Hard-Boiled Legs

The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

1963, Vintage

Occasionally I like to indulge in a bit of fluff from the past that offers very little beyond stylistic derring-do. Like watching old film noirs or listening to Whitney Houston albums, reading these works offers little beyond the satisfaction of false nostalgia. By this I mean there is something comforting (even a little dazzling) in delving into an out-moded genre knowing that it existed as a pure, inimical product of its time. There was only one unique point in history where Courtney Love could record Live Through This or Preston Sturges could have made Sullivan's Travels; moreover, that point in history has passed and cannot be recaptured. That we may view these artifacts - curios, really - of time gone by is (for most of us) false nostalgia that inspires curiosity, devotion and certainly no small amount of bemusement.

This is why genre exercises (particularly in film) often fall flat. The aping of a sincere mode of an expression inevitably comes off as insincere. To take On the Town and turn it into New York, New York is to plunder something special, something earnest, and make it a false artifact. There is a sly knowingness, a "wink, wink" quality that ruins the purity of these outmoded genres.

In some way The Grifters by Jim Thompson is understood best as lacking what it cannot have: earnestness. In contrast with Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (which I wrote about here), Thompson's book fizzles where it is meant to crackle. Its attempts to modernize the dimestore noir genre come off as disingenuous when it's good and quaint when it's bad.

It's a tricky case, though. Thompson published pulp fiction from the early 1940s through the late 1960s. The Grifters falls late in his canon - 1963 - and Thompson had to have been aware of how much the world had changed from the world he possessed with Chandler and Hammett decades earlier.

As such, The Grifters is ultimately a self-conscious work. Thompson struggles in the text to maintain tension in true hard-boiled fashion. The story begins with a small-con grifter named Roy Dillon who is caught performing a con wherein he receives an extra twenty dollars by intentionally confusing a sales clerk. The clerk, who thinks he has caught on to this grift, assaults Dillon with a baseball bat. Dillon lands himself in the hospital with severe internal bleeding.

While Dillon, who values the "freedom of movement necessary to carrying on the grift," is laid up in the hospital he is visited by his over-bearing and nefarious mother whose loose morals and similar occupation is what leads Dillon initially to a life of crime.

His mother, Lilly Dillon, is given Thompson's most careful treatment in characterization. Lilly is a woman who "[knows] how to take care of herself" and whose "fatalistic do-or-be-damned philosophy" preempts maternal instinct in favor of a brand of tough love that has the ring of apathy to it. As a child Roy was treated by his mother with carelessness; he is ostensibly a sibling to Lilly, an annoying fact of life that cannot be discarded.

As Roy matures and his body grows into a handsome figure, Thompson alludes to a softening of her manner towards her son, "a suppressed hunger in here eyes." These incestuous undertones allow Thompson to impel the plot forward as Lilly attempts to insinuate herself further and further into her estranged son's life in his time of need. First and foremost, Lilly takes it upon herself to drive a wedge between Roy and his amoral part-time girlfriend, whose on motivation and backstory grow increasingly suspicious.

Where Thompson falters first is in his inability to maintain the necessary tightness to the plot that permits tension. Thompson traces his characters meanderingly, alternating points of view among Lilly, her son and his girlfriend (and even some minor characters). This alternation would be enough to dissolve tension, but even within each character's self-contained chapters there is a constant switching between backstory and present. The backstories do very little except fill in some character detail that does not directly contribute to the plot of the story and distract from its possibilities for tension-building.

Of course, character writing is an important part of what makes novels great - arguably more important than plot. But Thompson's sense of character ends up being a troubling situation.

Where most pulp fiction would not make avail of its female characters, Thompson should be credited for his significant interest in employing female perspective as part of his narrative. Lilly Dillon, as stated above, is given a good deal more care to idiosyncratic detail and psychological complexity than her son. Female characters abound in the book and their power in moving the narrative forward is a testament to Thompson's attention to the issues of feminism that no doubt pervaded cultural discussion in the early 1960s.

But Thompson's treatment of those women is another issue entirely. The three main female characters who appear in the book represent a sort of trinity of conventional female roles: there is a nurse, the survivor of a concentration camp, whom Lilly attempts to foist on her young son; there is the aforementioned over-bearing, criminal mother whose disinterest in her son gives way to incestuous impulses; and finally there is the girlfriend, whom Roy uses as little more than a commitment-free source of sex-on-demand.

For Thompson, women are defined entirely by their sexuality. Roy views the world in terms of women who use their beauty and those who do not:

[Lilly and Moira] were both members of the same flock; women who knew just what it took to preserve and enhance their natural attractiveness. Women who were either endowed with what it took, or spared no effort in getting it.

Thompson's "it" here is central to the problem of his treatment of women; there seems to be an air of predation here. Women are either naturally given the ability to enhance their "prettiness" with sex, subsequently granting them power, or they devote their lives to masquerading as such.

