The Transgressors (Mulholland Classic)

The book begins with the protagonist taking his beautiful dame out to a working oil well in remote west Texas. First, the drive out to the drilling site was a joke; the remoteness was overblown and completely unrealistic. Then, the main character was such a caricature of a typical west Texas "good ol' boy", that came off pitifully one-dimensional. Hell, I grew up with these people, and just writing realistically about the vast, untapped lode of real-life, larger-than-life characters in the west Texas "awl patch" - even a halfway decent composite - would totally eclipse what Thompson offers. (Note: My "awl field trash" bonafides are impeccable!)Like any book, the first thousand to two-thousand words will make or break it. I held on a bit longer than that, but I couldn't get past the main character, who reminded me of a cross between Jethro Bodine, Burt Reynolds and Charles Manson.

I am being generous giving this 3 stars but I am a long-time fan of Jim Thompson and have trouble ranking his books as sub-par.In this novel, we meet Tom Lord, a man who comes from a cultured background and is an intelligent man but who due to circumstances beyond his control has not lived up to the expectations that he and others placed on him. As a result, he has had to dumb himself down to become a member of the local police force. A job that he finds dull and uninspiring. This leads him to make fun of people in a way that they are not aware that he is mocking them.Through a series of unfortunate events, he loses his land to the oil company and ends up involved in the killing of the man who organised the land deal. This brings the shady underworld figures to town to deal with the issue.I must admit that I did not greatly enjoy this book, the characters were uninteresting and the plot was very "un-Thompson" in its lack of depth and drama.This is very much a novel for Jim Thompson fans only.

The Transgressors fails to make the grade as a novel because it contains far too many preposterous plot elements. Almost nothing that happens in this book rings true. Protagonist Tom Lord comes off as foolhardy and, at times, just plain foolish rather than as the man of breeding and intelligence he is purported to be.A couple of the more minor characters (I'm referring here to George Carrington and Buck Harris) are described in such a way that the reader will be able to recognize them as representing flesh and blood people even though they themselves are over-the-top caricatures. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of The Transgressors' characters bear no relationship whatsoever to anyone inhabiting the real world and are, therefore, not very interesting and completely forgettable.Even the most diehard Jim Thompson fans will have to admit this book has very little to offer.

The best thing about The Transgressors is the protagonist, Tom Lord, who is a deputy sheriff in a small Texas town after failing to complete medical school due to family crises. Lord resembles a couple of earlier Thompson characters, including the similarly named Lou Ford in his masterpiece The Killer Inside Me, in that he is a man way more intelligent than the other people in town and he enjoys using that advantage by needling them, primarily through a faked countrified way of speech that is designed to humiliate those who naturally talk that way. Lord, like Ford, also has spasms of violence, though he isn't quite the cold-blooded psychopath the latter is.The story itself is readable but unexceptional thriller stuff that won't bore a reader. Hardly Thompson's masterpiece but not negligible either.

My first experience with Jim Thompson was a complete accident, when I picked up an audio copy of Pop. 1280 during a non-stop drive across the country. Even though Pop. 1280 had a few uneven moments, I think of it as classic Thompson, and measure everything else I read of his side by side with that seminal work.Having said that, The Transgressors falls far short of some of his other novels, but fans of the noir thriller will still find all the elements that attract them to that genre present and accounted for. Like all genre literature, there is still a possibility that the material will rise above the constraints of the form and touch on universal themes - but The Transgressors does not make that leap. One reviewer mentioned that he thought that 'Thompson was just going through the motions', but I have to believe that working with the limited palette that Thompson did, that there were only so many times he could rise above the average and create something truly outstanding.Either way, whether he was only going through the motions or not, The Transgressors still delivers a good yarn, slightly wandering, but satisfactory for light reading. I would suggest anyone approaching Thompson for the first time begin with his classics, such as 'The Killer Inside Me', or 'Pop. 1280', but if you, like me, find this one in a second hand store somewhere, available for small change, don't hesitate to pick it up.

Excellent.

All good.