The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"Krafft-Ebing, Jung, Freud, Bleuler, Adolf Meyer, Kretschmer, Kraepelin [...] I took down a bound volume of one of the German periodicals and read a while. I put it back and took down one in French. I skimmed through an article in Spanish and another in Italian."

The Killer Inside Me (1952) is my third classic early noir novel by Jim Thompson, after Pop. 1280 and The Getaway . It has been fun to read a novel almost exactly as old as I am and not finding it awfully dated. Alas, that's one of the very few good things I can say about the novel. Yet, according to the blurb on the cover, Stanley Kubrick wrote

"Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered."

I completely disagree but then who would you tend to believe more, Mr. Kubrick or me?

Lou Ford is a sheriff's deputy in an oil-boom town in West Texas. Already before the tenth page of the story the reader encounters sinister tones: Deputy Ford is afraid that his sickness might come back, and it is clear that he is not talking about flu. The sickness seems to run in his family: for instance, his brother had been convicted of having sex with a little girl. The deputy is asked to deal with a town woman who sells her bodily charms to men. Well, he beats her up and, obviously, they began an affair: we all know that nothing attracts a woman to a man better than getting solidly beaten by him.

Other than dealing with women - he is also a target of another lady's romantic interest - Deputy Ford has another mission. He wants to punish the powerful owner of a construction company on whose building site Ford's brother died in an accident after release from prison. Note that I am nor giving any spoilers as all those threads are mentioned at the beginning of the novel.

About one-fifth into the book the reader will encounter the first of brutal and graphic scenes of murder and the plot embarks on its twisty and very gruesome path. The problem is that I have been unable to find the portrayal of Deputy Ford believable. For instance, we are told that he reads medical journals in German, French, Italian, and Spanish and that he solves calculus problems for fun. Maybe solving calculus problems for entertainment signifies criminally warped mind? Particularly when compounded with reading medical papers in five languages.

Seriously, there are some memorable passages in the novel, like the rant about how horribly messed up our world is (messed up by us, of course) and there are chilling undertones showing how corruption is the most natural way the world has always worked and will always work. But in my view one thing that novel is certainly not - a believable portrait of a sociopath. Unless Mr. Kubrick is right.

Two stars.



View all my reviews