Thompson's life was nearly as colorful as his fiction, which was semi-autobiographical, or, at least, inspired by his experiences. Thompson's father was sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma. He ran for the state legislature in 1906, but was defeated, and he shortly thereafter left the sheriff's office under a cloud due to rumors of embezzlement. The Thompson family moved to Texas. (The theme of a once-prominent family overtaken by ill-fortune would feature in some of Thompson's works.)

Early work

Jim Thompson began writing early: a few short pieces were published in his mid-teens. He was intelligent and well-read, but had little interest in or inclination towards formal education. For about two years during prohibition in Fort Worth, Texas, Thompson worked long and often wild nights as a bellboy while attending school in the day. He worked at the Hotel Texas. One biographical profile reports that "Thompson quickly adapted to the needs of the hotel's guests, busily catering to tastes ranging from questionable morality to directly and undeniably illegal." Bootleg liquor was ubiquitous, and Thompson's brief trips to procure heroin and marijuana for hotel patrons were not uncommon. He was soon earning up to $300 per week, far more than his official $15 monthly wage.

He smoked and drank heavily, and at nineteen he suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1926, Thompson began working as an oil field laborer. With his father he began an independent oil drilling operation that was ultimately unsuccessful. Thompson returned to Fort Worth, intending to attend school and to write professionally.

Thompson’s autobiographical "Oil Field Vignettes" appeared in 1929 (found in March 2010 by history recovery specialist Lee Roy Chapman). He began attending the University of Nebraska the same year as part of a program for gifted students with "untraditional educational backgrounds." By 1931, however, he had dropped out of school.

Thompson married Alberta Hesse on September 16, 1931 in Marysville, Kansas, the couple having eloped, partly owing to Alberta’s family's disapproval of Thompson. The first of two or three (sources differ) children was born in 1932.

For several years Thompson occasionally wrote short stories for various true crime magazines. Generally, he would rewrite actual murder cases he had read in newspapers, but in a first person voice. In this era, he wrote other pieces for various newspapers and magazines, usually as a freelancer, but occasionally as a full-time staff writer. His 1936 piece for Master Detective Magazine, "Ditch of Doom," was recently selected by The Library of America for inclusion in its two century retrospective of American True Crime writing.

In the early 1930s, Thompson was the head of the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project, one of several New Deal programs intended to aid Americans during the Great Depression. Louis L'Amour, among others, worked under Thompson's direction in this project. Thompson joined the Communist Party in 1935 but had left the group by 1938.

First novels

In the early stages of World War II, Thompson worked at an aircraft factory where he was investigated by the FBI because of his early Communist Party affiliation. These events were fodder for his semi-autobiographical debut novel, Now And On Earth (1942). Featuring little of the violence and crime that later permeated his writing, though it did establish his bleak, pessimistic tone, it was positively reviewed but sold poorly. His second novel, Heed The Thunder (1946), found Thompson steering towards crime; it details a warped and violent Nebraska family, partly modeled on his own extended clan.

When these early novels generated little critical attention, Thompson gravitated to the less-prestigious but more lucrative crime fiction genre with Nothing More Than Murder. He afterwards moved to Lion Books, a small paperback publisher. Lion's Arnold Hano was his ideal editor, offering the writer essentially free rein about content, yet expecting him to be productive and reliable. Lion published most of Thompson’s best-regarded works.

To support his family while writing novels, Thompson took a job as a reporter with the Los Angeles Mirror, a tabloid newspaper owned by the Los Angeles Times, shortly after the Mirror was founded in 1948. He wrote for the Mirror until 1949.

Fifties maturity

The early to mid fifties saw Thompson reaching his stride as a mature writer. In 1952, The Killer Inside Me was published. It is arguably Thompson's finest and best-known novel. The narrator, Lou Ford, is a small-town sheriff who appears amiable, pleasant and slightly dull-minded. Sheriff Ford is actually very intelligent and fighting a nearly-constant urge to act violently; Ford describes his urge as the sickness (always italicised). Lion Books unsuccessfully attempted to have The Killer Inside Me nominated for a National Book Award. It was eponymously adapted to the cinema, in 1976 (by director Burt Kennedy, with Stacy Keach as Sheriff Lou Ford), and again in 2010 (by director Michael Winterbottom, with Casey Affleck as Ford and co-starring Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba).

