Un hombre que se hace llamar Carl Bigelow llega a Peardale, una población de mala muerte situada a unos ciento cincuenta kilómetros de Nueva York. Nadie se acercaría a ese lugar sin una razón de peso pero, desde luego, Bigelow la tiene. A pesar de ser alguien de aspecto inofensivo, ha viajado hasta allí para cumplir un escalofriante encargo: matar a Jake Winroy, un hombre que ha sido testigo de un crimen y que, si acaba declarando, puede hacer mucho daño a gente poderosa. Bigelow tiene que cometer el asesinato discretamente y sin fallos; le va en ello algo más que su reputación.

this book is full of miserable characters; a bunch of low lifes in a small town somewhere outside of new york. And yet, for some reason, I just ate it up. Four stars.

The protagonist is a 5 ft tall man with tuberculosis. It's funny, in the 1930s when this was set, that a cough was quieted by smoking another cigarette:
"I started coughing a little, and lighted a cigarette to quiet it. I wondered whether I could risk a few drinks to pull me out of my hangover. I needed them. I picked up my two suitcases and headed up the street."

In the House that he's boarding in, the maid of all work is ruthie, a young woman with a birth defect. Her left leg stops at her knee, and a tiny little foot juts out from it. She uses a crutch to get around.
"I knew how she felt. Why wouldn't I know how it felt to be a kind of joke, to have people tell you off kind of like it was what you were made for? You never get used to it, but you get to where you don't expect anything else."

The protagonist gets together with the wife of the man that he's been hired to kill. Seems like a pretty stupid idea to me, but he just wanted to have sex with her. Well, once he had sex with her, he was sick of her come up but now he's stuck with her. They pretty much disgust each other, but for the sake of the money that they're planning to get, they have to pretend:
"I woke up with her feet on my chest, feeling like my ribs had been caved in. It was 9:00. I'd had less than 4 hours sleep. But I knew I wasn't going to get any more, so I slid out from under her and got up.
I went to the toilet and took a bath, being as quiet about it as I could. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, fitting the contact lenses into place, when I saw her looking in the doorway. She didn't know that I saw her. It's funny how people will watch you in a mirror without thinking that you're bound to be watching them. She was looking at the lower part of my face, my mouth, and I saw her grimace. Then, she caught herself, catching on to the fact, I guess, that I might be able to see her.
SHe moved back into the bedroom, waited a moment, and headed for the door again, making enough noise for me to know that she was up.
I slipped my teeth into place. I guess my mouth did look bad without them - kind of like it belonged in another location. But I didn't give a damn whether she liked it or not.
She came in yawning, drowsily scratching her head with both hands. 'Gosh, honey,' she said. 'What did you get up so early for? I was sleeping so-ahh-- excuse me - so good.'
'it's after 9:00,' I said. 'I figured I'd been in bed long enough.'
'Well, I hadn't. You woke me up with all your banging around.'
'maybe I'd better go stand in the corner.'
her eyes flashed. Then she left, half irritably. 'grouchy. You don't have to snap me up on everything. Now, get out of here and let me take a bath.'
I got out, and let her. I dressed while she bathed and started brushing her teeth -- washing her mouth out a thousand and fifty times, it sounded like, gargling and spitting and hacking. I began getting sick at my stomach; rather, I got sicker than I already was. I threw down the rest of the whiskey fast, and that helped. I picked up the phone and ordered breakfast and another pint. And I knew how bad the whiz was for me -- I've been told not to drink it at all -- but I had to have it."

The Protagonist also has sex with the maid of all work, ruthie. Of course, once he has sex with her, he doesn't want anything else to do with her. But now she "loves" him:
"I smoked a couple of cigarettes, wondering what I'd better do. Whether I better get up and get out on the town -- stay away from the house until the others were up. Or whether I should just stay here in my room until they were up. It would have to be one way or another. Otherwise, unless I missed my guess, I'd have Ruthie on my neck. And all Ruthie was getting from me, from now on, was the cold shoulder. I wasn't going to get caught alone with her. Anytime I saw her, there'd be someone else around. Pretty soon she'd get the idea, and then maybe it would be safe to be friendly with her.. just friendly."

