He was a crime fiction writer, highly recommended by Stephen. I have two of his books, The Killer Inside Me and After Dark, My Sweet. Many of Thompson's works have been adapted to film, including the two mentioned. Believe it or not, one of his novels was the basis for Sam Peckinpah's film The Getaway. From what I've read, Thompson's works are noirish, with an emphasis on "noir": there is a noticeable dearth of sympathetic characters, and endings are almost always downbeat. Thompson himself said that to him, life was "a bucket of s@#& with a barbed-wire handle"; in addition to the misanthropy and bitterness, he was quite fond of booze, another tick box for the tortured author archetype.
