Short take: Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

Much has been made of the sixtieth anniversary of J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, one of the most popular novels ever written in the voice of an angst-ridden protagonist (the adolescent Holden Caulfield). But there’s another subversive American novel with an even more disturbed narrator, which was published around the same time: Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.

Though acknowledged as a classic of crime fiction – and venerated by many of us who love the genre – Thompson’s novel isn’t as well-known in the wider literary universe as The Catcher in the Rye is. (Salinger’s book, once the subject of controversies and banned in many schools and colleges, today occupies a firm position in the literary mainstream. Oh yes, it does. Don’t pout so, you disaffected little adolescent – it’s no longer glamorous or radical to identify with Holden, it’s a cliché.) I’m not saying Killer is as good as Catcher, though the two works are sufficiently different for comparisons to be avoidable. What it is, though, is a very unnerving fictional self-portrait. The voice is that of Lou Ford, the deputy sheriff of a Texas town ambitiously named Central City. He appears to be nothing more than a kindly law-enforcement officer – with an annoying habit of tossing off platitudes like "if we didn’t have the rain we wouldn’t have the rainbows" - but soon we discover a not so pleasant side to him.

In the context of the literature and cinema of the time, Lou is closely related to such anti-heroes as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Bruno Anthony; perhaps even the likeable Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. But I can’t stop thinking of him as a kindred spirit to Holden Caulfield – it’s one of those ideas that take root in your mind and refuse to leave. “I hadn’t had the sickness in almost 15 years,” Lou tells us early on, “Not since I was fourteen.” Reading this, and discovering the nature of his “sickness”, how it regains hold of his mind and what it leads him to do, I was reminded of the famous penultimate chapter of The Catcher in the Rye – Holden’s description of his own nervous breakdown as he watches his little sister riding a carousel in the rain. With a few minor changes in personal circumstances, it’s possible to speculate that Holden could grow up to become someone like Lou.

Like Salinger’s teen hero, Lou is sensitive and introspective. He’s a reader too: alone in his father’s old office, he trawls the pages of psychiatric literature – the works of Jung, Meyer, Krafft-Ebing – and thinks he understands the roots of his own condition. In fact, one of the characteristics of his narrative is its bland matter-of-factness. He doesn’t set himself up as an enigma; he takes the reader into confidence, invites us into his world. Tilting at the pretensions of literary fiction, he says:

“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 babbling… I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff – the reviewers eat it up. But the way I see it, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy. I’ll tell you everything.”

But despite this apparent candour, we don’t learn everything about Lou; by the end of the book we aren’t really close to scratching his surface. (After all, as he says to a doomed prisoner on another occasion, “How can a man ever really know anything?”)

For all the placidity, even languor of its narrative, The Killer Inside Me constantly plays on the reader's expectations of Lou's sickness exploding to the surface. And sure enough, it contains two passages of such ferocious violence – both aimed at women – that Michael Winterbottom’s recent movie version (made in a much more permissive time) was accused of being misogynistic, when it was merely being faithful to a book where the bad guy is a man. Thompson would go on to do more accomplished work (his Pop. 1280 can be seen as an expansion on the themes of The Killer Inside Me), but this creepy, insidious novel occupies its own special niche in crime writing.

[Here's a recent post on another early 50s crime classic, A Kiss Before Dying. And two posts on early Stanley Kubrick films that were largely scripted by Jim Thompson: Paths of Glory and The Killing]