The Grifters (1963) - Jim Thompson

On the surface, The Grifters (1963) is a crime novel about a young con-man named Roy, his mother Lilly (also a con artist), his lover Moira (who cons in her own way) and a nurse named Carol. All of them are victims, all of them are guilty of something, all of them are caught up in relationships that have the potential of ending very, very badly.

Below the surface, Thompson (1906-1977) delves deep into twisted family relationships (with a bit of Oedipus thrown in), the hunger for redemption, the inevitability of crime begetting crime, and the consequences of actions born both of greed and survival, which often seem inseparable.

As the novel opens, Roy is suffering internal bleeding, the result of a small con gone wrong when the mark discovers Roy’s game and hits him in the gut with a baseball bat. We get the sense that Roy isn’t very good at what he does, but he really is. His mother is better, however, operating a much bigger, longer-running con on her boss. If he ever finds out what she’s up to, Lilly is going to have a very unpleasant life, what little she survives to tell anyone about.

The exploration of the mother/son dynamic alone is worth the price of the book. Is Lilly a completely amoral character with no feelings for her son? Does Roy have any shot at redemption from a life of small-time cons? Their scenes together are filled with tension, electricity and depth, with the potential for destruction always lurking beneath the surface of every conversation.

Jim Thompson did not write about nice people. Thompson’s world, like ours, is a fallen one, full of con artists, greed, murder and perversity. But he knew his characters, knew their motivations and desires. I’m not sure if Thompson expects us to gain a sort of Greek tragedy type of pleasure from all this, thanking God that we’re not like these characters, but maybe that’s indeed his point.

A lot of times people ask me how I can read such things as a Christian, how I can look at the ugliness in the world and say that I am “entertained” by such works. I suppose one reason is that I’ve always been fascinated by the criminal mind (not that I plan to incorporate one). Why would anyone in their right mind (and perhaps that’s the key) live a life of crime? Environment? Upbringing? Survival?

Another reason is I think I’m always looking for what Flannery O’Connor calls “moments of grace.” In a collection of lectures and essays entitled Mystery and Manners, O’Connor states:

...I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world. (p. 112)

There are several moments of grace (or potential ones) in The Grifters, moments that lift the novel from typical genre fare to something greater, something that makes you stop and examine those moments that are important and pivotal, moments that must be confronted, moments that scream out that something important is at stake and you’d better pay attention.