Wild Town (Mulholland Classic) by Jim Thompson

Wild Town (Mulholland Classic) Reviews

• 
  Darwin8u

  Jim Thompson has basically written a locked-room mystery in a West Texas, frontier boom town.
  
  
  
  All the hard-boiled pieces are set. There are several femme fatales, a sheriff that seems to be brilliant and quietly manipulative, a slow-witted, hot-headed house detective, and a shabby hotel. Not my favorite Thompson, but that belittles the truth. I love all Jim Thompson's stuff. He writes from both the head and the gut. Each of his novels seem to contain a bit of Crime AND Punishment. They all seem to balance Freud with Nietzsche. Thompson is one of those novelists that for me at least proves that some of the best fiction of the 20th century was genre fiction. Wild Town seems like a modern-day Notes from the Underground. Thompson isn't just writing about crime and criminals. He is tearing apart the bones of society. He is examining the ideas and ideals of America. You can certainly read Thompson as a transgressive, crime fiction writer, but he is so much more. There is another dark river under the narrative's river and the currents and eddies of both might hydrate or drown you, but will certainly carry you into zones you haven't previously been.
• 
  Carla Remy

  12/2018
  
  From 1957. About an oil town in Texas, called Ragtown , because it bloomed into a town with the oil boom, because there were so many people there before there were houses they were living in three walled shacks finished with rags. But then a big hotel is built, and most of the action in this book takes place there. Probably the major Thompson theme is the sheriff or deputy who is either a dumb hick or super smart acting like a dumb hick. This is a good book, with a lively plot which comes to a satisfying conclusion. I really liked the end.
• 
  FotisK

  Φίλος μεν ο Thompson, φιλτάτη δε η αλήθεια! Με λίγα λόγια, σαφώς δεν ανήκει στα αριστουργήματά του. Ευχάριστο, αλλά πέραν αυτού, ουδέν.
• 
  Steven

  Although not the main protagonist, Lou Ford, a character from two other classic Thompson novels - The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 is nonetheless the prime mover as he sets things in motion by releasing Bugs McKenna from jail and arranging his hire as a hotel detective. Plenty of noir dealings and double dealings, but the plot and the narrative shifts are almost incomprehensible at times. The ending, where Lou Ford spends five pages describing what really happened, pretty much confirmed my sense that Thompson had lost control of the narrative and had to tell us what he'd fail to show in the course of the novel. Not Thompson's best, but it does have buried within some details best described as the Lou Ford origin story.
• 
  Paul

  A ragtown (Wild Town) in the oil fields of West Texas;
  
  Mammoth sixteen-wheeled trucks lumbered down the street toward the oilfields. The smell of white-corn whiskey drifted from doorways. There was an incessant tinkling of juke-boxes, a clang-clinking of slot machines, the rattle and smack of dice and the whirr-and-click of roulette wheels. The noise rose and fell, a chorus that faded with the passing of one doorway and picked up, in perfect tempo and tune, at the next.
  
  Essentially a prequell to
  , although they can be read separately. The only characters both books share are deputy Lou Ford and his fiancee Amy and the insideousness of Ford is not as evident in Wild Town.
  Although, we do see glimpses;
  
  He moved unhurriedly, effortlessly; he was completely unruffled and the cigar was still in his teeth. And yet he gave the impression of raging, barely controllable fury. It came from the very deliberation of his movements, perhaps: a feeling that he was building up, relishing and prolonging the savagery, forestalling the cataclysmic climax that would end his game.
  4.5*
• 
  F.R.

