Jim Thompson
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Joe Wilmot can't stand his wife Elizabeth. But he sure loves her movie theater. It's a modest establishment in a beat-down town--but Joe has the run of the place, and inside its walls, he's king. Without the theater, he'd be sunk. Without his leadership, the theater would close in a heartbeat. If it isn't the life Joe imagined for himself, at the very least, it's livable.
Everything changes when Joe falls for the housemaid Carol, and the two can't...
2) Savage Night
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Jake Winroy had no looks, no education, and little else before he'd worked his way to the top of a million-dollar-a-month horse-betting ring. But when the state's latched onto his game, the feds take a bite and the lawyer fees eat away at the rest, all Jake's got left is the bottle and a beautiful wife whose every word is ugly.
Jake's to be the top witness in a major case against organized crime--if he hasn't already kicked the bucket before the...
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This is the Enoch generation.
It is time to get ready.
Jim Thompson takes an in-depth look at a mysterious man known as Enoch. Enoch was an ancient man who has a modern message for our day and time. Some of the questions that will be answered are:
What are the futurists and scientists saying about the 21st Century?
Who are the prophets? What have they said? What are they saying?
Who is the Marvel of History?
Who is Enoch? What can he teach us?
What...
4) The Rip-Off
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Britton Rainstar never knew he could love a woman as deeply as he does Manuela Aloe and be so terrified of her at the same time. It's not just that he thinks she's out of his league. It's more that the longer he stays with her, the closer to death he seems to come. A vicious dog is somehow let loose in his hotel room. He's threatened at gunpoint by a man in a skeleton costume. And when he finally ends up in the hospital, someone pushes his wheelchair...
5) Roughneck
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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 his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.
A bittersweet...
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The first self-loading rifle to see widespread military use, the robust M1 Garand survived the tests of battle from World War II to Vietnam, and it remains a favorite among competition shooters and collectors to this day.
In this heavily illustrated, practical history, author Jim Thompson, a longtime M1 shooter and collector, tells the complete story of the rifle's development, look, feel, and function. A thoroughly researched overview of the M1...
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Nineteen-year-old Tommy Carver desperately wants to make something of himself, but he's got some mighty tall odds stacked against him-a brutal sharecropper father, a secret love affair with his wealthy landowner's daughter, a step-mother devoid of maternal instincts, and even his own short-tempered, prideful ways. The odds only get worse when Tommy is fingered for murder in this shocking, twisting tale that explores sex, American Indian rituals, simmering...
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San Diego in the years before World War II. James Dillon is barely scraping by working a menial job in manufacturing, trying to raise a family and support his elderly mother and sister Frankie at the same time. He drinks too hard--just like his father and nearly everyone in his extended family. With so many people crammed into one home, sometimes there's so much fighting he can barely stand it. But if James can survive the chaos of everyday life long...
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Singing is one of the most repeated commands in Holy Scripture. It's right up there with "believe" and "do not fear." But commands like these can feel vaguely spiritual, intangible, or esoteric. You might not know if you're doing them right. Not so with singing. You just open your mouth and make it happen. And when we do, we often get the sense that God is up to something, that he has designed singing to change us. But how?
How does singing do its...
10) The Alcoholics
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Dr. Peter S. Murphy needs fifteen thousand dollars by the end of the day, or the city of Los Angeles can say goodbye to the El Healtho clinic. A recovery center for the most severe cases of alcoholism in the state--even if no one ever does quite seem to get dry there--El Healtho has been the bane of Dr. Murphy's existence ever since he started running it. But now that its doors are about to close forever, Dr. Murphy finds he'll do anything to keep...
11) Cropper's Cabin
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Tommy Carver may be every inch the angry, rebellious young man his teachers and parents accuse him of being. But sometimes, there are reasons for a fury like Tommy's.
Tommy's relationship with Donna, the daughter of a man he hates almost as much as his own father, has led to more outbursts than anything else in Tommy's firecracker existence. With her unearthly beauty and a passion that rivals Tommy's own, he couldn't help but fall for her. But as...
12) South Of Heaven
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Orphaned by a tragic accident at sixteen, Tommy Burwell's been scraping out a meager existence working dead-end jobs for years. When he and fellow nomad Four Trey Whitey get jobs working with dynamite, making way for a new pipeline across the deserted plains of Far West Texas, disaster ensues. In a matter of days, Tommy is brutally beaten and witness to an act of cold-blooded murder the law can't be bothered to investigate.
When Carol, a knockout...
13) Heed the Thunder
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In the rural town of Verdon, Nebraska, in the early days of the 20th century, you can't go ten feet without running into one of the Fargos. So, Grant Fargo argues to his grandfather Lincoln, it's perfectly all right that he's desperately in love with his first cousin, Bella-she's the only source of intelligent conversation for miles, and in a town like Verdon, it would be hard not to end up with a relative of one kind or another.
Before it all...
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Murder at the Bijou (originally titled Nothing More Than Murder) is noir master Jim Thompson's dizzying tale of deception, adultery, revenge, arson, and cold-blooded murder in Smalltown, U.S.A., Thompson's favorite setting. In this novel, Thompson's first major success as a pulp fiction writer, Joe Wilmot, trying to go straight after a stretch in the pen, finds a movie house in a small crossroads that can use a helping hand and someone with half a...
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It was supposed to be only a temporary job -- something to pay the bills until Dusty could get his feet back on the ground and raise enough money for medical school. After all, there's nothing wrong with being a bellboy at a respectable hotel like the Manton -- that is, until she came along.
Marcia Hillis. The perfect woman. Beautiful. Experienced. Older and wiser. The only woman to ever measure up to that other her -- the one whose painful rejection...
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To everyone he's every played dice with, Mitch Corley seems like the luckiest guy around. But in truth, Corley's fast hands are the only gift fate's ever given him. He's never held down a steady job, and when it comes to women, his luck might just be the worst of all -- his girlfriend and partner-in-crime Red would double-cross him in a heartbeat if she knew just how short on cash they really were. And if Red ever finds out about the wife Corley neglected...
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Frank "Dolly" Dillon has a job he hates, working sales and collections for Pay-E-Zee Stores, a wife named Joyce he can't stand, and an account balance that barely allows him to pay the bills each month. Working door-to-door one day, trying to eke money out of folk with even less of it than he has, Dolly crosses paths with a beautiful young woman named Mona Farrell. Mona's being forced by her aunt to do things she doesn't like, with men she doesn't...
18) Wild Town
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In trouble more often than not, guilty of assault, manslaughter, and honorably discharged from the military by the skin of his teeth, David "Bugs" McKenna can't seem to help doing the right thing at the wrong time--or the wrong thing, every chance he gets.
But when he drifts his way into Ragtown, Texas, things seem to finally be turning around for Bugs. He gets his first job in years as the hotel detective of the landmark Hanlon Hotel. But now...
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"William "Kid" Collins was once a respected boxer. Now he's a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution. One afternoon he meets Fay, a beautiful young widow. She is smart and decent--at least when she's sober. Soon Collins finds himself involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes drastically wrong almost before it even begins. Because the kid they've picked up isn't like other kids: he's diabetic and without insulin, he'll die. Not...
20) The grifters
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"To his friends, to his coworkers, and even to his mistress Moira, Roy Dillon is an honest hardworking salesman. He lives in a cheap hotel just within his pay bracket. He goes to work every day. He has hundreds of friends and associates who could attest to his good character. Yet, hidden behind three gaudy clown paintings in Roy's pallid hotel room, sits fifty-two thousand dollars--the money Roy makes from his short cons, his "grifting." For years,...