Billy "The Kid" Collins: Jim Thompson's Enigmatic Savior in 'After Dark, My Sweet.'

After Dark, My Sweet is not one of Jim better-known works, and critics have had relatively little to say about it; even Michael J. McCauley, in his biography of Thompson, allows book mere two pages. However, what little critics have had to say has been extremely positive. McCauley calls it an important Thompson psychotic narrator (188), and Robert Polito has included it amongst Thompson's boldest writing about criminals (3). Max Allan Collins has gone further, ranking it the most accessible, best-crafted of psychopath-as-narrator (51). Published in 1955, After Dark, My Sweet came last in remarkable string of thirteen novels written in an inspired three-year burst beginning in 1952. In any estimate, these thirteen novels (including established noir classics like The Killer Inside Me [1952] and Savage Night [1953]) represent definitive Jim Thompson. Although between 1957 and 1973 he would produce another thirteen, only in Pop. (1964) would he again recapture frenzied intensity of psychopathic schizophrenia that in different forms stamps narratorial worlds of The Killer Inside Me or Savage Night. After Dark, My Sweet rounds off series by striking an altogether milder and comparatively bloodless note (the novel contains no gratuitous sadism, no psychic disintegrations, and only two deaths -- apart from climactic shooting of narrator -- and both of these are lawful police killings); but it nevertheless deserves attention because of its deviations from pattern set by preceding novels; these deviations open up wider and more subtle range of perspectives than Jim Thompson, hard-boiled crime novelist, is usually given credit for. The most interesting variations are to be found in character and predicament of ex-boxer narrator, William Kid Collins. He is very rare Thompson protagonist in way he struggles to overcome his psychological disorder rather than be swept under by it, and appears to end novel, McCauley has put it, as true savior -- rather than deluded savior like Lou Ford of The Killer Inside Me or Nick Corey of Pop. 1280 (189). What also makes After Dark, My Sweet an untypical Thompson novel is fact that it moves toward protagonist's final affirmation of moral certainty (even though Collins's realization comes only hours before his death at hands of his beloved, Fay) opposed to indecipherable moral ambiguity and sense of life's absurd meaninglessness which finally swamp Thompson protagonists like Nick Corey in Pop. and Charlie Little Bigger in Savage Night. After Dark, My Sweet is that rarest of all things in Thompson oeuvrea -- novel in which, albeit momentarily, protagonist appears to have found a reason for his actions, his unknowable nature, his seemingly meaningless existence, McCauley puts it. These are strong and surprisingly positive words to find applied to crime novelist whose work is often thought of being unremittingly nihilistic and which, according to at least two commentators, lacks any moral center whatsoever.(1) On surface, After Dark, My Sweet is suspenseful tale of kidnap plot that goes disastrously wrong, ending in deaths of two of three conspirators. In its deeper structure, however, novel is also study in doomed love and death of innocence in an indecipherable and morally vacuous postmodern world, where nothing and nobody are what they seem. The novel is given coherence and direction by William Kid Collins's three main objectives -- to reintegrate himself into normal world after life spent in and out of mental asylums, to arrive at comprehensible reading of that world and its inhabitants, and to search out another human being whom he can love and who can restore his sense of personal worth (all common but usually unfulfilled aspirations of Thompson protagonist). …