The Grifters

Jim Thompson (nicknamed the Dimestore Dostoevsky) is possibly the hardest-boiled of all the hard-boiled fiction writers. He wrote ugly, fascinating, uncomfortable novels. The Grifters (written in 1963) is no exception. It begins with Roy Dillon, a small-time con artist, getting slugged in the stomach with a baseball bat and spending the next several days vomiting up blood before his mother Lilly (also a con artist, unbeknownst to Roy) finds him passed out in a hotel room and gets him to a hospital just in time, where during his recovery, Lilly and Roy's girlfriend Moira (also a con artist, unbeknownst to both Roy and Lilly) face off.

The thing I liked most about this book was that it devotes most of its energy to developing the characters. Not much happens, plot-wise, for much of the book, especially considering the fact that the three main characters are all con artists at the end of their ropes. The novel catches Roy Dillon at a crossroads. He's been a very successful small-time con artist and now has to decide whether to go straight or move on to bigger cons. That decision is complicated by the arrival of his long-estranged mother, and his stomach injury. Although all of the characters are pretty repugnant, they're not entirely unsympathetic. Very small glimmers of humanity show through their cruel, ruthless actions.

Unfortunately, the book overall feels sloppy. An entire novel's worth of action is unconvincingly packed into the last thirty pages or so. There's also an incongruous subplot involving Roy's seduction of an innocent nurse that seems significant for the first half of the book and then all but disappears. If you're interested in Thompson's work, I would recommend the much more consistent (and very, very disturbing) The Killer Inside Me (although be warned, it's a book that's unpleasant in just about every way imaginable).