  I’ve never read a bad Jim Thompson. The world he creates is so real and yet so his, you can almost smell the cheap whisky and desperation. This is another great tale of suckers, hard dames and homicide, with an ending that defies expectations to such an extent it is brilliant.
• 
  Jade Aslain

  This is the eleventh Jim Thompson I've read so far, and the most exciting. Certainly the most eventful. It just might be my favorite.
• 
  Dylan

  Not the best Thompson (see The Criminal for a perfectly formed noir), but still a sizzling, hot little thriller. Hard to engage with the characters here, and they are almost caricatures, drawn without the usual Thompson eye for subtle shades of colour. The plot is rather thin, but plot was never really the point of Thompson's work - it's the zingy one liners, the oppressive noir atmosphere, and his Dostoevsky like ability to draw complex, layered and morally compromised characters. Everyone in Wild Town has something to hide, but it's made pretty obvious pretty quickly what it is. Jim Thompson was incapable of writing a bad book, and this is still worth reading, just not up there with his best.
• 
  Bobby

  Perhaps not top shelf Thompson, but fans of his will enjoy this much tamer whodunit tale of murder and extortion set in and around The Hanlon hotel in a west Texas oil boom town.
  
  Bugs McKenna, ex-cop and ex-con all rolled into one lug, is fresh out of jail and is given a hand-plucked opportunity to be the house dick at the Hanlon (that's house detective, you pervs). Things seem to be on the up and up for 'ol slow-witted, but not stupid, Mckenna... until a little bit of murder and a missing five thousand dollars threatens to unravel McKenna's relatively calm and quiet fresh start.
  
  Then for good measure, mix that in with a cast of a few femme-fatales, an eccentric wheelchair bound millionaire, a near virginal school teacher, a roster of roustabouts in the hotel's employ, and not least of which, a county sheriff who just so happens to be Lou Ford, and suddenly Bugs is caught up in yet another no-win situation that he can't escape from.
  
  And yes. That Lou Ford. A man who can give even the hardest of Thompson fans shivers down their spine. But Wild Town doesn't appear to exist in the same universe as The Killer Inside Me, despite a few characters making appearances here. He may, or may not be, the same Ford as depicted in Thompson's most well-known novel, but anytime Ford's around (and he seems to damn near be omnipresent here), you know that sonofabitch is always up to something.
  
  There's not nearly the level of sex and violence here as you'll find in other works of Thompson. Don't worry though, there's still some to have. The impending sense of doom isn't as heavy here. By and large the worst thing that could happen in Wild Town is that you catch a bum murder rap, or maybe someone offs you relatively painlessly. For Thompson, that's not too bad. It's not like a descent into maddening insanity or anything like that.
  
  Wild Town by Jim Thompson - 3 out of 5 hotel graveyard shifts.
  
• 
  ?0?0?0

  I still haven't read a Jim Thompson book I found to be underwhelming, and now added to the list of works that grabbed me, is "Wild Town", a mystery set in a Texas town that went rich from oil and then never amounted to anything more than what the place is now termed, Ragtown. Lou Ford, the psychopath we accidentally fell in love with from "The Killer Inside Me" plays a key role as one of the side characters that might be in on a blackmail operation against a wife-beating, former convict who now holds court as the house dick to the one hotel in town. The hotel's owner and his dopey wife, co-workers, and Lou's girlfriend round out the supporting players in yet another dive into the lonely, mad, and mysterious world of Thompson's mind. What makes "Wild Town" work so well is the depiction of alcoholism: the horror of it is written to make it out to be just as horrifying as any plot that Lou Ford could concoct, and the passages where it hits Bugs, the house detective, the hardest are some of the most painfully true moments in any Thompson novel. The constant repeating of life being empty, grey, and somewhere lower than low add to the melancholic mood, but don't let this fool one from reading it: this is a mystery where I thought I knew the answer, only to be shown differently, and then I thought I had most of it only for another piece to show up and dissolve that notion, and this repeated until the final five pages, where most of the surprising truth is exposed, hardly correlating to any theory I'd thought of. If there's any redeemable characters here, they're still coloured with so much dirt that it's difficult to tell, but who the hell cares, the pages demanded turning and the prose was some of Thompson's best, it's hard to resist that.
• 
  Richard Schaefer

