: Jim Thompson
: Murder at the Bijou
: Chalk Line Books
: 9780989671439
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Krimis, Thriller, Spionage
: English
: 238
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Murder at the Bijou (originally titled Nothing More Than Murder) is noir master Jim Thompson's dizzying tale of deception, adultery, revenge, arson, and cold-blooded murder in Smalltown, U.S.A., Thompson's favorite setting. In this novel, Thompson's first major success as a pulp fiction writer, Joe Wilmot, trying to go straight after a stretch in the pen, finds a movie house in a small crossroads that can use a helping hand and someone with half a brain for business. The theater's owner, Elizabeth, isn't the smartest operator around - or is she? Joe and the plain Jane Elizabeth decide maybe it would be better for business if they got married. Why not? And then Carol shows up, a bit stale in the eye candy department but ready and willing to serve - in every way. They've got insurance coverage on the movie house; their lives would all be better if the place maybe had an accident, a little fire. But things can go very wrong. And in Murder at the Bijou they do. Fans of Jim Thompson will recognize the terse dialogue, plot twists and double-crosses, and a belief that nothing in the world is good, all of which makes Stephen King say that Jim Thompson is 'My favorite crime novelist - often imitated but never duplicated.'

Chapter 2

When Elizabeth and I were married there was another show in Stoneville. It wasn’t much of a house—five hundred chairs, and a couple of Powers projectors that should have been in a museum, and a wildcat sound system.

But it was a show and it pulled a lot of business from us, particularly on Friday and Saturday, the horse-opera nights. Not only that, it almost doubled the price of the product we bought.

In a town of seventy-five hundred people, you hadn’t ought to pay more than thirty or thirty-five bucks for the best feature out. And you don’t have to if you’ve got the only house. Where there’s more than one, well, brother, there’s a situation the boys on film row love.

If you don’t want to buy from them, they’ll just take their product across the street. And the guy across the street will snap it up in the hopes of freezing you out and buying at his own price the next year.

The fellow that owned the other house was named Bower. He’s not around any more; don’t know what ever did become of him. About the time his lease came up for renewal, I went to his landlord and offered to take over, paying all operating expenses and giving him