Jim Thompson's importance in American crime fiction is based on works that undermine even as they depend upon their generic constraints. In his double relation to the genre, he is unlike other noteworthy paperback crime novelists of his era, such as Mickey Spillane or Gil Brewer, who typically produced competent and sometimes compelling work by executing their craft within the constraints of the genre. These writers succeed precisely because they skillfully combine the specific resources of crime fiction: suspense, violence, and sexual intrigue. In his best work, however, Thompson, while he too acknowledges the protocols of genre, does so in a way that turns the genre inside out. For example, the characteristic misogyny of the genre--epitomized in works such as Spillane's I, the Jury (1947) and Brewer's 13 French Street (1951)--is also evident in Thompson's A Hell of a Woman (1954). In Thompson's book, however, the reader is to understand the...