  In its own right, Wild Town is a decent novel; not Thompson’s best, but far from his worst. Where it suffers is in Thompson’s unfortunate decision to make it a prequel to The Killer Inside Me, one of his most beloved and best novels. By showing us deputy Lou Ford from an outside perspective (as opposed to the first person narration in Killer), he undoes much of the mystique inherent of the question: how much is Ford actually getting away with, and how much does he only THINK he’s getting away with? Wild Town presents him as a deputy who runs the town (different than what we see in Killer), everyone knows he’s on the take (different than Killer), and most people know he’s smarter than he lets on (it’s crucial to Killer that most people DON’T know this). Most damning of all, it makes Ford seem like he’s not such a bad guy. Oh boy. All this was very distracting from the book’s plot about a hotel dick who is maybe being framed for murder. He’s an interesting character, but it was hard to notice amidst the chaos of Thompson tearing down the legacy of one of his best books.
• 
  Joseph Hirsch

  You can find noir/crime writers who have a better eye for action, and a better sense of pacing than Jim Thompson. What you can't find (outside of perhaps Charles Willeford or Lawrence Block) is someone who can take you as deep into a very dark psyche, and illuminate its byways and least-haunted corners.
  
  "Wild Town" is not my favorite book by Jim Thompson, nor do I think it ranks near the top for most of his hardcore fans (which I'm not). But it is a book that, like all of his better works, gets under your skin and leaves you feeling chilled, haunted and experiencing a kind of forlornness that we tend not to associate with pulp paperbacks.
  
  "Wild Town" opens with David "Bugs" McKenna blowing into Ragtown, Texas like a bad wind. Bugs is a drifter whose life has mostly been one hard break after another, and as we get to know him better (or think we do), we see that he brings a lot of the trouble upon himself. He's a mass of unexamined contradictions, a petty criminal who adheres to a strong ethical code, a man who can be calculating and cruel with women and yet at times becomes as shy and tongue-tied in their presence as a school boy. He is, like all of Jim Thompson's characters, a real three-dimensional person.
  
  Bugs gets a break from a local lawman who lets him stay in town despite his unsavory past, and then he gets another break from a wheelchair-bound oil tycoon with a young wife, who hires him to work in his hotel as a private detective. Somebody in the hotel dies, perhaps by suicide, maybe murder, and as suspicions gather, all of the story's characters- sheriff, oilman, young trophy wife, house dick- cross paths and vie to escape blame and pin it on someone else.
  
  The read drags in places, as Thompson is given to digressions, and the ending is a bit of cheat (the culprit Thompson finally choses is a copout, I think), but in terms of tone, atmosphere, and characterization, it's a hard act to follow. Recommended.
• 
  Jake

  The Year of Jim Thompson begins with what according to GoodReads is his most popular book that I have yet to read: Wild Town. While it had some bumps, it was good and reminded me of how much I love Thompson’s work, especially after the two I read last year were too vulgar (King Blood) and too dull (Now and On Earth).
  
  This is classic Thompson with a twist: a locked room mystery that hooks the prototypical Thompson sucker in a bind with the prototypical Thompson puppeteer (Lew Ford from The Killer Inside Me, who is, as far as I know, the only character Thompson recycled). What you have here is basically if Knives Out took place in 30s Texas, and was written by a drunk, potentially homicidal nihilist.
  
  The mystery itself is interesting enough, I suppose although the twist, while fun, didn’t surprise me. But one doesn’t read Thompson books for the mysteries. One reads them for the bleakness, the manipulation and metaphysics filtered through the lens of a lower class southwestern American. Thompson has the “dimestore Dostoevsky” label for that reason.
  
  While this isn’t the most existential of his novels, one can feel how he effectively brings the weight of his disturbing universe on poor Bugs McKenna, a man who trouble seems to find in part because he can’t help himself. I was waiting and waiting for poor Bugs to catch his break, and I won’t spoil whether or not he does, but Thompson’s ability to get into the heads of the men he writes and breaks down trying to find salvation in a merciless world is a skill I have yet to see another writer possess.
  
  This isn’t top shelf Thompson: the middle is too messy and plot is not his thing. But it is a good endeavor by his lofty standards and a great start to the Year of Jim Thompson.
• 
  Piker7977

  Bugs McKenna has a short fuse and knack for finding trouble. Once found, the results, usually violent, make him up and go to a new place looking for a fair shake. That is how he wound up in Ragtown, Texas working as a hotel dick for a wildcat oilman. There is a lot to challenge his quick temper at the job including the boss's wife (wheet whew), a couple of middle-aged bellboys who like to wail on each other, an alcoholic hotel manager who does his job while on a bender, a spicy maid name Rosie, a crooked deputy sheriff named Lou Ford (yes, THE Lou Ford), and Ford's fee-an-say Amy Standish; hubba hubba.
  
