The Grifters
March 21st 2007 07:15
'The Grifters' is probably one of the more well-known novels from hardboiled crime writer Jim Thompson (he was also responsible for 'The Getaway' and the script for Stanley Kubrick's 'The Killing'). It was adapted for the screen in 1990 by director Stephen Frears, and featured John Cusack, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston in the three major roles. The book itself was published in 1963, and is as gritty and bleak as they come.
This isn't really a straight-forward crime novel but more of a pulpish tour of the lives of lowlife con-artists... immoral opportunists who work and live amongst the scum of society. Thompson paints their world as a sleazy, unpredictably brutal and depressing environment. The motivations of the three main characters isn't always clear, and there are more than a couple of twists in the tail of the piece as a result. At the heart of the novel is the ongoing journey of Roy... a shrewd young man raised to know nothing other than grifting. A series of events, starting with the baseball bat to the stomach and helped along by his antagonistic relationship with his mother, help propel Roy towards a kind of escape. Roy doesn't exactly have an epiphany - Thompson's world is too dark and drab for that - but he moves towards a better way of life. This is most exemplified by the middle section of the novel, where Roy strikes up a brief relationship with a nurse named Carol.
Carol is out of place in Roy's world... the world of grifting has no room for sympathy in it and when he encounters this shy, innocent and sinned-against woman he meets someone who is actually deserving of it for once. This is not a sucker, not another grifter, this is a woman who has endured abominable pain and cruelty. Roy is unable to deal with it, owing to his upbringing and worldview, but it's a remarkable and memorable sequence in what would otherwise be a simple tale of thievery and deception. This, coupled with tragic and incestuous overtones remniscent of Oedipus Rex, make the novel more than just pulp fiction.
A good, no-nonsense read set amongst the hard-knocks pond-life of small-time criminals. Dirty, double-crossing and delicious.
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