Ross Thomas's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Ross Thomas (1926 – 1995) was a writer of cynical witty political crime thrillers. He won two Edgars and had a dedicated following in Germany, where he won the Deutscher Krimipreis four times.

Early Life and Career

Born in Oklahoma City in 1926, Thomas was brought up in the Great Depression and became interested in politics.

I am (I confess it with no shame) a gavel-to-gavel political junkie. I got hooked as a child, and some of my earliest memories are a curious amalgam of films from the 1930s and political rallies held in Memorial Park in Oklahoma City, where, on a hot summer Depression evening, my parents would sometimes take me to hear the booming oratorical efforts of the likes of Blind Tom Gore, Alfalfa Bill Murray, and a savvy young comer called Mike Monroney. (Ethan Iverson)

Thomas fought in the Philippines during the Second World War and then worked as a sports journalist, foreign correspondent, and political strategist in the USA, Germany and Nigeria. He also ran his own public relations business, writing speeches and articles for politicians and labour unionists.

In the 1950s, he ran the political campaigns for a Republican nominated for the Senate, a Democrat running to be Governor of Colorado and an African Chief who wanted to be the first post-colonial president of Nigeria. The Democrat won, the Republican lost, and the African Chief ended up in jail.

Thomas moved in circles to which most of us are blind. He wrote an article for the Washington Post in 1975 about his time in Nigeria:

There’s no hard evidence to prove that the CIA anted up for Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s campaign. But somebody did, and it certainly wasn’t MI6. After all, Chief Awolowo was the CIA’s kind of folks. He was left, but not too far left, and he hated the British. If he got elected, then the Americans would become the dominant friendly foreign power in the land of the cocoa bean. (Ethan Iverson)

Aspiring Author

In 1965 a girlfriend suggested he write a novel and sell it to the “movin’ pictures.”

“I decided I’d like to write a book. I set up my typewriter and started hitting the keys, and when I was done, I had a couple hundred double-spaced pages and didn’t know what to do with them, so I called a writer friend of mine in New York and told him what I’d done. ‘Now, why would you do something like that?’ he wondered. ‘Well, go out and buy some brown wrapping paper and wrap your manuscript in that. And then address the parcel to this fellow at William Morrow in New York, and mail it to him. And enclose return postage, so he can send it back to you.’

“So I did that, making a reasonably neat parcel of it, and I sent it off, and a couple of weeks went by. Then I got a phone call from the chap I’d sent the manuscript to, and he said they wanted to publish my book.” (Mystery Scene)

Thomas’s first novel, The Cold War Swap, was published as easily as that. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery Novel of 1966.

Style

Clever, witty, political plots drive Ross Thomas’s books, and he populated them with perfectly described characters.

The sad brown eyes, the weary mouth, the delicate nose, and the sturdy chin had somehow melded themselves into a long-suffering look that many mistook for past tragedy, but that was actually chronic exasperation.
Missionary Stew

Thomas then daubs his stories with a smear of sardonic violence:

Then he turned to the young man in the chair. “You got a name?”

“Frank. Frank Smith. That’s the God’s truth. It’s Smith.”

Necessary returned the blackjack to his hip pocket and slapped Frank Smith across the face. It was a hard, brisk slap. “That’s what you get for telling the truth, Frank. You can just let your imagination work on what you’re going to get when you start lying.”

Not if, I noticed, but when. I lit a cigarette and watched the ex-chief operate. I decided that he must have enjoyed his former line of work.
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Fusion Fiction

Critics credit Thomas as the first author to mix the moral ambiguity of the hard-boiled detective novel with the traditional thriller. Before his time, the authors Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were delighted to point at the underbelly of society and spin out morally questionable human dramas. Thrillers, however, had obvious goodies and baddies (think Ian Flemming’s James Bond and Felix Leiter, versus anybody with an Eastern European accent).

Thomas changed that, overlaying twisted ethics on complex political situations. His characters are intelligent and personable, and it is easy to forget which side of the law they sit on.

Humour

Ross Thomas’s books are full of subtle humour and jibes at authority. An editor once took him aside and gave him some advice:

“There are two things you never want to write about… Dwarves and Chinamen. Nobody wants to read about dwarves or Chinamen.” (Mystery Scene)

Ross went on to write Chinaman’s Chance and The Eighth Dwarf.

Many of Ross Thomas’s novels are set in and around Washington D.C., and he had a low opinion of the people who work there.

“For a living, I write suspense novels or thrillers…  They do reasonably well, if not as well as I would like, and their backgrounds, often as not, are laid in Washington, which in my opinion, has more sharpies and sons-of-bitches per square foot than any place in Christendom.” (Ethan Iverson)

Praise

St Martin’s Press recently reissued many of his novels with introductions written by (amongst others) Sarah Paretsky, Joe Gores, Lawrence Block, and Donald E. Westlake.

Stephen King said that Thomas was “the Jane Austen of the political espionage story”.

The Times book critic David Ansen wrote that “His books ought to come with a health warning: Prolonged exposure to this page-turning prose can lead to nervousness, loss of sleep and antisocial behaviour.” He added, “[What] makes his books so damn much fun to read is Thomas’s insider’s familiarity with the corridors of power.”

A Final Mystery

If you study Thomas’s C.V. and then read his books, it isn’t hard to start wondering if he was ever a spy. He even worked for George McGovern, President Nixon’s target in the Watergate burglary.

When challenged, Thomas would smile and only admit he was a former civil servant.