The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reprinted all of Jim Thompson's novels - that's my memory; they may have missed an oddball or two along the way - in the '90s, in a stylish series that changed design just enough over the years to annoy completists like me. I read all of them in those days, and had a big Thompson shelf that went beneath the waves in my 2011 flood.

But I haven't read him in at least twenty years. So I thought I might as well get back to his most famous book, The Killer Inside Me - not least because I happened to already have it in a Library of America omnibus, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s - and see what I thought this time.

First is that I'd completely misremembered the ending. To be somewhat elliptical, my general rule of thumb is that noir books end fatally for the protagonist, usually because he is a murderer but occasionally because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. (The latter kind of protagonist sometimes makes it out alive, but that's an iffy thing.) I thought this one, about a corrupt and murderous sheriff's deputy in a small Texas town in the '50s, was an exception to that rule, because the hero was a cop and corrupt and able to cover for himself.

Reader, that is not how Killer Inside Me ends. I'll leave it at that.

The main character and narrator is Lou Ford, that deputy I just mentioned. He pretends to be dull, always spouting clichés, but is actually very smart - almost as smart as he thinks he is. He's also a sadistic, sociopathic murderer who was sexually abused by a babysitter in his childhood and (consequently? everything is a consequence in a noir) his relationships with women are the usual pseudo-S&M of the era.

Ford has an official girlfriend, the local schoolteacher Amy Stanton - who sneaks into his bed at night and pesters him to marry her - but has also been carrying on with the local prostitute Joyce Lakeland. Joyce has also been seeing Elmer Conway, the feckless son of the local hard-bitten building magnate Chester Conway. Lou wants to hurt Chester: Lou's older stepbrother Mike, who went to prison to protect him in childhood, died under mysterious circumstances a few years back in a way that Lou is sure Chester caused.

Lou tells this story, in the way of post-war noir. The town is lightly corrupt, run mostly by Chester. The people are upright, officially, and conversation sometimes is elliptical - there's quite a bit of "shut your mouth! we don't say things like that out loud" here - to keep officially quiet about the things everyone knows and won't admit. (Such as: the corruption, the local prostitute, the fact that men and women have sex with each other on occasion, various other minor criminal enterprises, and so on.)

Lou has a plan: to get rid of Joyce, hurt Chester, get a bunch of money and, he thinks, get out of town and away to the real life as a smart person he thinks he's due. It starts out working reasonably well; the first few deaths go mostly as planned. But - again, this is a noir, the kind of story in which things go wrong and fate destroys wrong-doers - it gets worse from there.

This is Thompson's most famous novel because of its psychological complexity and depth: Lou Ford is a vivid, real character, and a reader will sympathize with him much more of the time than that reader is comfortable with. Thompson has enough psychology - I think it's all hugely superseded now, but it was roughly current in 1952 - to make his people plausible. Ford is a mesmerizing narrator, and Thompson does a great job of keeping the reader invested in him while clearly showing how much of a monster he is - and, at the same time, hinting in that noir way, that it was never his fault, that he was doomed from the start.