Bad Boy

From the beginning, Jim Thompson knew he was going to catch hell no matter what he did. And during a childhood spent at the mercy of a father whose schemes put him on the wrong side of the law as often as the right, and a grandfather who knew the bad parts of town like the back of his hand, young Jim learned sin better than any writer had before.

From his rabble-rousing adolescencein the American Midwest, to wasted teenage years in the seedy underbelly of the hotel industry, to Thompson's ...