Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas.  The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring.  But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger.  The sickness that is about to surface again.

An underground classic since its publication in 1952, The Killer Inside Me is the book that made Jim Thompson's name synonymous with the roman noir.

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The Killer Inside Him: LOU FORD
by Robert Polito (excerpted from Savage Art, 0-679-73352-3)

Thompson turned to crime fiction relatively late in his life, at the age of forty-three, with the publication of Nothing More Than Murder (1949). His first novel, Now and on Earth (1942), was a thinly veiled proletarian memoir in the style of the 1930s. A second novel, Heed the Thunder (1946), recast incidents from his Nebraska childhood along the line of the regionalist realism of Willa Cather. Thompson subsequently ransacked a variety of popular genres: westerns, historical fiction, true crime, melodramatic thrillers, tall-tale autobiography, and rural soap opera. His most characteristic performances mark him as the blackest beast of what is coming to be known as serie noire. His notorious novels—preeminently The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), A Hell of a Woman (1954), The Nothing Man (1954), After Dark, My Sweet (1955), and Pop. 1280 (1964)—spotlight edgy, disturbed, insidiously engrossing criminals who often unravel into psychopathic killers. It became Thompson’s dismaying gift to re-create his monsters from the inside out, as it were, to roost deep within their snaky psyches, and to embody through imaginative art their terrifying yet beguiling voices on the page.

For all the casual ferocity here—the beatings, the shotguns fired into open mouths, the bodies that smash like pumpkins, “hard, then giving away all at once”—the central grotesquery of The Killer Inside Me remains Lou Ford’s voice. With his shrewd mix of good cheer and hard-boiled idioms, alternately swaggering and shrinking but always observant and self-regarding, Ford cakewalks through his story like a crafty, ingratiating con man. As he juggles his double life, putting on himself and his reader, just as earlier he had toyed with his victims and laughed at his pursuers, you never entirely disbelieve him—although it’s certain that he is giving himself away, and likely that he is a callous killer posing as a helpless psychopath. Neither do you ever wholly part company with Thompson’s rock-ribbed sympathy for Ford, even after the inevitable occurs—“All I can do is wait until I split”—and, in one of the strangest and ugliest endings in modern fiction, he and his world blow up in our faces.

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

"Jim Thompson is the best suspense writer going, bar none." --The New York Times

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(1906 - 1977) James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He began writing fiction at a very young age, selling his first story to True Detective when he was only fourteen. Thompson eventually wrote twenty-nine novels, all but three of which were published as paperback originals. Thompson also wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films “The Killing” and “Paths of Glory”). An outstanding crime writer, the world of his fiction is rife with violence and corruption. In examining the underbelly of human experience and American society in particular, Thompson’s work at its best is both philosophical and experimental. Several of his novels have been filmed by American and French directors, resulting in classic noir including The Killer Inside Me (1952), After Dark My Sweet (1955), and The Grifters (1963).

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