A SwellLooking Babe, Jim Thompson
A SwellLooking Babe, Jim Thompson
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A Swell-Looking Babe

Author: Jim Thompson

Narrator: Brian Troxell

Unabridged: 5 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/01/2011


Synopsis

It was supposed to be only a temporary job -- something to pay the bills until Dusty could get his feet back on the ground and raise enough money for medical school. After all, there's nothing wrong with being a bellboy at a respectable hotel like the Manton -- that is, until she came along.

Marcia Hillis. The perfect woman. Beautiful. Experienced. Older and wiser. The only woman to ever measure up to that other her -- the one whose painful rejection Dusty can't quite put from his mind.

But while Dusty has designs on Marcia, Marcia has an agenda of her own. One that threatens to pull the Manton inside-out, use Dusty up for all he's worth and leave him reeling and on the run, the whole world at his heels.

A richly-imagined crime narrative of the Oedipal and betrayal, A Swell-Looking Babe is Thompson at his very best -- a cornerstone in Thompson's enduring legacy as the Dimestore Dostoyevsky of American fiction.

About Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson is founder and CEO of Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA). He received the inaugural ETHOS Award from the Institute for Sports Law and Ethics (ISLE) in 2013, and now serves on the ISLE Board.


Reviews

Goodreads review by James

Dusty Rhodes is one seriously screwed-up dude. Of course when this book was first published in 1954, no one would have thought to call him a "dude," but no one would have disputed the fact that he was a young man with some pretty nasty problems--in other words, just the sort of protagonist that you'......more

Goodreads review by Dave

Dave’s noir fest continues. A Swell Looking Babe is my fourth Thompson book, after The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet, all of which I liked a bit better, but this is still a book by the writer Stephen King said was his favorite. And this book was King’s favorite, so it is w......more


Quotes

"The best suspense writer going, bar none."—The New York Times

"My favorite crime novelist-often imitated but never duplicated."—Stephen King

"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."—Washington Post

"Like Clint Eastwood's pictures it's the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors ... one of the finest American writers and the most frightening, [Thompson] is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell."—The New Republic

"The master of the American groin-kick novel."—Vanity Fair

"The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction."—Chicago Tribune