By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a b
urlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a nig
ht 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 penn
y 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 comedy of a hard-won
American life, ROUGHNECK chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and
downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction's mo
st enduring writers, in a larger-than-life literary memoir--or wildly entertaini
ng tall tale--as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so g
ood.
