Nick’s philosophy, however, is that he has it “ made” as long as he can keep his job and as he puts it: “ as long as I didn’t arrest no one unless I couldn’t get out of it and they didn’t amount to nothin’. The story is set in the backwater town of Pottsville, and the narrator is Nick Corey, the high sheriff–a lazy womanizer who is supposed to enforce the law in the small town of 1280 people. 1280, but thanks to a reference to the “ Bullshevicks” (Bolsheviks), the action seems likely to be set in 1917 or a few years later (news may travel slowly.) There’s a western-cowboy feel to the story accentuated by frequent references to the horse and buggy, but there are also a few cars around. There’s no clear date for the story that takes place in Pop. 1280, I concluded that it ranked right up there with The Killer Inside Me, but I’ve chewed this over and decided that of the two books, I actually prefer Pop. Up to this point, The Killer Inside Me topped the Thompson charts, followed by A Hell of a Woman, A Swell-Looking Dame, The Getawayand Savage Night. The Jim Thompson noirfest continues with the sixth selected title, Pop. “I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped on.”
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