The main character is Nick Corey, sheriff of Potts County, the 47th-largest county in what is probably Texas. 1280 is his true masterpiece, a preposterously upsetting, ridiculously hilarious layer cake of nastiness, a romp through a world of nearly infinite deceit. Which is the best? The smart money tends to pick either The Killer Inside Me, which was turned into a brilliant film in 2010 or Savage Night, which is perhaps the most psychologically dark thriller ever. Thompson wrote dozens of pulp novels, often several in a single year. His cheese on toast is like melted Gruyere over crusty fresh baguette. Though he was the pulpiest of pulp writers, he was also the densest and most intense and most complicated. And the best preparer of hard-boiled crime fiction, or at least my favorite, was Jim Thompson. Just as the fanciest chefs will happily eat simple cheese and toast so long as it's prepared properly, literary writers will happily read genre fiction, as long as it's prepared properly. Stephen Marche's latest book is How Shakespeare Changed Everything. Author Stephen Marche writes a monthly column for Esquire and is a frequent contributor to The Toronto Star.
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