After The Killer Inside Me was published, Thompson began producing novels at a furious pace. He published one further novel in 1952, then 5 novels a year in both 1953 and 1954.

Savage Night, published in 1953, is generally ranked as one of his best novels. It is also one of his oddest literary offerings. Its narrator, Charlie "Little" Bigger (also known as Carl Bigelow), is a small, tubercular hitman whose mind is deteriorating with his body. In reviewing Savage Night, Boucher said it was "written with vigor and bite, but sheering off from realism into a peculiar surrealist ending of sheer Guignol horror. Odd that a mass-consumption paperback should contain the most experimental writing I've seen in a suspense novel of late." Savage Night contains an interlude ... whether or not it is fantasy or dream, hallucination or flashback is unclear ... when Bigger meets a poor, verbose writer who, much like Thompson himself, has a penchant for booze and makes a living writing pulp fiction to be sold alongside pornography. That writer also claims to operate a "farm" where he grows vaginas as a metaphor for the material he writes.

Involvement with Stanley Kubrick

In 1955, Thompson moved to Hollywood, California, where Stanley Kubrick commissioned from him the screenplay adaptation of Lionel White's novel Clean Break to be filmed as The Killing, Kubrick's first studio-financed movie. Although Thompson wrote most of the script, Kubrick credited himself as screenplay writer, cheating Thompson with only a vague "additional dialogue" writer credit. Nevertheless, they collaborated again in Paths of Glory (mostly written by Thompson, again with little public credit); and again in the criminal story titled Lunatic at Large, a production that never materialized despite Thompson's having completed and submitted the commissioned screen treatment. Though pleased with the work, Kubrick was side-tracked by Spartacus; when Kubrick returned to Lunatic at Large, the sole copy of Thompson's manuscript had been lost. Kubrick was quoted by family and friends as regretting the lost opportunity. Yet, in 1999, after Kubrick's death, son-in-law Phillip Hobbs found the manuscript among the dead director's documents; as of 2006, said project is in the pre-production stage, fifty years after Thompson wrote it.

Later novels, television work and novelizations

After his film work, Thompson remained in California for the rest of his life. From the mid- 1950s through the late 1960s, Thompson continued to write fiction, although not at the same torrid pace of 1952 to 1954. During this era, Thompson usually completed one novel a year, but he gradually drifted away from writing his increasingly unpopular novels, abandoning the medium completely by the end of the 1960s.

With his novels providing scant income, Thompson turned to other forms of writing to pay the bills. Beginning in 1959, and continuing through the mid-1960s, Thompson also began writing television programs, including episodes of the action/adventure shows Mackenzie's Raiders (1959), Cain's Hundred (1961) and Convoy (1965). TV work seemingly dried up for Thompson after this point, so he turned to writing novelizations of produced TV shows and screenplays: this work paid a flat fee, and could be completed quickly. Thompson's novelizations include one for the TV series Ironside (1967), as well as for the films The Undefeated (1969) and Nothing But a Man (1970).

In the late 1960s, Thompson wrote his two final original books, King Blood and Child of Rage (its provisional title had been White Mother, Black Son), neither of which were published until the early 1970s, the latter in the UK. Even his longtime supporters in the publishing industry thought the books were poorly written.

Later life and death

In 1970, Thompson was flown to Robert Redford's Utah residence. Redford hired him to write a motion picture script about the life of a hobo during the Great Depression. Thompson was paid $10,000 for his script Bo, though it was never produced.

Motion picture writer/director Sam Fuller expressed an interest in adapting The Getaway for the screen, and Polito notes that Fuller so admired the novel that he quipped, half-seriously, that he could use the novel itself as a shooting script. Eventually, Sam Peckinpah was slated to direct The Getaway.

In many regards, The Getaway was a frustrating repeat of his earlier experience with Kubrick. Thompson wrote a script, but McQueen rejected it as too reliant on dialogue, with not enough action. Though Walter Hill was given the sole script credit, Thompson insisted that much of his script ended up in the film. Thompson sought Writers Guild arbitration but the Guild ultimately ruled against him. In the end, the film was heavily bowdlerized from Thompson's original vision and as King writes, "if you have seen only the film version of The Getaway, you have no idea of the existential horrors awaiting Doc and Carol McCoy at the point where Sam Peckinpah ended the story."

