Sheriff Nick Corey is in a bit of a pickle. He’s trying to get re-elected, only it’s clear to everyone he’s an incompetent sheriff who doesn’t do his job. His wife hates him and is probably cheating on him. Not that he cares because he’s cheating on her with other women around town. But it does bother him how the pimps at the local brothel don’t show him the respect his office deserves. What’s an honest god-fearing man to do? Simple: kill everyone.
Gee-whiz. I’ve known the name for years but I’m glad I finally got around to reading Jim Thompson because this guy fucking rules - Pop. 1280 is nothing short of a masterpiece, genre fiction or any kind of fiction!
It’s written in the first person so we see everything through Nick’s eyes and right off the bat, page one, the novel hooked me. As soon as Nick started drawling, he sounded like every other aw shucks brain-dead country boy, and I was immediately thinking, ok, here we go, please get better than this - and then, amidst the everyday normality emerges an odd detail. Third paragraph of the novel:
“I’d sit down to a meal of maybe half a dozen pork chops and a few fried eggs and a pan of hot biscuits with grits and gravy, and I couldn’t eat it. Not all of it.”
I read that line and thought, that’s an insane amount of food for one person to be eating in one meal. OF COURSE he couldn’t eat all of it - what?! And then more strange lines appear. On the fifth page his wife - who hates his guts - starts screaming at him that he’s a rapist because he’s thinking of having sex with her. Wha… his wife??
Thompson not only slowly reveals to you what a demented world Nick lives in but that he’s a long way from the first impressions he gives the reader, and other characters he encounters, of being a simpleton - he’s actually very cunning, very smart, and very dangerous. Even before he starts casually murdering people, I was pot-committed to this sociopath’s unpredictable odyssey.
First person narration is so hard to get right but Thompson does so effortlessly. Long before the end I knew his Nick Corey was up there with the best literary voices I’d read - maybe more so - in this style, like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Mr Stevens in The Remains of the Day. But every character is superbly realised with great dialogue - you’ll encounter a character and almost immediately get a strong sense of who they are. That’s remarkably astute writing. It’s no wonder Kubrick got Thompson to write the dialogue for The Killing - the guy’s got the ear for it.
The characterisation is all the more impressive as you realise what a shockingly horrible person Nick is - when he’s not ending lives, he’s ruining them in other ways - and you’re still rooting for him. I wanted to see how his story would end but I didn’t necessarily want him to get his comeuppance either, even though he definitely deserved the noose.
It’s never explicitly stated when the story takes place but it’s clear that it’s early 20th century. Cars are around but few and far between as they’re still too expensive for most and clunky as hell - people tend to get around with a horse and buggy. Though the novel was published in 1964, I think the reason Thompson chose to set it years earlier was to limit the mobility of the characters so that they’re stuck going from town to town without a train (which plays into the plot).
Or - was he trying to set it in an era like the 1930s because that’s when Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was set? Thompson has two characters in this book - Lennie, the mentally-challenged brother-in-law, and Curly, the pimp - who share the same names and character traits of two characters from Steinbeck’s novella, Lennie, the mentally-challenged migrant worker, and Curley, the boss’s aggressive son.
Unless it’s a coincidence (pfft), I feel like this is either an homage to one of Steinbeck’s masterpieces because Thompson was a fan, or perhaps he wants us to compare the two. Both are very bleak stories with some brutal things happening in them - in the same way that there’s no place in the world for Steinbeck’s poor Lennie and death is, unwittingly, a constant presence for him, Nick’s world - Potts County, population 1,280 - is a rotten place, full of incest, pig-ignorant racism, pig-ignorance generally (that’s how Nick is able to manipulate so many of the townsfolk), pointless violence, and thoughtless faith in a silent god. Thematically, the two books are kin.
And yet Pop. 1280 isn’t some po-faced story - it’s weirdly comedic at times. Not just the bizarre running joke of Nick’s absurd food intake but there’s gag setpieces like when the banker falls into the privy (after Nick sabotaged it) and lines like “He smiled, his bee’s-ass mouth stretching enough to show one tooth, and it was like getting a glimpse of an egg coming out of a pullet pigeon.” The uneven tone is another perfect choice by Thompson, showing us that Nick isn’t some morose crazy person but someone who’s doing and thinking all kinds of mad things and treating them all with the same level of seriousness, which is to say not much.
I had no idea how the story was going to end - Thompson’s so good at really taking you on a twisting journey in this book - but I loved how it ends by revealing the true extent of Nick’s insanity. Boy was he completely coocoo for coco puffs. Endings are so hard to write and Thompson sticks it like it was nothing. Incredible. Virtuoso writing.
Nick Corey is an ingenious literary creation, Pop. 1280 is a fabulously dark and compelling crime story, and such an impressive novel. I couldn’t have been more impressed by Jim Thompson’s writing and flew through this book in no time - it’s so entertaining and imaginative. This guy rocks - I’m reading everything by him, and if you’re intrigued with this writer, I highly recommend starting with Pop. 1280.
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