Thompson, Jim

▪ American author

in full  James Myers Thompson 

born Sept. 27, 1906, Anadarko, Okla., U.S.

died April 7, 1977, Los Angeles, Calif.

      American novelist and screenwriter best known for his paperback pulp novels narrated by seemingly normal men who are revealed to be psychopathic.

      After graduating from the University of Nebraska, Thompson worked in a number of odd jobs before becoming affiliated with the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. He later worked as a journalist for the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times Mirror (Los Angeles Times). Blacklisted for leftist politics during the anticommunist scare of the early 1950s, Thompson was later summoned to Hollywood by director Stanley Kubrick (Kubrick, Stanley) to cowrite screenplays for The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957).

      Thompson's reputation rests on his ability to enter the minds of the criminally insane. The Killer Inside Me (1952) is admired as a chilling depiction of a criminally warped mind; its narrator, a small-town deputy, pretends to be an agreeable hick but is actually a calculating madman who, like most Thompson narrators, speaks directly and colloquially to the reader. After Dark, My Sweet (1955), considered one of Thompson's best works, presents a mentally imbalanced narrator who becomes embroiled in a kidnapping scheme with his lover but kills himself rather than harm her.

      The posthumous publication of two Thompson omnibuses—Hardcore (1986) and More Hardcore (1987)—and a short-story collection, Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson (1988), revived interest in his work as classic hard-boiled crime fiction (hard-boiled fiction). One of his novels, The Grifters (1963), a tale of con artists, was made into a successful film in 1990.

▪ American businessman

byname of  James H.w. Thompson  

born March 21, 1906, Greenville, Del., U.S.

died March 26, 1967, near Tanah Rata, Malaysia?

      American-born Thai businessman who turned Thai silk making into a major industry selling worldwide and became an authority on Thai art. His mysterious disappearance in 1967 became a sensation in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

      The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Thompson graduated from Princeton University (1928) and studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. After working as an architect in New York City from 1931 to 1940, he served as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II in North Africa, Europe, and the China-Burma-India theatre, ending up in Bangkok. In the postwar period, in 1947, he returned to Thailand permanently, became interested in the old cottage industry of silk weaving, and, through his influential contacts in America, began selling luxury silks in New York City and elsewhere. His Thai Silk Company, Ltd., was founded in 1948. He sold to couturiers and achieved a coup in providing the silks used for the costumes of the musical The King and I (1951). By the 1960s business was flourishing and inspired the growth of several Thai competitors in an expanding industry.

      Meanwhile, Thompson became a Thai art collector and built in central Bangkok a splendid Thai-style home (now open to tourists). He became the best-known Western foreigner in Bangkok and perhaps in all Southeast Asia.

      On a holiday trip to the Cameron Highlands of Malaya in 1967, Thompson mysteriously disappeared after leaving his cottage for a walk through jungle trails. No trace of him was ever found, and speculations were that he was kidnapped for ransom or political purposes, or committed suicide, or intentionally ran off to a new life, or—most likely—met with an accident in the rugged, creviced jungle.

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