Thompson actually appeared in the 1975 movie Farewell, My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum. He played the character Judge Baxter Wilson Grayle. When Thompson's fortunes were fading, he made the acquaintance of writer Harlan Ellison who had long admired Thompson's books. Though Thompson still drank heavily (preferring to meet at the famed writer's haunt, the Musso & Frank Grill) and Ellison was a teetotaler (preferring fast food restaurants), they often met for meals and conversation.

Though Thompson's books were falling out of print in the United States, the French had discovered his works. Though they were not runaway bestsellers in France, his books did sell well enough in that country to keep a trickle of royalties flowing towards Thompson. Incidentally, Polito also debunks the myth that Thompson was not paid well for his works: Thompson's pay, he notes, was roughly in line with what writers of similar works received during that era. Rather, Thompson's drinking and general instability is what left him destitute.

Thompson died after a series of strokes at age 71, aggravated by his long-term alcoholism. He refused to eat for some time prior to his death, and this self-inflicted starvation contributed greatly to his demise. At the time of his death none of his novels were in print in his home country.

Thompson's stories are about grifter, losers, sociopath and psychopaths ... some at the fringe of society, some at its heart ... their nihilistic world-view being best-served by first-person narratives revealing a frighteningly deep understanding of the warped mind. There are no good guys in Thompson's literature ... most everyone is abusive, opportunistic, or simply biding time until able to be so.

Despite some positive critical notice, Thompson's novels were essentially lost in the crowd among dozens of peer writers who also were churning out crime novels; only after his best years as a writer did Thompson achieve a measure of fame. Yet that neglect might stem from his novels' style: the crime novels are fast-moving and compelling but sometimes sloppy and uneven. Thompson wrote quickly with little revision or editing (many novels were written in a month); using his newspaper experience he produced concise, evocative prose.

Yet at his best his novels were among the most effectively and memorably written genre pieces. He also managed unusual and highly successful literary tricks: for example, halfway though A Hell Of A Woman, the first-person narrator Frank "Dolly" Dillon has a mental breakdown; the sides of his personality then take turns narrating the story's chapters, alternately violently psychotic (telling the sordid tale that actually happened) or sweet-natured and patient (telling the idealized fantasy that did not happen). In the final page of the original manuscript the two sides of Dillon's broken personality appear together as two separate columns of text. The publisher disliked that, and instead alternated the two narrations in one, long paragraph, alternating standard Roman type and italicised type. Thompson disliked the change, thinking it confusing and difficult for the reader.

For most of his life Jim Thompson drank heavily; the effects of alcoholism often featured in his works, most prominently in The Alcoholics (1953) which is set in a detoxification clinic. Donald E. Westlake, who adapted The Grifters for the screen, observed that alcoholism had a great role in Thompson's literature though it tended to be inexplicit. Westlake described typical personal relationships in Thompson novels as pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night - behavior common to the alcoholic Thompson's style of life but which he elided from the stories.

Two of Thompson's books (The Getaway and The Killer Inside Me) were adapted as Hollywood motion pictures during his lifetime. However, Polito argues that neither adaptation was ultimately true to Thompson's spirit. A second, more faithful adaptation of The Killer Inside Me was released in 2010, starring Casey Affleck and directed by Michael Winterbottom.

French director Bertrand Tavernier adapted Pop. 1280 for his 1981 film, Coup de Torchon, changing the setting from the American South to a French colony in West Africa of the 1930s. Aside from shift in setting, Polito argues that Coup de Torchon was remarkably faithful to the plot and the spirit of the novel, and remains arguably the most authentic adaptation of any of Thompson's work.

A Hell of a Woman was also adapted in French as Série noire (1979).

In the early 1990s, Hollywood resumed its interest in Thompson's writing and several of his novels were re-published. Three novels were adapted for new film treatments during that period: The Kill-Off; After Dark, My Sweet; and The Grifters, which garnered four Academy Award nominations.

The Getaway was remade in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in the lead roles but the film retained the happy ending of the earlier film.

In 1996, A Swell-Looking Babe was released as Hit Me, and 1997 saw the release of This World, Then the Fireworks from Thompson's short story of that name. The latter film starred Billy Zane and Gina Gershon as a pair of twisted siblings.