Playboy's best book for a manly read? C'mon, man! You can do better than this!

I first heard of this book while reading a short article in Playboy magazine about the best books for real men. Playboy put this 1952-era crime noir novel at the top of that list. Then I heard that a movie version was headed our way, starring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba. So, curiosity inspired me to give it a try. Like the magazine that recommended it, The Killer Inside Me turns out to be dated and a bit of a bore. Now I'm struggling to understand all the fuss.

As a fan of hard-boiled crime novels and true crime nonfiction, I have tried to include readings from the roots of those genres to understand them better. Sad to say, I am usually disappointed when I compare the masters of the 1940s and 50s--like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane--with their literary descendants of these days--Elmore Leonard, Jeffery Deaver and Dennis Lehane come quickly to mind. The Killer Inside Me should be read in that vein, as an example of a more primitive literary time. Students of noir who can put themselves into a black-and-white frame-of-mind will want to include this on their resumes. The author, Jim Thompson, died in 1977 at the age of 70. But modern readers in search of entertainment should look elsewhere.

The Killer Inside Me could make an intriguing period-piece of a movie. The book tells the story through the eyes of a psychopathic deputy sheriff in a small West Texas oil town. It details Lou Ford's final crimes and delves into what he calls his "sickness"--the killer inside him. The 2010 movie is a remake of an earlier film from 1976 that starred Stacy Keach. But neither could ever match the FX series The Shield for a stark portrayal of police corruption--another symptom of generation gap with this book..

Thompson authored several successful cinematic crime novels, including The Getaway and The Grifters. But he received minimal recognition in his lifetime. His novels were resurrected in 1980 by the Vintage Crime Black Lizard unit of Random House. The Killer Inside Me has been touted as Thompson's finest work with Thompson described by some as the "dimestore Dostoyevsky" for the book's raw portrayal of a violent man fighting his demons. Many of his themes appear autobiographical from his youth as the son of an Oklahoma sheriff to his work in the Texas oil fields and briefly as a newspaper reporter for the Los Angeles Mirror. He honed his fiction credentials by taking newspaper crime events and turning them into short stories told imaginatively from the perspective of the criminal.

He worked most prominently as a screen writer for the film director Stanley Kubrick, notably on the classic Paths of Glory. Kubrick is quoted in a blurb on the Vintage Crime edition of The Killer Inside Me, describing this book as "Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered."

Kubrick either owed Jim Thompson a big favor, or, he hadn't read much dime store Dostoyevsky. Probably the latter.