By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper
boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel
pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other
occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America
in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his
kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep
them all alive.
A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, ROUGHNECK chronicles
the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and downright unlawful grifts of
the man who would become one of crime fiction's most enduring writers,
in a larger-than-life literary memoir--or wildly entertaining tall
tale--as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so
good.