Description

Roughneck by Jim Thompson

Paperback – Mulholland Books – Aug 2014 – 224 pages

By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had worked as a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber’s helper, a comedian, and a night bellboy and in more than a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name, his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.

A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, Roughneck chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapes, and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction’s most enduring writers.