After Dark, My Sweet

The classic crime novel about a kidnapping scheme gone wrong from America's “Dimestore Dostoevsky,” the basis for the noir film of the same name (Geoffrey O'Brien, poet, critic author, former editor and chief, Library of America).

William “Kid” Collins was once a respected boxer. Now he's a drifter, on the run after escaping from a mental institution.

One afternoon he meets Fay, a beautiful young widow. She is smart and decent—at least when she's sober. Soon Collins finds himself involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes drastically wrong almost before it even begins. Because the kid they've picked up isn't like other kids: he's diabetic and without insulin, he'll die. Not the safest situation for Collins, a man for whom stress and violence have long gone hand-in-hand.

After Dark, My Sweet once again displays Jim Thompson as the undisputed master of American noir. The basis of James Foley's critically acclaimed film of the same name, with the sweep of an epic tragedy, Thompson's classic limns the dangerous territory of honest people all-too-easily sucked into wickedness, with no way out but down.

Praise for Jim Thompson:

“The best suspense writer going, bar none.” —The New York Times

“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.” —Stephen King

“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it . . . His work . . . casts a dazzling light on the human condition.” —Washington Post

“The master of the American groin-kick novel.” —Vanity Fair

“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.” —Chicago Tribune