  In one way, shape, or form, it seems like all of these folks are out to make Bugs's life miserable. However, a couple are trying to frame him for murder and blackmail which raises the stakes and plays on his shady past and violent reputation.
  
  While not the best of Thompson's work, Wild Town does have a few good characters. The best illustrate quick tempers, mental illness, and troubles with booze. While these are the most compelling parts of the book, they are also a little sad as I have a suspicion Thompson may have been writing from personal experience.
  
  Wild Town is for the Thompson fan rather than the neophyte.
  
• 
  Gibson

  Detective per necessità
  
  Bugs ha un passato travagliato, tra botte alla moglie, poliziotti uccisi e prigione, prigione e ancora prigione.
  Agli occhi del mondo, le sue ragioni non importano, non fanno differenza.
  Eppure Bugs ha un codice morale in grado di renderlo migliore di molti ex detenuti, ed è questo che intuisce Lou Ford, vice sceriffo dalla personalità complessa, quando decide di dargli il lavoro di Detective di un hotel.
  
  Godibile, ma un Thompson meno imprevedibile del solito, soprattutto nel finale, solitamente un suo punto di forza.
• 
  Eddie Generous

  Engaging, suspenseful, totally satisfying. I'll be one sad donkey when I get through his 29 (I think) books.
• 
  jennifer

  For some reason, local sheriff Lou Ford releases Bugs McKenna from jail and gets him a job at the nicest hotel in town as the house detective. Bugs can't stop wondering why Ford would do that for a stranger, one with a police record of violence, but he quickly begins to suspect that the smiling, drawling sheriff has a plan that needs a fall guy.
  
  If you're like me and discovered Thompson through The Killer Inside Me, you'll be thrilled to find that he's plucked some of his characters from that amazing book and dropped them here. While this isn't a sequel, Lou Ford is again the creepy sheriff of a small Texas town and he is again engaged to sweet Amy and messing around with Joyce the Hooker ( her status is just slightly more elevated in this go-round), but the book is narrated by nervous Bugs, who just knows that somebody and everybody is out to get him.
  Everything Thompson wrote oozes gritty noir. 4.5 stars
• 
  Mike

  I suppose this is sort of a prequel to "The Killer Inside Me." Sheriff Lou Ford appears here at his manipulative best -- before the cracks started to appear in his armour. He uses school teacher Amy as a pawn in his plans and you just fear for how he'll treat her down the road. I enjoyed this book and seeing a functioning sociopath at work.
• 
  Caspar Vega

  Uninspiring protagonist but neat plot and hey, Lou Ford's in it.
• 
  Dave

  Wild Town (1957) starts out with one of Thompson’s trademarked bizarro characters, Bugs McKenna, a five-time loser who cannot do anything right to save his life. McKenna “The guy was just nuts, people said, as bugsy as they came. He couldn’t take a joke. He didn’t want to be friendly. He’d climb a tree to make trouble when he could stand on the ground and have peace. That’s what they said about him, the man he eventually became. And it was reasonably descriptive of that scowling, sullen, short-tempered man.” McKenna lost his job in the aircraft factory when he insisted on embarrassing the chief engineer’s wife. He lost his role as a military police officer when he shot a general in the hip and refused to apologize. He did full time in prison because he did not grovel to the parole board. Upon getting out, he managed to get in a scrape in every town he set foot in. Seemed like even breathing was a mistake for McKenna. He couldn’t take much more and drifted from town to town. When he came to Ragtown, a west Texas oil boom town, he instigated the situation by challenging the sheriff in the bus station washroom.
  
