Deputy Sheriff Tom Lord and local oil company manager Aaron McBride have beef. Lord signed over rights to McBride’s company Highlands to drill for oil on his West Texas land - who basically scammed him. After Lord gets some revenge by publicly beating McBride in front of his staff, the two have a bitter fight that ends with McBride dead and the feud continuing as McBride’s widow sets out to get vengeance on her dead husband.
The Transgressors was a disappointing novel - I was expecting something more high quality given that the main character was a kinda crazy Sheriff, which I thought was Jim Thompson’s speciality. Unfortunately though this one fell apart thanks to an utterly ridiculous romance plot and a convoluted final act where random people are killed for strange reasons.
The first part is promising. Lord is an intriguing fellow - like Thompson’s other Sheriff characters, he’s smarter than he lets on, and I wondered whether he was also a secret sociopath like Nick Corey in Pop. 1280. The premise of these two guys in a vendetta that was only going to end bloodily and then the introduction of seemingly-strong-willed Donna McBride was enticing - Donna at first seems to be like an older Mattie Ross from True Grit and so I was anticipating her to be Lord’s match in a showdown.
Then for no reason it gets really stupid and stays that way for the remainder of the book. Donna finds Tom’s father’s house - he was the town doctor, and Tom, too, was destined for a career in medicine until personal circumstances caused him to abandon his studies and so he never got licensed. Tom is there but doesn’t tell her he’s the man who killed her husband (accidentally or not - we never find out).
Then, without even really knowing who he is, she allows him to inject her with drugs that put her to sleep?! And then she allows herself to be kept hostage by him for days! And then, after finding out he’s been lying to her about his identity and that he is the man she planned to kill, she falls in love with him!?!??! It’s just one unbelievable plot development after another that feels stupider and more contrived than the last. Utterly insane.
Donna goes from being a headstrong woman with a plan to a simpering halfwit in no time at all. It made no sense to me whatsoever. There’s also - unusually for Thompson - a similarly baffling happy ending that feels more like a joke. And that’s after a series of non-characters get killed and the half-baked murder mystery of a prostitute is solved unsatisfyingly.
I’m not going to wholly blame Thompson for this failure of a story. Apparently he was contracted to write the novelisation of a movie called Cloudburst (which was never made) and so the scenario of this ridiculous romance was foisted upon him and he tried, unsuccessfully, to make it work.
It’s still a bad story regardless. The Transgressors doesn’t work as a thriller, or a crime story, or a romance - it’s a series of odd pieces that don’t fit mixed together in a boring, forgettable and very silly novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment