In “The Grifters,” Thompson offers a tight story that isn’t filled with unnecessary excesses. It is a story about the angles and “There was one thing about playing the angles. If you played them long enough, you knew the other guy’s as well as you knew your own.” It sets three life-long grifters in a tight triangle facing off against each other, last survivor wins. Along the way in with all the card games, that dice, the punchboards, the twenties, the horse races, and more, Thompson throws in Carol Roberg, who survived Dachau sterilized by what they did to her at age eight and an Oedipal complex with Lilly Dillon offering herself to now-grown up Roy Dillon, anything cause she just had to have that cash.
There are three players in this game and none of the other clowns in this story matter one iota. They are just filler, stand-ins, extras as it were. First, there is Lilly Dillon, from a family of backwoods white trash who married at thirteen and widowed at fourteen, dumping little Roy off with her family until her father showed up with Roy under one arm and a horse whip in the other. Sticking Roy in boarding school, Lilly became increasingly useful as an employee until eventually she became someone who would make layoff bets on longshots around the country, protecting the syndicate’s money.
She wanted to be something other than mom, to Roy, and he resented her until he turned seventeen when he left. Indeed, as he got into his teens, she softened her voice when she spoke to him and there was a suppressed hunger in her eyes. Roy eventually worked the short con across the country, settling in Los Angeles, where he could use his cover as a traveling salesman while he worked the fools he found everywhere.
Roy’s one distraction was Moira Langtry, with her own background in grifting. She could match him phrase for phrase as they sparred. Strangely, though, she resembled none other than his mother in stature and type. ”You couldn’t say that they actually looked like each other; they were both brunettes about the same size, but there was absolutely no facial resemblance. It was more a type similarity than a personal one. They were both members of the same flock; women who knew just what it took to preserve and enhance their natural attractiveness. Women who were either endowed with what it took, or spared no effort in getting it.”
Thompson pits these three at odds with each other, each pretending they were more on the level that they were, and each afraid of being called out. What makes this novel work so good is how tight Thompson’s writing is and how focused he is on the angles between these three characters, knowing that if you put them together and left them to their own devices, there would be fireworks.
Pulp, Crime, & Mystery Books 