Cropper's Cabin (1952)

Cropper's Cabin came out the same year as The Killer Inside Me, and feels like a rush job—but then, so does Killer, and much of Thompson's catalog. It slots pretty easily into a certain hillbilly mode of pulp fiction, set in the familiar environs of Oklahoma, but with many trappings of the Old South, white trash division. Moonshine and intimations of incest, for example, tend to be givens, the sharecroppers are growing cotton, and they are sharecroppers. There's a flavor of Oklahoma in a general lust for oil, but that's mostly in the background as a motivational device. As usual, Thompson plays with genre clichés and expectations at will. So the sharecropper's boy Tommy Carver (who narrates) is involved with the landlord's hot daughter. His family background is complicated and creepy—widowed stepfather with a bought-and-purchased 14-year-old helpmeet (who is of age in the present time of the tale, but of course having sex with both stepfather and stepson). This is definitely second-tier Thompson, at best, but nonetheless with many of the Dostoevskian touches we know him by: the fulminations at fate, the aw-shucks language masking deeper issues, the wanton ways of worthless reprobates, and a story that dissolves into nothing before ... The End. He's done it better elsewhere but he usually does it pretty well, and on that level Cropper's Cabin is worthy enough. There's also a murder mystery in the middle of it, though typically enough that becomes incidental. Some interesting lore about Oklahoma and Native Americans rounds it out, things we don't really need to know but evidently Thompson thought we might find them interesting, mostly concerned with the Trail of Tears and then the later Oklahoma Land Rush. So it's not exactly a mystery, and it's not exactly the hillbilly pulp sub-genre, but something of both, and vintage Jim Thompson more than anything. You don't want to start here, but you might want to end up here.

In case it's not at the library.