Jim Thompson's "Golden Gizmo'

When novels really were novel:
Jim Thompson's Golden Gizmo, revisited

RICK SOISSON

Last year 280,000 books were published in the U.S., up from 40,000 in 1978. Many of these, I would argue, bear no resemblance to real books except for being bound. As a teacher, my complaint is not that more people are writing books, but that many fine old real books may disappear amid the new storm.

One example is a 1954 novel by Jim Thompson called The Golden Gizmo. Although this work of pulp fiction has enjoyed periodic reprints (one as recently as 1998), Thompson is a largely forgotten writer for two reasons: He’s a genre writer, and he really never wrote about anybody whom anyone would want to know personally.

Thompson (1906-1977) also writes within a dying genre: crime/adventure stories that can’t actually be adapted into films in which Harrison Ford or Bruce Willis jump off moving vehicles that shouldn’t be on the road in the first place. Instead, Thompson does for “losers” what Chinua Achebe is widely seen as having done for African “natives” in literature written in English– he makes them seem like real people with aspirations not much different from yours and mine.

A Thompson character, despite his or her generally dire straits, is a recognizable, thinking, sometimes loving being, not the lower life form one vaguely associates with the term “loser.” Moreover, Thompson always manages this transformation from cliché to human being in a surprising way.

A heroine disposed of

Now, were I to write, “The protagonist of The Golden Gizmo is something of a lone wolf, a man who goes his own way,” you would likely groan, “Please, not another bitter, borderline alcoholic detective who has lost his love/child/dog/way.” To be sure, Thompson did once write a whole novel about a seedy hotel’s house detective. But the hero of The Golden Gizmo labors at a trade so obscure that we can justifiably wonder whether such a job ever really existed. Toddy Kent is a door-to-door scrap gold buyer. The alcoholic of this tale is his wife, and she is no regular crime novel boozer; she’s a literal, fall-down-the-stairs, rolling train wreck of a drunk. And she’s found murdered on page 37.

No role for Angelina Jolie there. The book proceeds without a heroine as such, not that Toddy doesn’t frequently recall her.

It is not only in the area of plot or character invention that Thompson puts the novel back into the novel. He also possesses a knack for casual hyper-invention by use of the simplest language. Take the very first sentence of Gizmo: “It was almost quitting time when Toddy met the man with no chin and the talking dog.” This is not some Garcia Marquez magic realist talking dog. The man without a chin? “He had no chin. It was as though nose and eyes and a wide thin mouth had been carved out of his neck. Either a thick black wig or a mopline bowl of natural hair topped the neck.” What is that? Moe Howard as imagined by Charles Bukowski? That murdered wife?

Adding up to zero

After her death, Toddy recalls the first time he met her:

“In the few seemingly casual glances he gave her, while she drank that drink and three others, he checked off her points and added them up to zero. She was scrawny. Her clothes, except for her hat – she was always careful with her hats– looked like they had been thrown on her. The wide-spaced teeth gave her mouth an almost ugly look. When she crinkled her face as she did incessantly, talking, laughing, smiling, she looked astonishingly like a monkey. … Yet, dammit, and yet there was something about her that got him, something warm and golden that reached out and enveloped him.”

Losers can be romantics too.

OK, then, what does a gold scrap buyer do after he marries a monkey woman, and she turns out to be the most horrid drunk in Los Angeles? He takes her to a psychiatrist– in fact, a couple… of course. The first proclaims that Toddy’s wife is not an alcoholic, but “a gutter drunk. A degenerate.” Her behavior is chalked up to selfishness (perhaps not far off the mark). The second spends more time examining Toddy’s motivation for marrying such an individual.

A neo-Nazi plot

Gizmo’s plot line is set in motion by an actual unconscious theft by the gold buyer. In the midst of a physical attack Toddy instinctively pockets the chinless man’s one-pound, 24-karat gold watch (all case, no workings to speak of), and before long he’s off to Mexico, impressed into service by South American neo-Nazis trying to keep a corrupt government afloat by converting gold fillings into currency.

I’ll observe the book reviewer’s code here and say no more (not that a sensible person could guess from what has already been written what might occur). On the reviewer’s page, it all seems preposterous, and yet Thompson makes it work. The reader comes to inhabit an alternative universe that, within itself, makes perfect sense.

Graham Greene would have called Jim Thompson’s books “entertainments,” and so they are. But by “entertainment” Greene meant novels like The Third Man, which he actually said was “never meant to be read but only to be seen.” Thus we have Carol Reed’s great film. It would be interesting, at this late date, to see if any of the sainted indie filmmakers would have the guts to make a Thompson novel into a film. At his best, Jim Thompson makes Edgar Allan Poe seem like a How-To manual writer.