Jim Thompson was, by his own admission, a bad boy. Born in the tiny boomtown of Andarko in the Oklahoma Territory, James Myers Thompson had an upbringing that was simultaneously rugged and eccentric. His father, a man whom he called “Pop” but the US government called James Thompson, tried to make a living at a variety of professions. The elder Thompson was a Republican politician, an oil roughneck, a farmer, and, at the time of Jim’s birth, the sheriff of Caddo County. As the younger Thompson would relate in his autobiographical work