Jim Thompson: ‘The Grifters’

 I think the most interesting parts of Jim Thompson’s novel The Grifters, published in 1963, are about trust.

Thompson is good at showing how predators must have heightened powers of observation to survive. When you don’t trust other people, you don’t really have a capacity to care about them. You see them as prey to exploit or as larger predators to avoid. But while you don’t care about people, you must pay attention to them. If you don’t, you’ll miss a meal or be eaten. It’s the laws of nature at work.

The hero of this story, Roy Dillon, is a grifter. It’s part of his nature — or so it seems to me.

There’s a minor character, a barkeeper named Bert, who comes to see that Roy trusts no one. Roy is missing the faculty or apparatus that makes trust possible. Roy doesn’t trust and therefore can’t be trusted.

Roy doesn’t want to take advantage of Bert and would like to be friendly. But Bert will have none of it. He recognizes there’s something missing in Roy, and that this lack — this missing trait — is not an accident or a mistake but a part of Roy’s nature. It’s something that won’t change.

Hanging with Roy would be like hanging with a tiger who’s not hungry now but will be later.

If you’ve read much in this collection of notes, you might be curious about the sudden interest in classic noire. A friend posed some interesting questions about whether comparisons between Thompson’s book and Greek tragedy would hold up.

I read Thompson’s book, curious and grateful that I have a friend who asks such questions.

Aeschylus believed that when people misbehaved, the cosmos dropped a hammer on them. I think Aeschylus would have liked this story.

• Source and notes: Jim Thompson, The Grifters; New York: Mulholland Books, 2014.