Wanted: The Real Jim Thompson : JIM THOMPSON: Sleep With the Devil, <i> By Michael J. McCauley (Mysterious Press: $19.95; 340 pp.)</i>

Paperback thrillers of the ‘50s and ‘60s thrived on their fall-guy heroes, sexy sirens, con men and coldhearted killers. At writing these, Jim Thompson was the best and most original of all the novelists whose first editions bore a 25-cent price tag. In his day, a few appreciative reviewers greeted Thompson’s work with a series of now-familiar quotes that have appeared on the back covers of his books for years.

His work went almost immediately out of print and his reputation mostly flourished in France until a series of ‘80s reprints by Black Lizard Press in Berkeley caught the attention of a new generation of mystery readers (and film makers) and Thompson was “rediscovered” in his own country.

By now the post-modern critical line on Thompson has been pretty well established. “The blackest beast of what is coming to be known as American serie noire, “ writes Robert Polito in his excellent introduction to “Fireworks,” a 1989 collection of Thompson’s short fiction:

“Thompson’s boldest writing about criminals is fueled by a lurid intelligence that bulldozes distinctions between sensational and serious culture. . . . With offhand brilliance, his novels pursue the most debased imaginative materials. . . . Reading one of them is like being trapped in a bomb shelter with a chatty maniac who also happens to be the air raid warden. . . . With so much in motion--the spinning shards of noir formulas, the furtive, often insane narrators--there’s no comfortable place to sit. All . . . is a wasted, sucking nihilism that’s as unsparing as the most lacerating rock and roll.”

With the Thompson renaissance, a full-scale biography was inevitable, and Mysterious Press has produced one in the form of “Jim Thompson: Sleep With the Devil” by the co-editor with Polito of “Fireworks,” Michael J. McCauley. The subtitle refers to the working title of Thompson’s most celebrated book, “The Killer Inside Me,” a Lion original that appeared along with 12 other paperback novels in the most productive period of his career between 1952 and 1955.

Thompson belonged to the vast majority of writers whose lives were decidedly less memorable than their fiction; biographical details and anecdotes aren’t plentiful, and Thompson’s surviving family and friends seem reluctant to discuss his darker edges. McCauley admits that “many key facts proved either unfindable or unavailable,” but contends that the lack of information about Thompson’s life “proved paradoxically appropriate and illuminating.” Would that it were so. As literary biographies go, “Jim Thompson” could have benefited from some more digging and a lot less critical theorizing.

McCauley draws too heavily on Thompson’s fiction to create a hypothetical picture of his life, and he fills out the book with lengthy plot synopses of almost all of Thompson’s 29 novels. Quite simply, this is cheating.

Although one can appreciate a long description of “Now and on Earth,” Thompson’s heavily autobiographical first novel, which is almost impossible to find, too much of the book consists of synopses interspersed with quotations, some of them running as long as 10 or 15 pages. It will take an aficionado of some devotion to summon up the concentration to follow these, and McCauley poses a problem for the readers who, plowing through them, might find their enjoyment of the actual books robbed of surprise--surely not the goal of an appreciative biographer.

The elements of Thompson’s life, however, are engrossing, and much of his writing was autobiographical. Many writers idealize the hardships of their youth; Thompson went just the other way, seeming to emphasize the negative in almost everything.

His father, James, was a hard-luck wildcatter, sometime deputy sheriff and dreamer, in and out of money all his life. The son, Jim, was born in 1906 in Anadako, Oklahoma Territory, and grew up a shy, introspective loner. He worked dry holes with his old man in Texas, caddied at a burlesque house, was a bellboy and a bootlegger, while always thinking of himself as a writer determined to make a living at it.

In the ‘30s, while a struggling contributor to crime journals and small magazines, he became the director of the federally funded WPA Oklahoma Writers’ Project and edited a labor history of the state. Pointing out that all of the people, places and professions known to the father and son recur regularly in Thompson’s fiction, McCauley makes a strong case that Thompson drew heavily from his own life in almost all of his work.

He also successfully parallels Thompson’s lifelong taciturnity with one of his most familiar narrative themes--that men and women use “masks” to hide their true feelings and designs from one another (often deluding themselves in the process). “The Killer Inside Me” and “Pop. 1280,” a later critical success, both are told from the twisted point of view of omniscient, psychotic sheriffs--two epic anti-heroes who murder and manipulate those around them while posing as dumb, affable yokels.

Thompson himself is said to have felt he was pretty good, better than his commercial reception, but his fatalistic attitude made failure something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. After publishing two unsuccessful hardcover novels, he was sought out in the early ‘50s by Arnold Hano, editor of Lion Books, the Republic Pictures of paperback publishing and one of the most consistently creative outfits in the business. It was Hano who started Thompson off on a series of quirky, quickly written novels that have certainly increased in reputation over the years. These include “After Dark, My Sweet,” “A Hell of a Woman,” “Savage Night” and “The Grifters.”

McCauley’s book does not allude to the steady collectibility of the vintage books: A 25-cent first edition of “The Killer Inside Me” recently sold in Santa Barbara for $750; others sell steadily at auctions for $100 to $300, making Thompson the undisputed king of the paperback originals (Charles Willeford is running him a close second).

The book lays out Thompson’s Hollywood career in broad, sad strokes, and again one would wish for more detail. Significantly, Thompson co-authored with Stanley Kubrick the screenplays for “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory.” McCauley acknowledges the debt of the gangster film to Lionel White’s original novel, but does not bother to tell us how much the “Paths of Glory” screenplay owes to the Humphrey Cobb book on which it was based.

Quite a lot of Thompson’s work has been made by French and American film makers (although adaptation of Thompson’s books seem always problematic and it’s questionable whether his contribution to film is more crucial than that of fellow paperback authors David Goodis (“Nightfall,” “Shoot the Piano Player”) or White, whose later book, “Obsession,” in a heavenly marriage of U.S. pulp and nouvelle vague intellect, inspired Godard to make “Pierrot Le Fou.” One can’t complain about a sub-genre that has produced, to name two, Tavernier’s “Coup De Torchon” and Frears’ “The Grifters.”

Still, it is perhaps to Thompson’s credit as a novelist that the many film versions of his work have done as much to enhance his literary reputation as to enrich film history. (For this reviewer, the film that really captures the delirious Thompson spirit is “Detour” by Edgar G. Ulmer.)

When Thompson died in 1977, still turning out TV scripts and novelizations, he left, as McCauley writes, “a body of work growing in pertinence and importance as the 20th Century in America nears its bloody close, and the psychotics of the Thompson world become more and more common in our own.”

If McCauley has only partly succeeded at a most daunting biographical task, aficionados and general readers will find much of interest here. American noir novices will be advised to thumb past the synopses if nothing else, pick up any of Thompson’s books currently in print, and experience one of the darker, more unique talents in modern American fiction.