In a series of paperback noir thrillers populated by the marginal and alienated inhabitants of Cold War America’s barren wastelands, Jim Thompson refuted the contemporary optimism of the “affluent society.” In contrast to the dominant ideology, Thompson argued that capitalism deformed both the environment and human nature, and he specialized in portraying the psychic ravages inflicted on the victims of American society, with his characters often keeping hidden their psychopathic natures, nursing private grudges that threaten to burst forth in a frenzy of homicidal rage. Similarly, his savage parodies of the ethic of “personality” subverted the ideal character type of American business culture. And, at a time when mainstream culture viewed the family as a potential haven for domestic peace in its suburban enclave and a bulwark against communism, he depicted the family as the center of the violence and chaos endemic to American life.

The roots of Thompson’s dark vision lay in the Popular Front of the Depression and World War II eras. In his 1997 study The Cultural Front, Michael Denning describes the flowering of “a left culture in the age of the CIO” emerging out of the confluence of the wave of labor organizing among Depression-era industrial workers with the growth of mass culture industries and various state cultural organizations, like the Works Progress Administration. Anchored in the Popular Front — a broad-based political/cultural movement with institutional bases in the Communist Party, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the left wing of the Democratic Party — this cultural front transcended these organizations, leaving an indelible mark on American culture for decades after its emergence. As Denning says, several thirties proletarian writers followed the lead of fellow traveler Dashiell Hammett and began producing detective and mystery fiction, either in novels or for Hollywood, seeing it as the logical outgrowth of the naturalism of the “ghetto pastorals.”