( )

SAVAGE NIGHT is Jim Thompson on simmer. Some dishes are best cooked on low. However, for much of the first half of this book I kept wanting to check if the heat was on at all. All the usual elements are there: depraved souls grasping at the scraps of the good life while mired in desperation. The usual wondering of who is up to what and just what are they capable of is muted by characters drawn without much gusto and a story that seems to meander. The main character spends this part of the book waiting for instructions for a job he doesn’t want—but nothing else seems to be happening either. But then the last third of the book kicks in. As if everyone smells blood in the air there is agitation and the characters come alive and start to move. Suddenly Thompson has the book by the throat and squeezes out a brilliant ending. I was startled that after pushing through much of the book hoping it would end soon to find that I had one of my favorite Thompson endings before my eyes. Maybe one of my favorite endings period. It is reminiscent of another Thompson favorite THE GETAWAY but is better in a way that is almost mystical--certainly surreal. The ending deserves a better beginning—but stay with it. ( )

Jim Thompson has a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest of all the pulp writers. He wrote thirty novels in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s, including The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, Hell of A Woman, The Getaway, and The Grifters. The Getaway was a huge box office hit in 1972 starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. Its 1994 remake was also a hit, starring Baldwin and Basinger. The Grifters also became a big hit in the movies in 1990, produced by Scorsese and starring Cusack, Huston, and Bening. Donald Westlake wrote the screenplay. But watching a movie based on one of Thompson’s books is not the same as reading the original material. Although hundreds of writers have tried to ape his style, there was only one Jim Thompson. His tales are sordid. They are filled with psychopaths and grifters. His heroes are anti-heroes. They are not just criminals, but often mean, violent, sadistic men. Also, his books are filled with a sardonic sense of humor that often leaves the reader laughing out loud.

Savage Night is a tale about a pint-sized contract killer who has been brought out of Arizona retirement to do one last job for “the Man” and Thompson never gives “the Man” a name. He is just a shadowy figure, representing mobster chieftains. It begins with “Little Biggers” arriving in New York after “three days of babes and booze while [he] waited to see the Man.” He then takes the railroad out to some poh-dunk dead- end town called Peardale where Jake Hinson is living – Jake Winroy who is about to testify at a trial that will bring down the gambling interests in the city. He explains that the farther he got into Peardale, the less he liked it. “The whole place had a kind of decayed, dying-on- the-vine appearance.” It was ninety-five miles from the city and nothing there but a small teacher’s college. “There was something sad about it, something that reminded [him] of bald-headed men who comb their side hair across the top.”

Because he looked young for his age, Biggers is to enroll at the college and take a room in the Winroy house and wait for his instructions to off Winroy. He uses the name Carl Bigelow since it is close enough to his real name- Charles Bigger- that he can remember it. Bigger is an odd hero for a book- he is short. He wears elevator shoes. He has false teeth and is barely healthy enough to get around without losing his lunch.

When he gets to the Winroy house, he notes the brown grass and the paint-peeled fence, but then his eyes came up and looked across the street and saw Fay, Jake’s wife, who had a reputation as quite a “stepper.” “She had one of those husky well-bred voices.” “One look at that frame of hers, and you knew the kind of breeding she’d had: straight out of Beautyrest by box-springs. One look at her eyes, and you knew she could call you more dirty words than you’d find in a mile of privies.” But Biggers knows what she is. And, he ain’t falling for her. As he pulls her by the hair up out of the tub, “She stood there on the bathmat, fighting with everything she had to fight with - - offering it all to me. And she saw it wasn’t enough. She knew it before I knew it myself.” And, after that scene, he’d broken the ice but good and she knew who he was now if she hadn’t had a damned good idea before and she knew why he was in Peardale and it was okay with her. “She was stacked. She was pretty. She was just about everything you could want in a woman – as long as you were on top or you looked like you might be on top.”

In the hands of a lesser author, this book would be slow as Biggers bides his time until he does the hit, but Thompson fills that time up with an odd assortment of characters, including a one-legged girl who Biggers takes advantage of, the calculating femme fatale of Fay, the old peculiar bakery manager who must be in on the deal to act so queer (Mr. Kendall), and the sheriff who won’t let up on Biggers. The time is filled with exploiting cripples, plotting to kill his landlord, putting out matches on a woman’s chest, sticking knives in his associates’ necks, and other beastly acts. All the while, Biggers puts on an act as if he were the prince of innocence himself.

