Unlucky Thompson

Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site brings this news:

It has been found out that George J. “Rhino” Thompson died on June 7, 2011, at his home in Cayuga, New York. He was well-known within law enforcement as a creator of Verbal Judo, a communications methodology to “defuse violence through words and professional presence.”

Before becoming a police officer, he was a university English professor. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on Dashiell Hammett, “The Problem of Moral Vision in Dashiell Hammett’s Novels,” in 1972 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. The dissertation was reprinted in seven issues of The Armchair Detective (TAD) starting with the May 1973 issue. His critical analysis was arguably the first one on Hammett. ... [H]e finally updated his doctoral dissertation, which was published for the first time in book form as Hammett’s Moral Vision (Vince Emery, 2007) with a new introduction by William F. Nolan. He was 69.

The Emory books site features a bit more about Thompson.