The Killer Inside Me

"WARNING! WARNING! HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPED LUNATICS!"

When a sign like this appears by the side of the road in the nightmare world of Jim Thompson, no one even comments on it… which may be one of the reasons that Thompson's work is still worth reading some forty years after it first began to be published. When first released, his novels appeared almost exclusively as paperback originals, just a few more titles in a flood of fiction unleashed by the popular new "pocketbook" format. Most of the others published in the late forties and fifties have long since been buried in the dustheap of the years, but Thompson is still being read… more than when he was alive and in his prime. We are, in fact, in the midst of a small Thompson revival: almost all his novels are in print in paperback; two collections of three novels each are available from Donald Fine under the title HardCore, and a book of his uncollected prose, Fireworks, has been issued.

Amazingly, almost all his books hold up as "good reads." More amazingly, two or three (Pop. 1280, The Grifters, and The Getaway would be my nominees) hold up as "good American novels of their time." And one, this one, remains as timeless and as important as it ever was. The Killer Inside Me is an American classic, no less, a novel that deserves space on the same shelf with Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Sun Also Rises, and As I Lay Dying. Thompson's other books are either good or almost great, but all of them pale before the horrifying, mesmerizing story of Lou Ford, that smiling good ol' Texas boy who would rather beat you to death with clichés than shoot you with a .44… But if the clichés don't do the job, he is not afraid to pick up the gun. And use it.

Before Kerouac, before Ginsberg, before Marlon Brando in The Wild One ("What are you boys rebelling against?" "What have you got?") or Yossarian in Catch-22, this anonymous and little-read Oklahoma novelist captured the spirit of his age, and the spirit of the twentieth century's latter half: emptiness, a feeling of loss in a land of plenty, of unease amid conformity, of alienation in what was meant, in the wake of World War II, to be a generation of brotherhood.

Lou Ford digs the above quote out of a psychology textbook by "a guy… name of Kraeplin" as his story winds toward its inevitable conclusion. I have no idea if Mr. Kraeplin is real or another product of Thompson's imagination, but I do know that the description fits a lot more people than one mentally disturbed deputy sheriff in a crossroads Texas town. It describes a generation of killers, from Caryl Chessman to Lee Harvey Oswald to John Wayne Gacy to Ted Bundy. Looking back at the record, one would have to say that it also describes a generation of politicians: Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Oliver North, Alexander Haig, and a slew of others. In Lou Ford, Jim Thompson drew for the first time a picture of the Great American Sociopath.

It's not that Lou Ford is a killer without a conscience; it would be almost comforting if he were. But Lou Ford likes people. He goes out of his way to help Johnnie Pappas, son of the Central City restaurant owner and the local wild child. And when Lou breaks Johnnie's neck and hangs him from his jail cell to turn murder into something that looks like suicide, he does it with great and genuine sadness.

Yet when Lou leads Elmer Conway into the trap he has carefully constructed, and when Conway gets his first good look at the bait in that trap—the bludgeoned, grisly body of a prostitute named Joyce Lakeland—Lou begins to laugh, taking an extraordinary, vicious pleasure in both the battered woman and Conway's reaction to her.

That Thompson was largely ignored by both the general reading public and the critics of his day can be taken as a foregone conclusion, I think, from the above sample of Thompson's nitro-and-battery-acid style. In a year (1952) when Ozzie and Harriet were America's favorite postwar couple and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, a novel about the ultimate victory of rationality over cowardice and insanity, was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature, no one really wanted to deal with this picture of a murderer so happy in his work that he laughs and farts before shooting the bewildered and drunken Conway to death with six bullets at point-blank range.

Nor does Thompson allow us the comfort of believing that Deputy Lou Ford is a mutant, a sport, an isolated aberration. In one of the classic passages of the novel, Thompson suggests just the opposite, in fact—that there are Lou Fords everywhere:

The fact is, we've all seen guys who fit the description exactly, right down to the goofy smile and the CASE gimme cap tilted back on the head. The honest—if a little dopey—eyes, the sincere smile. We just know the first thing out of this fellow's mouth is going to be "Howya doon?" and the last thing out is going to be "Have a nice day." Jim Thompson wants us to spend the rest of our lives wondering what's behind those smiles (and if you think the smiling villains don't exist, take a good close look at a picture of Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, two real-life Lou Fords). In Jim Thompson's world, the signs warn of possible escaped lunatics instead of crossing wildlife, and Deputy Barney Fife is a raving psychotic.

There's nothing elegant in The Killer Inside Me. In fact, one of my chief amazements on rereading it was how much Thompson got away with (or how much Lion Books let him get away with) in an era when showing a woman in a bra was verboten in American movies and you could—theoretically, at least—go to jail for owning a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

He does, too, including some things we're not sure we wanted to hear once we've heard them. And he tells us in amazingly blunt, no-holds-barred language.

