Hunter S goes permanently AWOL

Sad to hear this morning that Hunter S Thompson had killed himself. I suspect that he just got bored with it all. I first read Thompson's work in the mid 1970s when I picked up a copy of Hell's Angels in the old Compendium bookshop in Camden Town. Shortly after that I read Fear And Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and I realized that journalism did not have to be boring. For those unaware of the tale, Thompson had been assigned by Rolling Stone to cover "no-hoper" George McGovern. Ed Muskie was the front-runner and Thompson "broke" the news that Muskie was taking Ibogaine, which had in part caused Muskie's emotional outburst in a press conference after another paper made a remark about Muskie's wife. It was the end of Muskie's political career. But still no-one thought it would be McGovern who would win. There was Mayor John Lindsay, and Ed McCarthy from the 1968 campaign.

Thompson's record of this campaign was his greatest work, certainly superior to the vastly entertaining but hardly journalistic Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

The closest I came to Thompson was drinking with Ralph Steadman in 1980 or thereabouts in the Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street. Mel Calman had a cartoonist shop opposite at the time and I had picked up a Steadman sketch of Taos in New Mexico for what now seems the insultingly cheap fifteen quid. Tony Holden was there and he knew Ralph, so the three of us decamped to the pub. He (Ralph) had not long returned from one of his mad forays into the dark heartland of the US with Thompson. That new Mexico picture is still on my wall, and I will think of Thompson when I look at it.

Of course, his best work was behind him, and he almost certainly knew it. But most of us would be grateful to have one great book in us. Thompson had three.