So, I finally read Savage Night, and it reminded me that awhile back I referenced a blog post that claimed a scene from the book as evidence that Jim Thompson was “stone crazy”, something that gets thrown around all the time:
But horrible things come shambling out in all his work. The hero of Savage Night — a terminally tubercular degenerate assassin — encounters a man who tells him a long, involved and plot-bending account of a farm he happens to own, a vagina farm, where he raises acres of vaginas. This is in the middle of an otherwise fairly conventional fifties noir thriller. And this character’s name is “Jim Thompson.”
Having read that scene now, I can say that it doesn’t read crazy to me at all. It reads to me like a savvy skewering of what Thompson considered his own hackwork, and those who consume it.
Here’s the opening:
He was a writer, only he didn’t call himself that. He called himself a hockey peddler. “You notice that smell,” he said, “I just got through a dumping a load of crap in New York, and I ain’t had time to get it fumigated.” All I could smell was the whiz he’d been drinking. He went on talking, not at all grammatically, like you might expect a writer to, and he was funny as hell.
He said he had a farm up in Vermont, and all he grew on it was the more interesting portions of the female anatomy. And he never laughed or cracked a smile, and the way he told it about it he almost he almost made you believe it. “I fertilize them with wild goat manure,” he said. “The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads howling.”
I grinned, wondering why I didn’t give it to him. “I didn’t know goats howled,” I said.
“They do it if they’re wild enough,” he said.
“Is that all you grow,” I said. “You don’t have bodies on any of — those things?”
“Jesus Christ!” He turned on me like I’d called him a dirty name. “Ain’t I got tough enough as it is? Even butts and breasts are becoming a drag on the market. About all there’s any demand for is you know what.”
