At thirteen Jim Thompson was learning how to smoke cigars and ogle burlesque girls under the tutelage of his profane grandfather. A few years later, he was bellhopping at a hotel in Fort Worth, where he supplemented his income peddling bootleg out of the package room. He shuddered out the DTs as a watchman on a West Texas oil pipeline. He outraged teachers, cheated mobsters, and almost got himself beaten to death by a homicidal sheriff's deputy. And somewhere along the way, Thompson became one of the greatest crime writers America has ever known.

In this uproarious autobiographical tale, the author of After Dark, My Sweet and Pop. 1280 tells the story of his chaotic coming of age and reveals just where he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of human misbehavior. Bad Boy is a bawdy, brawling book of reprobates--and an unfettered portrait of a writer growing up in the Southwest of the Roaring Twenties.