For instance:

And my own favorite among Thompson's assortment of picnic crudités:

Some of these vulgarities are harsh enough to be startling even to readers who have become relatively inured to rough talk; they must have really "laid them by the heels," as Lou Ford likes to say, in 1952. Leslie Fiedler suggests in Love and Death in the American Novel that language itself is far less important than the spirit with which that language has been imbued, and even after all these years, the language Thompson employs to tell Deputy Ford's story has a kind of starey, socketed ugliness that rasps across our minds like stiff wire bristles. There is nothing pornographic in it, however; quite the opposite. In his introduction to Thompson's work (which is printed at the front of all the Black Lizard editions of Thompson's novels), Barry Gifford observes:

This is a perfectly fair assessment of most of Thompson's books. The reason, I think, is the same one even such good line-by-line writers as John D. MacDonald, David Goodis, and Donald E. Westlake (who spent that period writing under only God and Westlake himself know how many names) sometimes lapsed into fits of hackery: the big paperback machine was hungry, it needed to be fed, and the pay was so low you had to write a lot of prose to make a living wage. Books were often written in a month, sometimes in two weeks, and Thompson himself boasted that he had written two of his titles in forty-eight-hour stints (if one judges by quality, one of those two must have been the infamous Cropper's Cabin). There was little time to rewrite, and none at all to polish. The news that Joseph Heller would, two decades later, labor for seven years to produce a turkey like Something Happened would have caused these speed-writers to boggle with amazement.

But I would argue there is little or none of the salami writing of which Gifford speaks in The Killer Inside Me. In this one book, Thompson's muse seems to have led him perfectly. Every one of Lou Ford's casual country vulgarities is balanced—and out-balanced—by some pithy and unsettling comment on the human condition. Such comments run the risk of being of little use to the story… of being, in fact, the negative image of the meaningless clichés with which the smiling Lou belabors the people he doesn't like ("It's not the heat, it's the humidity," "The man with the grin is the man who will win," etc., etc.). Instead, they have exactly the same startling empty-socketed effect as Ford's vulgarities. Again, the language has been imbued with a tone that lifts it considerably above Thompson's rather pedestrian use of words.

"Why'd they all have to come to me to get killed?" Lou Ford complains suddenly in the midst of his tale. "Why couldn't they kill themselves?" Up to this point, Ford has been narrating, rationally and completely, the story of how the vagrant he ran out of town in the book's first chapter has returned to haunt him. Into this rational account, like a human skull rolling out of the darkness and into the lamplight, comes this paranoid, put-upon, Poe-esque shriek.

When this vagrant later sees the body of Amy, whom Lou has already murdered, he goes into a fit of horror that strikes Lou not as pitiful or frightening but as extremely funny… and such is the power of his skewed vision that it strikes us funny as well.

I laughed too, God help me. Even as I was trying to imagine what Lou Ford must have looked like to a man on the edge of his own death at the hands of a maniac and knowing it, I laughed. It did look and sound funny.

In The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson sets himself one of the most difficult tasks a fiction writer can hope to perform: to create first a sense of catharsis with and then empathy (but not sympathy; never that; this is strictly a moral novel) for a lunatic. The passage above is one of the magical ways in which he achieves this end.

In a book that fairly bristles with painful ironies, we are not really surprised to discover that the motto of Central City, the Texas town where all this mayhem takes place, is "Where the hand clasp's a little stronger." It is a motto a fellow like Lou Ford can take to heart. Especially when it's his hands, around your neck.

Writing about the modern hardboiled detective story, Raymond Chandler once said, "We've taken murder out of the parlor and given it back to the people who do it best." Thompson has gone that one better in The Killer Inside Me; Lou Ford is not only the sort of man who "does it best," but the kind of man who can do nothing else. He is the bogeyman of an entire civilization, a man who kills and kills and kills, and whose motives, which seemed so persuasive and rational at the time, blow away like smoke when the killing is done, leaving him—or us, if he happens to be the sort who kills himself and leaves the mess behind with no explanation—with no sound but a cold psychotic wind blowing between his ears.

At one point Lou tells us a story that seems to have no bearing at all on his own. It is the story of a jeweler with a fine business, a beautiful wife, and two lovely children. On a business trip he meets a girl, "a real honey," and makes her his mistress. She is as perfect in her way as his wife: married, and willing to keep it that way. Then the police find the jeweler and his mistress dead in a motel room bed. A deputy goes to the jeweler's house to tell his wife, and finds her and both of the kids dead. The jeweler has shot them all, ending with himself. The point of the story is Lou Ford's judgment of the jeweler, chillingly brief and to the point: "He'd had everything, and somehow nothing was better."

Thompson, by the way, went on to write a very good novel called The Nothing Man.

Okay. Enough. It's time to get out of your way and let you experience this amazing piece of workmanship for yourself. I have explored the story in more depth than is my custom when writing introductory notes such as this, but only because the story is strong enough to do so without spoiling that experience. No amount of introductory material or postmorteming can prepare you for this work of fiction.

So it's time to let go of my hand and enter Central City, Jim Thompson's vision of hell. Time to meet Lou Ford, the nothing man with the strangled conscience and the strangely divided heart. Time to meet all of them: