'The art of Jim Thompson was always a tightrope act, those first-person sadist heroes settling a lot of the writer's psychic debts. Drunk, he would babble on in an agony of guilt about his sheriff father's demise in an old people's home, inventing a death by swallowing mattress stuffing. Not a head you'd want, though you might envy the prose. A great biography' Brian Case, Time Out