Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.

Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompsons literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.

Thompsons writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. In these works, Thompson turned the derided pulp genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism.

The writer R.V. Cassills has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompsons was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Dont They?, ever wrote a book within miles of Thompson. [1] Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompsons work because The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didnt know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.

Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky and was nicknamed Dimestore Dostoevsky by writer Geoffrey OBrien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompsons The Grifters as 1990s The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.