The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson Review

Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford appears to be a pretty uninteresting man who does his job well in his small Texas town and lives a quiet life - but who actually harbours a dark past and nature that is reawakened when he begins an affair with a local prostitute. The killer inside Lou stirs and the murders begin in earnest…

This is Jim Thompson’s most famous novel and that’s partly why I resisted reading it for so long: sometimes a writer’s best-known books are among their least interesting. And so it goes with The Killer Inside Me which is by no means a bad novel but it isn’t up there with Thompson’s finest work.

The first 50 pages are fantastic, plot-wise. Lou gets involved with Joyce, a blackmail plot emerges, Lou’s awful past, and hidden bitterness, is hinted at, and then the violence explodes out of nowhere. The reader hurtles through the setup and action and it’s really well-paced. Lou himself though isn’t that compelling a main character. In fact, he’s the worst part of the book.

One of his less criminal anti-social characteristics is how he likes to wind people up by speaking in cliches to them - corny home-spun phrases that bore people - and then keep bothering them by continuing to say these things to them until they’re annoyed with him. The trouble is that the reader is also annoyed by having to read such tediousness at the same time!

It’s especially noticeable how empty a life and dull a person Lou is in the quieter parts of the story. Perhaps that’s the point - Thompson’s own spin on Arendt’s “banality of evil” (predating her by over a decade), that the person committing the atrocities he does is also a dreary man without a personality - but that idea and approach doesn’t make for an interesting read.

And while I appreciate Thompson attempting to understand the pathology of someone as unknowable as a serial killer, I did find his conclusions behind Lou’s motivations a bit pat - although that might be the modern perspective; I’m sure this kind of viewpoint didn’t feel as well-trodden in the early 1950s when this novel was first published.

Other aspects of Lou are cleverly constructed though. The hair-trigger temper (the extreme violence comes out nowhere, even though we know he’s planning some of the murders), and the matter-of-factness with which he talks about his killings is subtly chilling. There’s a disconnectedness of reality, emotion and other people that you see with Lou that rings true of monsters like him even if most of us will (thankfully) never meet a real serial killer in person.

When Lou does kill, the novel comes alive - when he’s evading suspicion in the aftermath, not so much. Parts of it felt contrived to keep Lou killing - so even though there are characters who see the evil in Lou, it takes the length of the novel before anyone takes steps to stop him - and the final act is altogether unconvincing, particularly as various characters’ actions seems to have been based more on hunches than evidence (but then perhaps that’s how small town justice worked in 1950s Texas).

It’s weird how Jim Thompson kept returning to this scenario of a corrupt small town sheriff throughout his career - apparently he had daddy issues as his father was just such a character. If you look into the author, you’ll notice he wrote several books about Lou Ford-types, most of which I’ve read by now and can say that the best, most interesting portrait of this character is to be found in Pop. 1280.

The Killer Inside Me isn’t bad but it’s only sporadically compelling to read whereas novels like Pop. 1280 and A Hell of a Woman portray similarly nasty main characters who are less irritating to read about, caught up in more interesting hellish descents. The novel is likely Thompson’s most famous because of the movie adaptations and praise from major artists like Stanley Kubrick, rather than because of its literary qualities.

If you’re someone who’s picked this up because it’s Thompson’s most famous work (most people tend to only check these out and leave it at that unless they’re really taken with that writer) and you weren’t that impressed, I recommend reading either of the novels mentioned above to see how brilliant this writer can be.