'My favourite crime novelist - often imitated but never duplicated - is Jim Thompson' Stephen King. 'Thompson's writing is dense, lurid, idiomatic, musical in its speech rhythms...alternatively plaintive and obscene...raucous and bitterly funny' Village Voice. 'A blisteringly imaginative crime novelist ... violent, amoral, terse and fast-moving ... a classic American novelist' Kirkus Reviews. 'If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich could have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it' Washington Post. 'A master of the noir crime novel. His vision of small town America ... is uniquely compelling' Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction. 'The toughest crime novels ever' Newsweek. Pop. 1280 was an acclaimed French film under the title Coup de Torchon. Published alongside THE GRIFTERS, THE KILLER INSIDE ME and THE GETAWAY - all in a brand new cover style.

Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. After an itinerant childhood during which his sheriff father was driven from office for embezzlement; and as a roughneck in the Texan oil fields of the 1920s, Thompson became successful as a writer with the pulp fiction houses of the 1950s, writing a dozen of his more enduring novels in just 19 months. He also wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory).