistress, is always looking for the main chance, and so is Carol Roberg, the nurse brought in to look after Roy when a bad choice of mark means he has an unfortunate encounter with a baseball bat and a bad case of internal bleeding. Together they make up a perverse quadrangle of love and greed in a coruscating novel of corruption.

Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. After an itinerant childhood during which his sheriff father was driven from office for embezzlement; and as a roughneck in the Texan oil fields of the 1920s, Thompson became successful as a writer with the pulp fiction houses of the 1950s, writing a dozen of his more enduring novels in just 19 months. He also wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory).

Jim Thompson is the best suspense writer going, bar none * NEW YORK TIMES * Casts a dazzling light on the human condition * WASHINGTON POST * I don't read many books twice but Jim Thompson novels - due to their concise, dirty power, their relentless violence and purity - can always draw me in for a second time. Some of the most psychological crime writing ever done. I love James M Cain and Elmore Leonard but Jim Thompson holds a special place in my heart. One of the toughest crime novels ever * NEWSWEEK * My favourite crime novelist - often imitated but never duplicated - is Jim Thompson -- Stephen King If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich could have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it * WASHINGTON POST * The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction * CHICAGO TRIBUNE *