The Nothing Man

The Nothing Man by Jim Thompson

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You can see from “The Nothing Man” how Jim Thompson earned the sobriquet of “the dimestore Dostoevsky.” This is a short, quick, engaging read about someone who is in self-imposed exile on the fringe of society. The main character, Clinton Brown, is the essence of “untrustworthy narrator” as runs a permanent 2.0 BAC as he associates with lowlife cops and the better class of Pacific City, where he is a reporter working for the Courier.

Brown is handsome, young, and witty (when he chooses.) He is also bitter, vile, and coarse. He is estranged from his wife, who has turned into a slut in the absence of his attentions, attentions he is not capable of providing inasmuch as, in his words, he was “emasculated but not castrated” in an engagement with the enemy “during the war.”

This is not much of a spoiler since the reader gets told this on the first page of the book, albeit through circumlocutions. I found myself strangely reluctant to understand what Brown was talking about, and I wondered about following the story of a man who had been “disfigured” in this way. In point of fact, the “disfigurement” comes up on almost every page and is presumably the thing that provides the motivation for the story.

Brown's concern that the nature of his disfigurement might become known plagues him. And, yet, he often hints about it so broadly that someone would have to be very dense not to pick up on the references. Everyone seems to know that he is getting a substantial military pension, but has no obvious disfigurement. Everyone also knows that his boss was also his military commander during “the war” (I'm assuming World War II, but it might have been Korea), and has been willing to take Brown's bitter insults for years. So, it may be the case that Brown's worry about social emasculation is totally in his mind rather than a feature of reality.

In any event, his fear of exposure leads him to commit murder, and, then, murder again to cover up the first murder. Brown does all this with the detachment of a sociopath, which does not ring entirely true with his disgust for the corruption of the Chief of Detectives or with his concern that no one be framed for his crime.

Is Brown a sociopath? Thompson has written about sociopaths, for example, Nick Corey in “Pop. 1280,” who was out and out nuts by the end of the story. I think I saw some of the same character arcs with Clinton Brown that I saw with Nick Corey (although Corey was truly evil and, yet, strangely appealing and funny.)

This book is very well written for a book with such gritty and disturbing content. Thompson can turn out some pretty sentences in the midst of horrifying images. Sometimes, the sentences suggest that Thompson is just having fun with language and characters. for example:

“I loved her, Colonel,” I said. “Her image is permanently graven on my heart. I could have gone for her in a large way—if, unfortunately, I had not lacked certain essential equipment.”

And:

“I drove out to the Fort, leisurely, wondering how, if I ever found the opportunity, I should polish Kay off. The most appropriate way, I felt, would be to hit her with a father. She always called Dave “father” and I think that any wife under sixty who does that should be hit with one.”

And I found this paragraph interesting as a kind of literary/historical bit of self-awareness of life at the bottom:

“You asked for it,” he said stubbornly. “I'm telling you. You claim I'm always layin' into the colored folks—blaming everything that happens on them. Well, maybe I do, kind of, but I got a damned good reason to. Not one out of a hundred can get a decent job, a job where he can get as much as you do, say, or even half as much. They don't make no dough, but they got to keep laying it on the line. They get stuck every time they turn around. Their rents cost 'em plenty, because there's just one section of town they can live in. If they don't want to walk two–three miles to a store in a white neighborhood—where they'll probably get a good hard snooting—they have to buy from the little joints in their own section, places where there ain't much of a selection and the prices are high. It takes every nickel they can get just to keep goin', just to live like a bunch of animals. They're always about half sore, an' it don't take much to make 'em more than half. They make trouble; they start playin' rough. And all me and my boys can do is play a little rougher. Flatten 'em out or get 'em sent up for a stretch. We can't get to the bottom of the trouble, try to fix it so there won't be any more. All we can do is... All right,” Stukey sighed, “go on and laugh at me. But just the same, I'm giving it to you straight.”

I liked this book. I don't think that it was as good as “Pop. 1280,” and I can see that it has lightweight elements, such as the motivation for the murder and the infatuation of the female characters for Brown, and I might be inclined to knock off half a star for those infelicities. On the other hand, I would certainly rate it as one of the better noir crime stories I've read, which enough poking into gritty truth and the warped human soul.