The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson, Black Lizard Vintage ($29)
Hopefully the controversy surrounding Michael Winterbottom’s recent film adaptation has provoked readers to investigate the source material. Stanley Kubrick worked with Jim Thompson on the script for his film The Killing and said this book was “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”
It is justifiable praise for a haunting view from a sociopathic mind. Our charming protagonist, Sheriff Lou Ford, is full of clichés and platitudes that mask his sadistic intent. One moment he is boring the townsfolk with banal banter, the next he’ll be beating an unwitting victim to a pulp. His ‘sickness’, as he describes it, is reawakened by the arrival of a prostitute, Joyce Lakeland, to the small Texas town he serves. Blackmail, alibis and homicides follow with our unreliable narrator staying one step ahead of the law he should be upholding.
Speaking to the reader, Ford tells us:
“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 goddamn lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything. But I want to get everything in the right order. I want you to understand how it was.” – pg. 161
So if you want to understand how it was, how it is and how it will be, read this essential noir and find other Thompson classics such as Pop. 1280, Savage Night and The Grifters. His memoirs, Bad Boy and Roughneck chronicle his colourful, tragic life and for a less subjective view, read Robert Polito’s excellent Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson.
Reviewed by Dylan from Unity Wellington
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