"What are you going to say when you're drowning in your own dung and they keep booting you back into it, when all the screams in hell wouldn't be as loud as you want to scream, when you're at the bottom of the pit and the whole world's at the top, when it has but one face, a face without eyes and ears, yet it watches and listens..."

Jim Thompson's world was dark, dark, dark. Seldom in 20th century literature has a writer thrown up so many desperate visions of everyday men spiralling into a hell of their own making - bungling criminal amateurs, hotel clerks, wildcat oilmen, grifters, drifters and sinister sheriffs - all riddled with diseased obsessions and pinioned under the stiletto heels of venal, ruthless women. And no one else has come close to luring the reader into the mind of a psycho by so perfectly encapsulating the banality of evil. The author of The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters and The Getaway set up his stall in the basement bar of Heartbreak Hotel and never went away.

Thompson used to boast he was born in a jail cell. In fact, he was born above one, on 27 September 1906. His father, James Sherman Thompson was the sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma, a place described at the turn of the century as "the last refuge of cattle thieves, gunfighters and train and bank robbers". 'Big Jim's exploits in those lawless times fuelled the imagination of his writer son. The ruin he brought upon himself gambling and drinking, the many desertions his family endured and his pitiful end inside an old people's home inspired JT Jnr's most devastating prose.

Thompson's childhood was spent in Nebraska - where Big Jim would dump his brood when on the run - and West Texas, where he would reappear, prospecting for oil and hoping for the big-time. These locations provide the settings for Thompson's future novels, along with the fuel of Oedipal rage.

As a young man, Jim took the hardest jobs imaginable to provide for his mother and family. At 15, he was working long, exhausting hours as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas, an experience that spawned three novels, A Swell-Looking Babe, Wild Town and Texas By The Tail. It also provided the prompt for his life-long alcoholism: Jim turned to whisky to get him through the nine hour-a-night, seven night-a-week routine.

He then took a job on the West Texas oilfields, where he also began his "first serious writing" amid the hobos and roughnecks in the shadows of the wells. Jim rode the hard rails of the Depression era, drifting through the South in search of work. He backed up his earnings with a 'true crime' enterprise - his mother, sister and wife scoured Texas for sensational murders he could write up for the popular pulp True Detective, adding posed photos of them - and himself - for accompanying illustrations of the 'crime scene'.

In 1942, he finally secured a publisher. Two weeks after the deal was struck, his father died, senile and penniless. For the rest of his life, Thompson would claim that Big Jim killed himself by stuffing mattress wadding down his throat. At the time, fuelled by grief and booze, he bashed out his first novel Now And On Earth. Four years, one breakdown and several jobs later, he completed his second, Heed The Thunder.
In between, he grafted as a journalist, estimating that "in three years I was hospitalised 27 times for alcoholism". But, after the publication of Recoil in 1950, Thompson banged out a string of his most devastatingly brilliant titles: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell Of A Woman, After Dark,

My Sweet and The Kill Off. These 1950s novels were cast from the characters and circumstances of Thompson's 1930s youth, but the glowering amorality and upturning of perceived values they radiated belonged inextricably to the post-WWII decade. They sold like wildfire.

In 1956, a 26-year-old Stanley Kubrick asked Thompson to adapt Lionel White's Clean Break. Retitled The Killing for the screen, it became Kubrick's breakthrough movie. Thompson's multi-narrative, tightly-wound script about a racetrack heist going wrong would resound down the years in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Jim also collaborated on Kubrick's next venture, the World War I drama Paths of Glory.

In 1957, Thompson began his most subversive novel ever, The Getaway, which, in 1972, led him back to Hollywood but in less happy circumstances: the film was hijacked by its star, Steve McQueen. The Getaway, the novel, begins as a routine caper and ends, steeped in a sense of Biblical retribution, with its bank robber protagonists Doc and Carol McCoy trapped in the Mexican purgatory of El Rey, having previously lain low in underground caves and a room made from shit. It wasn't an ending McQueen was likely to relish.

Long before that version was even a glimmer, Thompson had tried to get Kubrick interested. Kubrick, in turn, got Thompson to work on another proposed caper, I Stole $16,000,000 but Thompson collapsed with a stroke. Kubrick paid him, but the film was never made. In ill-health and bedevilled by drink, Thompson's creative juices were drying up.

In 1962, he returned to form with The Grifters, which, in 1990, became Stephen Frears' masterful movie. By this time, Thompson's son Mike, afflicted with the family's alcoholic curse, had attempted suicide. Jim poured his distress into a nightmarish portrayal of his own father, thinly disguised as the murderous lawman Nick Corey, in Pop. 1280. His next novels, 1965's Texas By The Tail and 1967's South of Heaven were similarly autobiographical.

Thompson spent his twilight years in the gloom of Musso & Franks bar in Hollywood. Sometimes Hollywood went looking for him. Writer Tony Bill wanted Jim to help adapt The Killer Inside Me as a vehicle for Robert Redford. Thompson wanted to do South of Heaven instead. He was paid $10,000 but the film was never made. He was then offered the screenplay for The Getaway. He wrote two drafts before being replaced with Walter Hill. Thompson wasn't the only one disappointed with the picture. When Peckinpah saw McQueen's final cut, he pissed all over the screen.
His final years blighted by cataracts, further strokes and a heart attack, Jim Thompson died on 7 April 1977. "Just you wait," he told his wife, "I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years." Today, he is about the hippest name you can drop.

"We just got this world, then the fireworks, boy. Just this world, then the fireworks, and we ain't got long for this world."