by John McMahon

Jim Thompson spy and silk entrepreneur.

Jim Thompson Master of American pulp.

In 1906 Jim Thompson was born into a wealthy family of American renown in Greenville, Delaware. His father was a mercantile magnet and his mother the daughter of a civil war Union general who would later act as diplomat to England. He attended a prestigious boarding school before going on to study architecture at Princeton followed with a masters degree from the university of Pennsylvania. After completing his degrees he went to work at the firm of Holden, McLaughlin & Associates in New York, designing homes for the east coast rich and enjoying an elite social life that included sitting on the board of the Ballet Russo de Monte Carlo.

At the pinnacle of the US involvement in World war II he was recruited by the OSS ( the predecessor of the CIA) by the Princeton old boy network and stationed at first in Northern Africa and then France. In 1945 he was transferred to Bangkok as part of a detail to oversee the Japanese surrender of Thailand. After serving a year as station chief in Bangkok Thompson decided to stay and go into business.

He foresaw an opportunity for Bangkok to become a destination for the upper echelon of international travelers and took as his first task revamping the Oriental Hotel to a level competitive with the rest of the worlds luxury spots. His hands on approach brought him into contact with a dying Thai silk industry that captured his imagination.

Jim Thompson was born in 1906 in Andarko, Oklahoma Territory where his father was sheriff for a short time before fleeing with his family to Texas under a cloud of embezzlement. The family moved from town to town in abject poverty around the panhandle counties until settling in Fort Worth. Thompson was an ambitious writer even in youth though he quit school at 14 to work as a bell boy at the Hotel Texas.

The job provided abundant opportunities to deal in all the vices the hotel’s prohibition era clientele desired. Trafficking in alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and even acting as a pimp Thompson was earning $300 a week at a time when the average working man took home $15. 

At nineteen, already a chain smoking alcoholic, Thompson had a nervous breakdown.

Just the coincidence of two boys receiving what must have been a common name at the beginning of the American century. A kind of prince and pauper tale; one would be raised in the lap of luxury, his future paved with his fathers gold. The other would scrabble together a make shift living throughout the badlands during the worst of times, maybe scribbling a little on the side. They could have simply lived out the lives prescribed for them. A dandy moving through the elite world of design while dabbling in international intrigue and a laborer moving from oil field to logging crew to warehouse with just enough in his pocket for a bunk and a bottle.

But these two Thompsons’ entwined themselves with ideas they would dedicate their lives to evolving and their names would be forever attached to their respective passions. For some the name Jim Thompson is synonymous with the luminous sheen of Thai silk, for others the same moniker represents a dark and heaving genre of psychological pulp thriller that is uniquely American.

Just about the same time Jim Thompson the designer graduated from Princeton Jim Thompson the writer finished his first novel. Oilfield Vignettes, an autobiographical work based on Thompson’s own experiences as a wild catter over the previous three years. The work was never published but it gained Thompson entrance into a writers program at the University of Nebraska. This stint of formal education lasted less than a year but it got Thompson into the habit of writing systemically. He began publishing short fiction pieces in mystery and true crime magazines as well as picking up work as a freelance reporter. He also became interested in the workers of the wold movement at the time, which led him eventually to join the communist party. 

Meanwhile in Bangkok, Thompson the designer’s own liberal politics guided his business model in Thailand. As he resurrected and industrialized a silk weaving tradition that was nearly abandoned due to lack of patronage he made the women who spun the threads in the impoverished eastern provinces partners in the business. He vowed to not only maintain the cottage industry as an institution but to empower the workers financially.

Thompson took his silk samples directly to the fashion capitals of the world where he wowed designers with the quality of his jewel colored clothes.  In 1951 his silks were spotlighted by designer Irene Sharaff in the Rogers and Hammerstien musical The King and I which created tremendous international demand and guaranteed success.

The war years found Thompson the writer working in an aircraft factory in San Diego where he was investigated by the FBI for his communist activities. Events that informed his debut novel Now and On Earth, a serious work that examined his struggle to write and his battle with alcohol. Though now critically acclaimed the book was a complete failure at the time. Thompson’s next effort Heed The Thunder of the same year saw him steering back toward crime fiction with marked auto-biographical touches. He began forming characters based on the kinds of people he knew personally; laborers, bar flies, drifters and small town sheriffs like his father.

The post war period saw the rise of a new kind of publishing house in America. A cheap print of racy material featuring hard drinking men and loose women illustrated with lascivious covers; pulp fiction was born. In this new world Thompson found his home at Lion Press, who would publish the bulk of his work.

In 1952 Thompson wrote The Killer Inside Me, probably the best known of his works which has been adapted twice as films and referenced countless times in song and print. The book set the mold for his duplicitous main characters. Often a darkly intelligent man of the law fighting psychotic urges while acting as a lovable dupe. The Killer Inside Me was nominated for the national book award and sold over 700,000 copies. Thompson set a furious pace after this success completing another novel in 1952 and 5 per year in 1953 and 1954 all while fighting his constant battle with alcoholism and managing a growing family with little money.

The fifties were a high time in Bangkok for Jim Thompson the silk magnate. He was like no other figure in South East Asia; part of the American elite, an architect, ex- military attache and spy who brought Thai silk to the world. He held court at the Orient Hotel welcoming the creme de le creme to the city until 1958 when he completed his iconic home.

Known simply as Jim Thompson’s house, or among friends as the house by the klong (Thai for canal), Thompson’s house is an elegant integration of six traditional Thai houses built in different styles which Thompson melded into one structure. Changing the individual traditional components only enough to make the whole functional. It was in this house that he held dinner parties nightly. Here the elite gathered from around the world amongst his eclectic collection of artifacts; Ming vases, Belgian glass, Cambodian carvings and Thai stone sculpture.  The house still stands today as an open gallery for the collection and is the best place in Bangkok to view art. 

In 1955 Stanley Kubrick was hired to make the book Clean Break into his first film and sought out Jim Thompson the writer to create the screenplay. Thompson was already in Hollywood seeking movie work to augment the royalties of his book sales. The film came out as the Killing and though Kubrick cheated Thompson of his screen writing credit they collaborated again on Paths of Glory.

Through the end of the fifties Thompson’s writing pace wore down and he began taking on more television and film work; essentially hacking out scripts for short money on long forgotten half hour shows. Despite his meager success in the fifties Thompson never entirely rose from the clutches of poverty nor the pull of the bottle.

By the mid 1960’s Thompson’s creative output had diminished to a trickle compared to the earlier decade. He wrote only five books in ten years, though of those two are considered to be some of his best work (The Grifters, Pop. 1280). Many of his titles remained in print but they sold poorly and his television and screen work dried up. Always in need of money Thompson  began writing tie-in novels based on television shows for a flat fee. Though he sketched out screen plays for two of his novels during the period he couldn’t put anything together and he and his family barely scraped by.

For Jim Thompson the designer success continued un-abated. He moved his company to bigger and better headquarters in Bangkok as the reputation and demand for his silk grew throughout the fifties and into the sixties. At the height of his renown as a businessman and as Bangkok society’s leading light Jim Thompson took a holiday to the Cameroon Highlands in Malaysia to visit friends. On Easter Sunday March 24, 1967 Jim Thompson left the Moonlight Bungalow for an afternoon walk but never returned.

Thompson’s disappearance has been theorized and written about for fifty years. At the time the site was visited by well known detectives, professional jungle guides, Chinese mediums, a Brigadier General and a famous T.V. Psychic who claimed he saw him in held in a cave. The search for Jim Thompson was the biggest man hunt ever put together in Malaysia. Tremendous reawards were promised by the Jim Thompson Silk company, friends and the Malaysian government.  Rumors abounded and became more hysterical as time passed; his OSS background was blamed, some claimed he was abducted by communists, he was eaten by a tiger or that he was simply run over by a lumber truck and then run through a buzz saw. There was a story even that Thompson’s disappearance was his own doing, that he was tired of the demands on his time and just wanted a break. 

The seventies saw Thompson the writer back in bed with Hollywood. Working on scripts with Robert Redford, Sam Fuller and Sam Peckinpaw. Each project was plagued by problems as Thompson argued for the integrity of his writing while the directors and stars cut dialogue to include more action and cleaned up some of the murky psychological undercurrents for the benefit of the box office. After this stint Thompson’s out put ceased all together. In 1976, Thompson, emaciated and disabled though still drinking after a series of strokes, decided in an almost surreal homage to his own creations to simply stop eating and die.

Before Thompson’s death he reportedly told his wife that his work would come back into favor after he was gone. He believed in the books he generated through the fifties. Predicting that time would show he was something other than just another pulp hack.

Of course time has proven Thompson correct. The psychological depths and troubled characters he created are listed as influences by some of the most prolific and successful American crime writers of the last forty years including Steven King, James Elroy and Harry Crews. Musicians have referenced and played tribute to his work in songs, actors and directors talk openly of being fans and filmed versions of his books are still being made. Generations of outsiders have found solace reading his books, forming connections with the degenerates, grifters, and psychopaths who populate his work. 

The mystery of Jim Thompson’s the famous designer’s disappearance among the tea plantations of Malaysia has been the subject of countless books and his silk shops and now restaurants are found in cities and airports all over the world. His famous house still exits today as a cool, cultural refuge from the stifling grind of a Bangkok he couldn’t have imagined. A city driven by greedy materialism, home to a kind of plastic hedonistic tourism that he as an entrepreneurial philanthropist, an intellectual and aesthete would be ashamed of. Even if his dedication to promoting Thailand is in some small part responsible for what it is today.

The legacy of Jim Thompson the writer is not so different. For even those who don’t recognize the name know the stories as they have become sanitized and  integrated into the glut of crime movie and television scripts which seem to be the backbone of contemporary entertainment. His innovative, over the top and sometimes absurdly disturbed characters have become stock players rattling off predictable diatribes of filth laden threats that would have moved a mind like his to yawn. 

Two American boys born within months of one another, given identical names but polar opposite means to start from. Men who diverged from the paths meant for them in pursuit of creating something unique. Each left his indelible mark on the world before slipping off in equally bizarre circumstances. 

Editor’s Note:

Jim Thompson is not the first piece of John McMahon’s writing published in Eastlit. No Man’s Whore was in the January 2013 issue.