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The Killer Inside Me
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The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
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Read 2010
This is book a light pick for me in that I think it was good for what it was, but I don‘t personally enjoy being in the thoughts of a serial killer. It actually wasn‘t quite as gory as I was expecting, but it was disturbing in the way he plotted and had basically no remorse for his actions. It also has quite a bit of dark humor. I read this book as I was finishing and immediately after reading Ulysses by James Joyce, which I think made the following quote really jump out and kind of amused me.
"In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.”
Texas Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford comes across as a friendly, bumbling kind of guy. But he has what he calls a sickness, a side to him that enjoys violence. When dead bodies start turning up in his small town, he starts to wonder if people are beginning to suspect.There’s some nasty violence against women here, not only murder but also sadism, but not too graphically described given the date of the book. Other than that, I enjoyed this early psychological thriller (from 1952), the study of a killer who's been clever but perhaps not quite clever enough. Or has he?
A classic pulp psycho crime drama. This is the third book I have read in the last little while where the protagonist is a police officer and also a manifestation of evil or a sociopath. This particular book is written in a straight forward, clear style, not the usual chopped and satirical slang dialogue of noir. However, the true creative aspect of the book is the use of first person narrative so that the reader is right in the mind of the killer. Lou acts the part of a Texas good old boy with simple desires but it is just an act. He is actually consumed with a "sickness" which drives him to act sadistically and violently toward women and to seek revenge against others for events that he himself actually instigated. Lou is intelligent and logical and only slightly delusional about his own sickness, so to be in his head is quite disturbing. Lou's violent and sadistic acts against women are extreme and that also is quite disturbing to read although not as graphic as some books. We want Lou to get caught and at the same time, as we are in his mind, the tension that builds as he works his way through the legal tangles turns this book into a page turner to see is he will get away.
1952! This classic crime novel by Jim Thompson was written in 1952! I had to keep reminding myself of that date because it felt modern and new. It is a brutal and harsh book of noir. It feels like a gritty and dark movie that could have been made in the 1970s with all the cinematic graininess of the era. It is a book that shocked me, and I just didn't expect it from a book written in 1952. The story is told in first person which means that the reader lives inside the mind a a killer and gets up close and personal with his thoughts. Rarely does any book feel quite so intimate with a killer. It is disturbing and shocking ... and really, really good.
Our narrator, Lou Ford, is a sheriff’s deputy in the small town of Central City in west Texas. On the surface he is just Texas boy. He is good-natured and has friends and family he cares about. But the title says it all. Lous has a killer living inside him. The intriguing part of it is that Lou seems to think of the killer as a person separate from himself. The killer cannot be controlled by him and often kills the people that Lou loves. In fact, somehow Mr Thompson allows the reader to believe that Lou really still loves some of his victims despite his brutality towards them.
One of the best parts of this character portrait of a killer was that we were witness to Lou's glee when he teases the others in the story... he dares them to figure it out. He makes fun of them. He toys with them. And he is absolutely rapt about it. As a reader it was petrifying and shocking, but also comical and ludicrous.
Recently I binge-watched the television show "The Americans" and found it a disconcerting and strange experience where I was often rooting for the Russian spies. (As an American veteran of the Cold War, this was incredibly odd for me.) Reading this book was a similar experience. There were moments when I really liked Lou and wanted him to somehow get away with it. To stop killing.
To marry his girl. To move on with a better life. But then my mind would scream at me, "Kelly, stop it! He is insane!"