All of Thompson's women are portrayed as either victims or victimizers of sexuality. Lilly is ostensibly a predator, as her callous attitude toward her son is only able to shift when she can sexually desire him. But even Lilly can be victimized by her weakness. She is portrayed as pathetic, deluded by her false sense of female empowerment, when she is abused by her mobster boss. She loses control of her bladder as he burns her with a cigarette. Her manner becomes obsequious, grateful to the man who has spared her life by beating her.

Moira, Roy's girlfriend, uses sex as a bargaining chip in acquiring things in life. She is fully aware of the "delicate shivering of her breasts and the sensual swing of her rounded little hips" and is unafraid to take advantage of her sexuality to accomplish her goals. While Roy chauvinistically uses Moira as a sexual plaything, Moira uses her body for monetary gain.

In one chapter, Moira is confronted by her landlord on an issue of outstanding rent. Moira has the cash at hand and offers to her landlord that he can have sex with her instead but that he would release claim on the cash. "The lady or the loot," she threatens him. Preying on his weakness of character, she submits her body to him because of the perverse power play it permits her to enact, not because of necessity. In other words, her acting of essentially selling her body can only be read as a malicious act, one of depravity, not an act of necessity.

To drive the point home, Moira laughs during coitus and fails in her attempt to "[repress] merriment."

And finally, his nurse Carol, whom Thompson describes as a "child playing at being a woman", is seduced by Roy who cares nothing for her or for her troubled past of victimization. As Roy takes her to bed, Carol naively hopes that her sacrifice will find some meaning in Roy's hands. "In the drape-drawn dimness of the room," Thompson writes, "she was reborn, and there was no past but only a future." Roy consents to sleep with her only once he has established she is not a virgin. In Roy's mind there is a dichotomy that exists wherein women are either virginal Madonnas who are not to be defiled with sex or experienced women who offer their bodies freely for his (and other men's usage). When Roy discovers the source of her de-virginity, her past as a victim of the Holocaust, he is disgusted not by his carelessness in using her a sex object but by the transformation of his sex object into something that requires reciprocal feeling.

"Yes, I was very young. seven or eight, I think. That was the reason, you see: to discover the earliest possible age at which a female might conceive. It can be very early in life, as young as five, I think..."

Roy wanted to vomit. He wanted to shake her, to beat her. Standing apart from himself, as she was standing from herself, he was furious with her... The pious mourning of sin; the joyous absolution of the sinners; the uncomfortable frowns and glances-askance at those who recalled their misdeeds. After all, the one-time friends, poor fellows, were now our friends and it was bad taste to show gas-stoves on television... And after all, those people, the allegedly sinned-against, had brought most of the trouble on themselves.

To read this, wherein our main character wants to strike a woman because he slept with her and then revealed her victimization as a child in the Holocaust is frustrating enough. When Roy decides she is trying to romantically entrap him, that the story is a ploy designed to create emotional connection, he grows very cold. He rationalizes to himself that she is a "nice girl" and that she does not deserve him to enter in bad faith into a relationship. In Roy's view, what she apparently deserves is to disrobe and keep her mouth shut.

But are Roy's attitudes towards women also Thompson's?

It would seem very clear that Thompson, writing in 1963, is not expressing a hatred for women in the telling of Roy's emotional abuse of Carol. he is calling, of course, attention to Roy's misogyny, his self-centeredness, his inherent greed. He is seemingly coming to the defense of this weak, pitiable woman - but in 1963, would it not have been more heroic to portray a woman in a pulp novel who is not victimized by a man?

The answer is in Lilly Dillon, Thompson lamentable interpretation of an empowered woman. Lilly is a strong character insofar as she can manipulate them (until they threaten her with bodily harm) and is not dependent on them for definition (unless they offer her the promise of sexual satisfaction). Lilly, though a fully realized and truly memorable character, demonstrates Thompson's inability to reinvent the crime novel he knew so well in the context of modern issues.

You might object to my placing the onus of women's liberation so squarely on Thompson's shoulders. Surely it's not his obligation, as a writer of pulp fiction, to accurately encompass the changing tides of attitudes towards women in his novel of petty theft. Isn't it enough that he devotes so much energy to portraying them in the novel? That he demonizes Roy for his mistreatment of them?

But Thompson determines the terms on which we will engage with his novel. The Grifters is clearly a hard-boiled crime novel that has unusual interest in women for a pulp. This unique preoccupation with the role of women and, especially, sex demands that we engage it on these terms. By 1963, Thompson was no doubt aware of the heritage of pulp fiction he had a hand in creating. To include characters more multi-faceted, more carefully assembled, that the typical ingenue or femme fatale portraiture is to call attention to its modernity.

Thompson's Grifters are set, like Scorsese aping the Hollywood musical in New York, New York, in a hard-boiled past that cannot include it. To demand that we treat The Grifter as both a classic genre exercise and as a modern take on said genre is a contradiction that, like Thompson's unvarying definition of women as wielding the promise or the villainy of sex over men, cannot be justified.