On 7 April 2004, Bill Crider wrote:
: Mark: Lou Ford appears as a secondary character in WILD
TOWN.
Which, it turns out, is what I'm reading. POP. 1290 is set in
the South, and I looked at it, then grabbed WILD TOWN (1957),
which is set the West or "Far West" of Texas. I'd forgotten
the book completely and was surprised when Lou Ford showed
up, because the last time I saw him he'd just killed his
girlfriend and then been shot to bits in THE KILLER INSIDE ME
(1952). I looked it up in Robert Polito's SAVAGE ART: A
BIOGRAPHY OF JIM THOMPSON (New York: Knopf, 1995).
| WILD TOWN (Signet, September 1957) is neither a sequel to
THE KILLER
| INSIDE ME nor properly a prequel, although the action
likely occurs
| decades previous, just after the oil boom of the 1920s. The
novel
| transpires, rather, in a parallel universe to THE KILLER
INSIDE ME, an
| inverted mirror world called "Ragtown," where everything
the reader
| *knows* about Lou Ford turns out to be wrong. The West
Texas setting
| may be similar--Ragtown resembles an earlier incarnation of
Central
| City--along with some of the characters, such as Ford's
girlfriend Amy;
| the deputy sheriff may still be a posturing "country clown"
belching
| cornpone and dread. Yet as Thompson told his cousin about
the plot of
| all stories, "things are not as they seem." Ford goes to
bed with the
| devil, but this time he rises with the angels.
I skipped the rest to avoid spoilers.
How do Thompson's Texas settings, from the '20s to the '50s,
seem to the Texans on the list? How's he regarded down
there?
Polito adds:
| WILD TOWN showed Thompson for the first time winking at his
Lion cult,
| if cult can be the word for so sizable a readership as he
collected by
| the late 1950s. Over the following thirteen months the
novel sold a
| vigorous 238,987 copies. With his $2,500 advance, Jim quit
New York
| City for California, a New American Library author, in May
1957
A quarter of a million copies seems like excellent
sales.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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