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"Now you’re Mother’s big boy, her little man."
"I never was your baby," he said. (213) A Swell-Looking Babe
Jim Thompson’s paperbacks from the fifties have earned him the monikers "The Camus of Crime" and "The Dime-Store Dostoevsky". Not content with the straight pulp crime story, Thompson infused his narrative with the kind of psychodrama that has since become a staple of modern crime fiction. Thompson may not have been the first crime writer to use Freudian theory, but he is certainly one of the most memorable. Woody Haut has suggested that "given the twisted behaviour of those inhabiting his work, one wonders if Thompson might not have read Freud back to front, reversing diagnoses and symptoms to portray a world turned inside out" (Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War, 20).
It was a world he knew well. Whether door-to-door salesman (A Hell Of A Woman), proprietor of a failing cinema (Nothing More Than Murder), bellhop (A Swell-Looking Babe) or alcoholic, distracted writer (Now And On Earth, The Nothing Man), Thompson had first-hand knowledge of it all. His writing is driven by personal experience, art imitating life and vice versa. Indeed, Thompson's self-mythology in the likes of Bad Boy (1953) and Roughneck (1954) further blurs the line between fact and fiction.
And so it is with some trepidation that someone might read A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) with its overt treatment of the Oedipus complex. Thompson's predilection for writing in the first-person (used to devastating effect in 1952's The Killer Inside Me) is absent here, perhaps because his setting is pulled directly from his experiences as a bellboy, detailed in Bad Boy. Nobody would want to see A Swell-Looking Babe as a continuation of his memoirs, so the third-person narrative is used to distance the reader from some frankly shocking material, though the background is authentic:
What The Bellboy Saw served as Thompson's provisional title for his Hotel Texas novel, A Swell-Looking Babe. But what this bellboy saw – and committed – could have furnished the lurid details for an entire lifetime's crime fiction. (Savage Art: A Biography Of Jim Thompson, 104)
And as Thompson himself tells us in his "autobiography":
There was no pity in that world. The usual laws governing rewards and punishments did not obtain. It was not what you did that mattered, but how you did it. (Bad Boy, 105)
It is not only his experience that informs the story, though. Thompson was a devotee of Oedipus Rex at an early age, became self-educated in Freudian theory as a result. The Oedipus complex is a central component of modern psychological discourse. Drawn from the Oedipus myth wherein Oedipus kills his father and unwittingly marries his mother, Freud adapted it to designate attraction on the part of the male child towards his mother and rivalry and hostility toward the father. This rivalry may not, however, be solely sexual – many modern psychiatrists ascribe this part of the Oedipus complex to resentment of parental authoritarian power. This is the core of A Swell-Looking Babe, a twisted mish-mash of Thompson's past and present, peppered with sexual tension and the threat of violence.
Bill "Dusty" Rhodes is a bellboy at the not-too-prestigious Forth Worth Hotel Manton, a hive of underworld activity. Dusty was originally set to go to medical school until a Communist scare over a free speech petition left his teacher father jobless. Yearning for his lost foster mother, lusting after the ostensibly unattainable Marcia Hillis, Dusty finds himself embroiled in a scheme to rob the hotel's safety deposit boxes. As the story progresses, Dusty's incestuous leanings come to the fore and his past comes back to haunt him with devastating results.
The robbery itself is a subsidiary plot to the real Oedipal drama taking place, however. Thompson's real preoccupation is with stirring up Dusty's past, whipping his protagonist into a frenzy of incestuous lust and barely-concealed aggression. The family relationships in Thompson's fiction are where the true criminals lie. Abused children become twisted adults, wearing themselves as a disguise while their psychosis festers within. Dusty Rhodes is all potential gone to waste, a mixture of youth and good looks that belie his inner distraction:
As a youngster, when the other kids had dubbed him with such hateful titles as Pretty Boy and Dolly, he had detested those good looks. (159)
Most young men would be proud of looks such as these. Instead, Dusty’s intelligence leads directly to a kind of bitter self-awareness. He has learned that his looks can get him what he wants some of the time, but more often than not, all they get him is trouble. Women find him attractive, but he is so suspicious of their superficial attentions, he finds himself filled with contempt.
These superficial attentions are borne out of his relationship with his foster mother. Rather than the parents as violent abusers, Dusty is damaged with over-affection from his foster mother and sees his father as lacking. As Robert Polito noted: "Thompson's novels engage the nuclear family principally in the act of detonation." (62). Though we're never told the exact circumstances of Dusty's adoption, the problems between his foster parents are apparent from the start:
He had been five at the time of the adoption. He knew that they were not actually his parents. But it had been an easy thing to forget. She made it easy, starved as he was for the motherhood she could not naturally achieve. (212)
His foster father is mostly absent, "lecturing in winter, attending college for doctorate credit in summer" (212) and because of his foster mother's adoration, Dusty is allowed to get away with almost anything. But when Dusty pushes his mother too far with his advances, their relationship is irrevocably ruined, all innocence lost. He blocks it from his conscious memory.
