Roughneck

The hardboiled sequel to the autobiographical Bad Boy, from the author Stephen King calls "my favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated."

By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and hi...