  And that’s when McKenna meets Lou Ford. Yes, that Lou Ford. Anyone who has read any Jim Thompson knows Lou Ford, his psychotic-deranged deputy sheriff who appears on the surface to be Gomer Pyle, but is much more, much more, underneath the surface. And, tell the truth, that’s the oddest thing about Wild Town. Five years after he published Killer Inside Me (1952) and with 12 novels in between Killer and Wild Town, Thompson reprises the characters of Lou Ford and Amy Standish in a sort-of prequel, but not a prequel. It is as if Thompson did a Twilight Zone twist and put these two characters in a time and dimension warp because they are Lou Ford, mild-mannered deputy who does not need to carry a gun, and innocent little Amy Standish, but then again they are not the same. For one thing, Amy is engaged to Lou, but dates McKenna. Lou abuses Amy here, but she is sort of okay with that. But then again, she falls for loser McKenna. Later in his career, Thompson created Nick Cory in Pop. 1280, who seemed like a Lou Ford character, but at least had a different name and was not engaged to Amy Standish. It is hard to know if Thompson fell in love with these characters or just got lazy and shoehorned them in.
  
  The plot of Wild Town revolves around a hotel in this boomtown, a former wildcatter, now a hotel owner, and the barmaid he took as his wife, Joyce, knowing she was wild and untamed, but realizing that he was stuck in a wheelchair and hoping she could be discreet. You know McKenna is somehow going to come between them, particularly when Ford appoints McKenna, the ex-con loser, as the hotel detective.
  
  You wish that the novel would stay focused on the triangle between these three, but it seems to be a five-pointed triangle or pentagram involving Ford and Amy too. You also wish as a reader Ford was not so laid-back and easygoing and more sinister, particularly when investigating the suicide-not suicide of a hotel employee.
• 
  Jason McCracken

  I thought this was okay for the most part but when it takes 15 minutes to explain all the twist and turns and even one of the characters falls asleep during the exposition, then your book was probably a bit too tricky for it's own good. Also, for any reader that hadn't read
  The Killer Inside Me they'd be excused for thinking that Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is nothing more than a shit-stirring crime-solving mastermind the equal of Hercule Poirot. I guess it's nice to know that in Jim Thompson world no one is beyond redemption but I spent the whole book waiting for him to turn into the Lou Ford I remembered...
• 
  Nate

  One of Thompson's more "problematic" books by contemporary standards, with some troublingly antiquated views on sexuality. I love Thompson's hotel books, though, and this one has some nifty plot devices constructed around that world. Certainly not my favorite Thompson, but satisfying enough if he's your guy. On a particularly interesting note, the sheriff in this one is none other than Lou Ford of "The Killer Inside Me." "Wild Town" was published five years after "Killer," though, so the continuity between the two probably shouldn't be examined too closely.
• 
  A

  Date is a guess. Went to read this today (7/2/21) and was very disappointed that i had already read it! (ACK). The story of a man who made a wild cat oil fortune in texas, but broke his back when the oil gushed, so he is laid up (but tough as nails). His wife is a shady character probably waiting to kill him for the dough. Lou Ford is around as a deputy sheriff and we have a wild man, Bugs, hired by the Hotel Hanlon to protect the rich guy- but you knew it wouldn't be as simple as that. Lots of tough guy in this- great story.
• 
  Liam Green

  readable but not thompson's best
  
  More like 2.5 than 3. The jacket copy bills this book as a sequel or prequel or some sort of companion to THE KILLER INSIDE ME, and indeed features three of its characters in slightly repurposed roles. But in truth, it's on the lesser end of the Thompson spectrum. And yet...it's still a reasonably entertaining read. If you're already a fan of his, you'll probably like at least some of it.
• 
  Erwin

  Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is back and he has a style all of his own. "Wild Town" is really wild but Ford has his finger on everything and seems to be in complete control.
  Thoumpson's books are raw and there is plenty of action and the characters are quite the charm as they are quite bad or a little good. Not much in between.
  
• 
  P.S. Winn

  David "Bugs" McKenna always seems to be in trouble, maybe not always his fault, but that's the life he leads. When he heads to a small town that may change, but you never know just what life might hand you.
• 
  C. McGee

  There is some beautiful writing in here, there always is with Thompson, but the book lagged a bit in the middle. The ending was strong but not enough to make up for the mediocre stretch. Worth a read if you’re a Thompson fan, if you’re not skip it.