"The Car In The Mexican Quarter" [In] The Nebraska Farmer: Nebraska's Farm And Home Paper (August 22 & 29, 1931).

JIM THOMPSON

Publication: The McKelvie Publishing Company, 1931, Lincoln, Nebraska

Story is published in two consecutive issues of "The Nebraska Farmer, Nebraska's Farm and Home Paper.

A).Volume 73, Number 34. Published August 22, 1931.

14 1/4" x 10 3/8" pictorial color newspaper, 20 pp. (including covers), first part of the story is on page 5 in four vertical columns, and illustrated. Recipients stamped address label at upper left of cover page. Also on page14 is a continuation from Mignon G. Eberhart's book The Patient In Room 18. A little tanning to the lower portion else a fine copy.

B).Volume 73, Number 35. Published August 29, 1931.

14 1/4" X 10 3/8" pictorial color newspaper, 16 pp. (including covers), second part of the story begins on page 4 and continues and ends on page 12 in four vertical columns, and illustrated. Recipient stamped address label at upper left of cover page. Also on page 5 is a continuation from Mignon G. Eberhart's book The Patient In Room 18. A little tanning to the lower portion else a fine copy.

Complete serialization of a young Jim Thompson's only known piece of detective fiction, published in the long-running agricultural magazine The Nebraska Farmer, run by his friend Glenn Buck. "Thompson lifted the spare, hard-boiled rhythms and the flippant phrasing of "The Car in the Mexican Quarter" from the pages of Black Mask or Red Harvest. But he pulled the squalid Fort Worth setting, the hotel heroin ring, and the murdered bellboy directly from his own experiences with the Lonestar underworld at the Hotel Texas. Police Detective Marshall, while munching on his tamale in the Mexican quarter, sees a car run over Charles "Skippy" Kahn. A "sneak thief," a "capper for crooked games," a stool pigeon and dope peddler, Kahn recently signed on as night bellboy at the Hotel Lansing. Marshall's investigation of the killing leads him through the drug underground to a familiar Fort Worth gangster – "Airplane Red" Brown" (Polito, Robert. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, pp.172-73). The story was considered among Thompson's "lost" works for over six decades, until 1996, when it was included in James Grady's anthology Unusual Suspects: An Anthology of Crime Stories from Black Lizard.

A Choice item and rare.