The Kill-Off (21 page)

After Dark, My Sweet

The Alcoholics

Bad Boy

The Criminal

Cropper’s Cabin

The Getaway

The Golden Gizmo

The Grifters

Heed the Thunder

A Hell of a Woman

The Killer Inside Me

The Kill-Off

The Nothing Man

Nothing More than Murder

Now and on Earth

Pop. 1280

Recoil

The Rip-Off

Savage Night

South of Heaven

A Swell-Looking Babe

Texas by the Tail

The Transgressors

Wild Town

“The best suspense writer going, bar none.”

—
New York Times

“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”

—Stephen King

“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”

—
Washington Post

“Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”

—
New Republic

“The master of the American groin-kick novel.”

—
Vanity Fair

“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”

—
Chicago Tribune

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 1957 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1985 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from
Wild Town
copyright © 1957 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1985 by Alberta H. Thompson
Cover design by Julianna Lee, cover art: Getty Images. Cover copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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First e-book edition, December 2011

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ISBN 978-0-316-19596-6