Heed the Thunder

Old Lincoln Fargo has spent his life engaging in almost every vice imaginable—and his only regret is that he once stole a horse. His son Grant, a shiftless dandy with a resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, is conducting an affair with his voluptuous and volatile cousin. And behind everyone's back, Grandmother Pearl has just signed the family property over to the Almighty.

In the literature of the American prairie, few families are as brawling, as benighted, or as outrageously vital as the Fargos of Verdon, Nebraska. And when Jim Thompson chronicles their life and times, the result suggest Willa Cather steeped in rotguut—and armed with a .45.

Publishers Weekly

Noir writer Thompson, who has been getting a lot of attention lately in paperback reissue and in movie versions of some of his downbeat studies of small, thwarted lives, began rather differently, as evidenced in this reprinting of his second novel, first published in 1946. While scarcely the `` lost classic'' its publisher claims, it is an interesting period piece, an odd mix of social realism and early Dallas. Set in a small Nebraska town around 1914, it tells of the interlocking lives of the mean-spirited, brawling Fargo clan, a charming young lawyer who becomes a crooked politico, an embittered English bank clerk dying slowly of syphilis, sundry vivacious kids, and the glamorous Bella, whose longing to get away to the big city ends in death. Winding up in a Grand Guignol finish, this is very much a young man's book, full of uninhibited energy, mixing scenes that work with ones that emphatically don't, and demonstrating flashes of insight alongside crude tomfoolery. And there are embarrassing bursts of mawkish ``fine writing,'' of cut-rate Thomas Wolfe. But there is also a real feel for small-town life, a clearheaded, populist view of American economic imperatives, and an endearing playfulness that does not survive in the somber later Thompson. (July)

(1906 - 1977) James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He began writing fiction at a very young age, selling his first story to True Detective when he was only fourteen. Thompson eventually wrote twenty-nine novels, all but three of which were published as paperback originals. Thompson also wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory”). An outstanding crime writer, the world of his fiction is rife with violence and corruption. In examining the underbelly of human experience and American society in particular, Thompson’s work at its best is both philosophical and experimental. Several of his novels have been filmed by American and French directors, resulting in classic noir including The Killer Inside Me (1952), After Dark My Sweet (1955), and The Grifters (1963).