Paperback 271: The Killer Inside Me / Jim Thompson (Gold Medal 1522)

Paperback 271: Gold Medal k1522 (1st thus, 1965)

Title: The Killer Inside Me
Author: Jim Thompson
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• The most famous novel by the king of paperback originals. Book is tight and square as the day it came off the shelf. Very faint reading crease and horrible scuffing in bottom right corner are about the only defects.
• This cover is a good example of how paperbacks start to suck, design-wise, beginning in the 60s. Art gets minimized, text takes over. Further, the cover copy is no longer interesting, imaginative, lurid tag lines, but turgid quotes from highbrow folks telling you what great literature this book is. Well, they aren't lying. The book is fantastic. But this reaching after seriousness by crowding the cover with critical acclaim really chafes my aesthetic hide.
• Pink glasses? Really?
• I actually love the reflection of the screaming dame in the lenses, but she's too small to be very interesting. Ten years earlier, she'd have been five times bigger.
• Lou Ford Does Not Look Like This Guy. At least not in my head he doesn't.

Best things about this back cover:

• Booooooooo!
  
• How quaint: the real book critic goes slumming and finds a gem among the 'originals' (books so untouchable he can't even refer to them without first putting on scare quotes).
• If the French like it, it must be good.
• Among those on this comparison list, only McCoy is remotely comparable to Thompson. The other guys (both masters) write P.I. novels with P.I. heroes and an entirely different sensibility. If Sam Spade were a murdering sadist, then there'd be some basis for comparison.

Page 123~

Howard kept his seat. His face looked like a blob of reddish dough, but he shook his head at Jeff and kept his seat. Howard was really trying hard.

~RP

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Paperback 50: Mysterious Press 40827-8

Paperback 50: Mysterious Press 40827-8 (1st ptg, 1989)

Title: Fireworks: The Lost Writings
Author: Jim Thompson
Cover artist: Stephen Peringer


Best things about this cover:

• Not a lot - I've included this in my collection only because it contains a bunch of otherwise unreprinted Jim Thompson stories. I also wanted to give you a sense of the deterioration of cover painting as an art form. This is done with computers, and it's pretty unimaginative and uncatchy. I do, however, love the work that Mysterious Press has done keeping old hardboiled writers alive and in print. One of the editors of this collection, Robert Polito, wrote the great Thompson biography, which I've mentioned before. You should read it.

I should add that I called this book a "first printing," even though it's unclear to me what to call it. It reads "First printing: August, 1989," but those numbers at the bottom of the publication page have the "1" missing, which makes me think this is a second printing of a first edition. Modern ways of determining first, second, etc., are overly complicated and bug the crap out of me.

RP

Paperback 11: Gold Medal k1502

Paperback 11: Gold Medal k1502 (PBO, 1964)

Title: Texas by the Tail
Author: Jim Thompson
Cover artist: Unknown

Yours for: $50

Best things about this cover:

• Are you kidding me? Look at it! There's a naked redhead toweling off in a giant cocktail glass! That's pretty much the paperback cover jackpot.
• I love how TAIL is right by her TAIL - saucy.
• This cover is too texty, with too many different font sizes and color changes, but I do like how the text sort of tumbles down the side of the girl and the glass.
• Is she supposed to be standing in champagne? Wine? Beer? I wish I knew. She seems to be enjoying it.

This is the first Jim Thompson original that I ever owned. You can see that it's in pretty sorry condition, mainly from grime and overall dinginess (plus someone drew some weird symbol just underneath the bowl of the glass). Still, it cost me almost $50, which I happily paid. At the time, I was just happy to have my hands (finally) on a real, honest-to-goodness Jim Thompson PBO. Now, I wouldn't spend that much money on something this beat up. But I still love the book, even if it is a late-career Thompson with less-than-stellar cover design. The naked-woman-in-giant-glass thing makes it so easy to overlook all the negatives.

RP