One of the oddest episodes is his dalliance with Ruthie, she of he one- legged fame. When she arrived, one good look is all he got, but what he saw interested him. “Maybe it wouldn’t interest you, but it did me.” She had on “an old muckledung-colored coat – the way it was screaming Sears-Roebuck they should have paid her to wear it.” He observes that “the swinging around on that crutch hadn’t done her rear end any harm. If you saw it by itself, you might have thought it belonged to a Shetland pony.”

The ending is Thompson-esque in its strangeness and uniqueness as blood and mental illness take over. This is prototypical nihilism and is found throughout the book such as a scene where Biggers is angry and elbows through a crowd getting on a subway car, noting he had elbowed a woman holding a baby good and wondering if the baby would be better off under the wheels of the train than going through the crap of life.

This is vintage Thompson and it is noir like nothing else you have ever read. Enjoy. ( )

Although hundreds of writers have tried to ape his style, there was only one Jim Thompson. His tales are sordid. They are filled with psychopaths and grifters. His heroes are anti-heroes. They are not just criminals, but often mean, violent, sadistic men. Also, his books are filled with a sardonic sense of humor that often leaves the reader laughing out loud.

Savage Night is a tale about a pint-sized contract killer who has been brought out of Arizona retirement to do one last job for "the Man" and Thompson never gives "the Man" a name. He is just a shadowy figure, representing mobster chieftains. It begins with "Little Biggers" arriving in New York after "three days of babes and booze while [he] waited to see the Man." He then takes the railroad out to some poh-dunk dead- end town called Peardale where Jake Hinson is living - Jake Winroy who is about to testify at a trial that will bring down the gambling interests in the city. He explains that the farther he got into Peardale, the less he liked it. "The whole place had a kind of decayed, dying-on- the-vine appearance." It was ninety-five miles from the city and nothing there but a small teacher's college. "There was something sad about it, something that reminded [him] of bald-headed men who comb their side hair across the top."

Because he looked young for his age, Biggers is to enroll at the college and take a room in the Winroy house and wait for his instructions to off Winroy. He uses the name Carl Bigelow since it is close enough to his real name- Charles Bigger- that he can remember it. Bigger is an odd hero for a book- he is short. He wears elevator shoes. He has false teeth and is barely healthy enough to get around without losing his lunch.

When he gets to the Winroy house, he notes the brown grass and the paint-peeled fence, but then his eyes came up and looked across the street and saw Fay, Jake's wife, who had a reputation as quite a "stepper." "She had one of those husky well-bred voices." "One look at that frame of hers, and you knew the kind of breeding she'd had: straight out of Beautyrest by box-springs. One look at her eyes, and you knew she could call you more dirty words than you'd find in a mile of privies."

But Biggers knows what she is. And, he ain't falling for her. As he pulls her by the hair up out of the tub, "She stood there on the bathmat, fighting with everything she had to fight with - - offering it all to me. And she saw it wasn't enough. She knew it before I knew it myself." And, after that scene, he'd broken the ice but good and she knew who he was now if she hadn't had a damned good idea before and she knew why he was in Peardale and it was okay with her. "She was stacked. She was pretty. She was just about everything you could want in a woman - as long as you were on top or you looked like you might be on top."

In the hands of a lesser author, this book would be slow as Biggers bides his time until he does the hit, but Thompson fills that time up with an odd assortment of characters, including a one-legged girl who Biggers takes advantage of, the calculating femme fatale of Fay, the old peculiar bakery manager who must be in on the deal to act so queer (Mr. Kendall), and the sheriff who won't let up on Biggers. The time is filled with exploiting cripples, plotting to kill his landlord, putting out matches on a woman's chest, sticking knives in his associates' necks, and other beastly acts. All the while, on an act as if he were the prince of innocence himself.

One of the oddest episodes is his dalliance with Ruthie, legged fame. When she arrived, one good look is all he he saw interested him. "Maybe it wouldn't interest you, She had on "an old muckledung-colored coat - the way screaming Sears-Roebuck they should have paid her to
observes that "the swinging around on that crutch hadn't done her rear end any harm. If you saw it by itself, you might have thought it belonged to a Shetland pony."

The ending is Thompson-esque in its strangeness and uniqueness as blood and mental illness take over. This is prototypical nihilism and is found throughout the book such as a scene where Biggers is angry and elbows through a crowd getting on a subway car, noting he had elbowed a woman holding a baby good and wondering if the baby would be better off under the wheels of the train than going through the crap of life.

This is vintage Thompson and it is noir like nothing else you have ever read. Enjoy. ( )