The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Just so you can understand the context within which I read this book, here are two quotes from the covers of the edition I read:

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

This quote is the one that gives the book "hipster" status, like listening to music that David Bowie listens to before it gets big. But the quote on the back is the truly intense one:

"Thompson is my particular admiration among 'original' authors. The Killer Inside Me is exactly what French enthusiasts for existential American violence were looking for in the works of Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy and Raymond Chandler. None of these men ever wrote a book within miles of Thompson's." -R.V. Cassill, Book Week.

Now that is an opinion. A statement that seems even more intense after being assigned Hammett in a Berkeley English class, and after considering the status Chandler has attained and Thompson hasn't. I have never read anything by McCoy, so we'll leave him out of it for now.

The other novel of Thompson's that I have read is Savage Night, which I happened upon the same semester I was assigned Hammett's Red Harvest. It was at this time, when I was directly comparing the two authors, that I found myself heavily on Thompson's side. Savage Night was a book that, were it a movie, would have been directed by Hawkes or Wilder. Except for the last fifteen minutes, which would have belonged to Lynch or Tarkovsky.

The Killer Inside Me has made me want to look into the genre of first-person-killer narratives. Already a fan of American Psycho, Mr. Brooks, "Dexter," and the like, I wish to know how much this genre owes to Thompson's book. It hits what have become all the expected buttons: a disgust or amusement with "regular" people, a feeling that the victims deserve or ask to be killed, a complete awareness and twistedly reasonable acceptance of a "sickness," and, of course, almost compulsory involvement in "normalcy" as defined by a respectable job and romantic attachments.

Lou Ford is our killer, here, and he is wonderfully crafted. Thompson has this beautiful trick of using the first-person narrative primarily as a way of describing actions, delaying the opportunity to reveal our protagonist's detailed thoughts and feelings concerning those very actions. It is like slowly filling in a sketch with color paint. Beautifully done.

Thompson also does something wonderfully fun that he did in Savage Night as well, which is to comment on literature from within literature. When Ford begins to tell us how he killed his fiancée, he refers to the way that writers allow their prose to get sloppy when their characters are excited. He says that he won't do that, he will slow down and tell you exactly what happened, in the right order, with complete coherence. He calls those other writers "lazy," which made me blush because I pulled such a hat-trick in my own novel.

Ford's method of dealing with the mounting desire to kill is also fun. He socially "needles" people, purposefully talking in colloquialisms and annoying those around him under the guise of innocent friendliness.

So, there is certainly a sense of humor running underneath this story of evil, which also seems to be a theme of the "killer" genre. Whether this humor is the result of identification or uneasiness is probably a moot point, but it's interesting to ponder nonetheless.

Thompson has a great visceral style, describing physical sensations with intimate metaphors that make you believe he's actually experienced some of the things he's putting the protagonist through. He also crafts very interesting plots without overloading you with characters in the way that I felt Hammett did.

I only wish this book had been longer, but I suppose that indicates its quality, since I don't wish it were shorter, or believe it would have worked had it been shorter. Unfortunately, it's the perfect length. I didn't want it to be over.

Also, I hope they never try to film this. Or, if they do, they should hire me. And somehow cast a thirty-year old Henry Fonda in the leading role.