Nothing More Than Murder by Jim Thompson Review

Joe Wilmot runs the biggest movie theatre in his small town - but things aren’t going well for Joe. Stuck in a loveless marriage and with business failing, he and his wife Elizabeth hatch a plan to commit insurance fraud: take advantage of their double indemnity insurance by faking Elizabeth’s death in a fire then claiming the cashout. Except Joe isn’t as smart as he thinks and the people he’s wronged over the years are lining up to make sure this time he gets what’s coming to him…

Nothing More Than Murder is the earliest Jim Thompson novel I’ve read so far, and his third published book, and it’s also the only book of his that I haven’t enjoyed (to date). That might partly be because he’s still learning to be the great writer he becomes in later books, but also because I don’t jibe with these double indemnity stories that litter early-to-mid 20th century crime novels.

I’m impressed with how different each protagonist is in Thompson’s stories - I’ve not read one where the profession is the same. So far I’ve come across: a sheriff, a bank robber, a door-to-door salesman, a journalist, a bellboy, and, in this novel, a cinema owner. And it’s a credit to Thompson’s storytelling ability that he’s able to convincingly portray each character’s profession (partly due to his experience with them - he was a bellboy as a teenager, a journalist when he was older, and his father was a corrupt sheriff).

But the life of a cinema owner isn’t interesting to me and I struggled to get invested in Joe’s day-to-day. I didn’t find Joe that compelling a main character either, nor his icy wife Elizabeth or his clingy mistress Carol, and the double indemnity plot feels - even by the late ‘40s when this was published and the premise was still relatively fresh - played out and hackneyed.

The usual beats follow such a plot with the characters ensuring they have alibis, then play around a suspicious insurance agent, paranoia ensues - it’s fairly lacklustre stuff. The insurance agent, Appleton, was a decent character and his scenes with Joe were the best in the story. Thompson’s dialogue shines through even in this early effort and Joe’s overall shitty character is underlined by Appleton who had a similarly bad childhood to Joe but turned out to be a productive member of society and not some pathetic crook.

You can see the bones of future, better Jim Thompson novels in this one: crime in a small town instigated by a protagonist who you learn turns out to be a worse and worse person as the story progresses. It’s just a shame it doesn’t come together quite as satisfyingly in Nothing More Than Murder than in other books. You see it also in the messy ending - he’s not finessed his style yet. What’s remarkable is how quickly he goes from a lesser book like this to writing fantastic novels just a few years later (possibly thanks in part to getting sober - albeit temporarily).

Besides the excellent dialogue, Thompson’s prose is as zippy as it ever is, and the occasional scene is fun (Thompson himself cameos bizarrely as an embittered author who hates readers asking him for free books!) but the story overall is weak and forgettable. There are too many uninteresting characters with too many ulterior motives, the plot is too convoluted and confusing, as well as the general story being unengaging - Jim Thompson was an amazing writer, and his later, more famous books are definitely worth reading, but there’s nothing much to recommend Nothing More Than Murder.