I haven’t fared well with crime fiction in the past, despite being easily sucked in to crime television and true crime spectacles, so I approached Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me with some degree of apprehension. Maybe not expecting much from the book made the reaction I had all the more powerful, but I am rendered slightly speechless by Thompson’s unsparing approach to his knowingly psychopathic criminal narrator.

A deputy sheriff in a small county in Texas, Lou Ford, spends his days patrolling the town with a friendly, approachable manner, spouting cliché, idioms and platitudes as advice to his colleagues. Yet behind his provincial facade, Lou is suffering what he terms “the sickness”, an uncontrollable and insatiable anger and urge to lash out violently, usually against women. When he is involved in a blackmail plot between the son of the man who possibly killed his adopted brother and a prostitute, Lou’s sickness bubbles over into reality and a chain of vicious beatings, ruthless murders and self-assured plotting follow. The less said about the actual narrative, the better – it’s a story best enjoyed through Ford’s eyes rather than mine.

I’ve loafed around the streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other – hell, you’ve probably seen me if you’ve ever been out this way – I’ve stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn’t piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I’m just laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people.

Told in the first person, Thompson involves us from the beginning with Lou, though he is a classic unreliable narrator. We’re completely aware that he may not be always telling the truth, that his justification for murder is warped, that things are not going to work out the way he wants them to – and yet, somehow, for most of The Killer Inside Me, I wanted Lou to get away with his sickening crimes. To somehow fool everyone, to slip between the cracks of justice. The reader is never made implicit in Lou’s crimes – they’re described in so little detail that the crimes themselves are never the point of interest. Rather Lou’s acknowledgement of his image of a bumpkin sherriff as an act to cover the murderous intent and his insistence that people believe his act despite all the evidence to the contrary is compelling. Any trace of paranoia is easily dissolved by his illogical reasoning and his staunchly held belief that he is smarter than the cops trying to track down the culprit. Ford drags us, in spite of any moral objections we may hold,  into his obviously deranged way of thinking.

The Killer Inside Me felt more like a curt slap in the face than a reading experience. It left me with the same sense of defiant shock, a speechless disbelief of what has happened. Ford is a character not easily forgotten, and Thompson’s narrative style is understated, yet effectively terrifying.