She had been the woman, the only one. Until he met her counterpart, in Marcia Hillis, there could be no other. (215)
And a deadly chain of events is set in motion with Marcia's arrival. Until now, Dusty has been a simple malcontent, subliminally torturing his ailing father with his tempered generosity. He has effectively taken any paternal power away. Firstly, his foster mother’s attachment to him precluded her relationship with Dusty’s father, to the point where Mr Rhodes became a third wheel, given a sleeping tablet and rushed off to bed. Secondly, Dusty’s "unwitting" forgery of his father’s signature on a petition for free speech rendered Mr Rhodes jobless. In Thompson's world, a man is only a man through work, therefore Dusty has succeeded in emasculating his father. Ostensibly the Oedipus complex has been resolved, albeit in a psychologically unhealthy manner, simmering behind Dusty's mask.
In the meantime, Dusty has found a surrogate father in Tug Trowbridge, a Capone-like gangster staying at the hotel. Ostensibly, Tug is everything his father is not: successful, self-confident and able to fix anything. And after an unfortunate encounter with Marcia Hillis, Tug helps the dust settle. With his father out of the picture, Dusty's surrogate not only ignores the attempt on the unattainable mother figure but also effectively aids and abets its cover-up.
But Tug is as efficient a conman as he is gangster. He uses Dusty's obsession with Marcia as a way to rob the hotel. Dusty's awareness of this fact is there, but smothered by his need for his representation of "all women – the personification, the refined best of them all" (160). The boy who played the father is now played himself:
Dusty hesitated. It was all wrong. He was all mixed up. Tug had aroused first one instinct, then another; played upon one after another. Self-preservation, avarice, fear for her, outright desire. (p.226)
Thus Tug as a surrogate father is no longer the benign figure he once was. "It was all wrong" is Dusty's refrain throughout the book, though not as an expression of any ethical dilemma. "It was all wrong" signifies Dusty's awareness of his situation, yet clouds it with confusion, driven as he is by purely selfish ambition. In a sense, the boy has never grown up; he has remained morally stunted.
This immature self-preservation leads to neglect and ignorance towards Mr Rhodes. Hounded by Rhodes' lawyer Kossmeyer, Dusty's thoughts are poisoned even more towards his father, whom he considers senile and throwing his money away on a useless case against his former bosses. When Mr Rhodes dies (coincidentally just as Tug Trowbridge is shot dead), it would seem that Dusty has achieved everything he wanted. He now has Marcia to himself, he has no fear of punishment, and they have the money from the robbery.
But when Kossmeyer turns up on his doorstep, Dusty's bravado comes tumbling down. In a searing twist of fate, Dusty's father ends up punishing him from his grave. Dusty's neglect of him led the former teacher to take out a life insurance policy (with Dusty as the sole benefactor) and then drink himself to death. Dusty was present when this happened and listened at his father's door:
It sounded like he was praying. Or singing. Kind of like he was praying and singing together. And occasionally there was something like a sob… choked, strangling, rattling. (278)
What Dusty took for the ramblings of a senile old man, not worth investigating or caring about, preoccupied as he is with his own problems, turn out to be his undoing. It seems that his father has known all along what kind of son he has brought up:
The old man had been afraid to tell him. He hadn't wanted to admit his fear; probably, he had never admitted it consciously. But still the fear and distrust had been there: the knowledge that someone he loved – someone he had to love and be loved by – might be tempted to kill him. (289-90)
With Marcia listening, Dusty feels his life slipping away as Kossmeyer continues. In true Greek tragic tradition, the Fates have had the final say. His neglect and passive hatred for his father lost his foster mother and now Marcia leaves, "shutting him out of her life forever" (294) with the soft sound of a door closing. Dusty is confronted with his own guilt and the consequences of his actions, finally arriving at what Freud terms "making the unconscious conscious". It is in these moments that Dusty sees his ultimate punishment, a stark premonition after a lifetime of muddied thought. The irony is, just as Oedipus blinds himself on his realisation, Dusty sees everything as clear as day:
In the quiet, summer-bright room, Dusty saw himself hanged. (294)
The scorching by-line for A Swell-Looking Babe when published by Lion was "A savage novel of crime and lust in a big city hotel", but the story is pushed further than that. It remains one of Thompson's most eloquent Oedipal psychodramas, a balls-out tribute to Sophocles as well as a rattling good read. As Anthony Boucher said in his New York Times review: "It's good value, on whichever level you choose to read it." Which is why, of course, in an age punctuated with tabloid psychology, Thompson has proved so popular. And will continue to grow in popularity just as long as we are obsessed with our own dark natures.
Copyright© 2004 Ray Banks
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Bibliography
Thompson, Jim. The Jim Thompson Omnibus 2 – After Dark My Sweet, A Hell Of A Woman, Savage Night, A Swell-Looking Babe, Nothing More Than Murder London. Picador 1997
Thompson, Jim. Bad Boy London: Vintage Crime 1997
Haut, Woody. Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995
Polito, Robert. Savage Art- A Biography Of Jim Thompson New York. Alfred A. Knopf 1996
RAY
BANKS has been a double-glazing salesman, croupier, student and
varying degrees of disgruntled office monkey. All of which, mixed with a heady
cocktail of booze and hatred, brought The Big Blind to the page.
He is also the creator of Manchester PI Callum Innes, who has appeared in Handheld
Crime, Hardluck Stories, Plots With Guns and Thrilling Detective.
At the moment, Ray is wrestling with the first Innes book, Dead Man's Hand and
eagerly awaiting publication of The Big Blind by PointBlank Press this
autumn. And sometimes, just sometimes, he's been known to write third-person
past tense.
Contact Ray
Read an extract from Ray Banks's The Big Blind