Roughneck

**The hardboiled sequel to the autobiographical** Bad Boy **, from the author Stephen King calls my favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.** By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber’s helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive. A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, *Roughneck* chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction’s most enduring writers, in a larger-than-life literary memoir—or wildly entertaining tall tale—as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so good. **Praise for Jim Thompson** The best suspense writer going, bar none. ― *The New York Times* The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction. ― *Chicago Tribune* If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it . . . His work . . . casts a dazzling light on the human condition. ― *The Washington Post*