Jim Thompson's 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me has become a classic of the hardboiled fiction genre. (Vintage)

Crime fiction has always thrived in darkness, where tough dames and morally bankrupt anti-heroes allow authors to explore the evil that men do. But more than 50 years after it its first publication, one novel in particular continues to horrify readers with its depiction of unrelenting malice.

Jim Thompson wasn't just writing crime fiction, he was entering the sort of dark terrain no previous writer seemed willing to explore.

That book is Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, the story of Lou Ford, the sheriff of a small Texas town named Central City. Ford works overtime to pass as a friendly, easygoing bumpkin – drawling and feigning simple-mindedness at all the right moments. But by page 8 of Thompson’s novel, something is clearly amiss, as Ford alludes to an inner “sickness” that is once again about to manifest itself. It seems to split his personality and compel him to commit random acts of violence.

This brutal tale was adapted for the screen in 1978, and a new version is heading for theatres this June. Directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, this new film is already generating controversy for its depiction of violence, particularly toward women – a testament to the novel’s lasting bite.

Although clearly influenced by masters like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Thompson was more black-hearted than his noir contemporaries. What made The Killer Inside Me so groundbreaking was that it was told from the point of view of a psychopath. Though James M. Cain had made some attempts to capture a murderer’s perspective in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943), his protagonists were typically weak-willed patsies, led into crime by fate or femmes fatales. By contrast, Lou Ford is an unrepentant killer. He relishes the chance to crack a bad joke before using a vagrant’s palm as an ashtray, and remains philosophical and detached while thrashing a woman to death (“it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving way at once”).

Not surprising given his criminal nature, Ford is an unreliable narrator, one who frequently admits to fibbing. In one scene, he tells his girlfriend he’s had a vasectomy, only to confide to the reader, “Now I couldn’t back up on my story. She’d know I was lying.” Thompson uses Freudian psychology popular in postwar pop culture to complicate the story. At one point, Ford psychoanalyzes himself, citing a traumatic childhood incident, guilt and schizophrenia as possible causes for his violent rage. But later he muses: “We might have the disease, the condition; or we might just be cold-blooded and smart as hell; or we might be innocent…. We might be any of those three things.” Thompson wasn’t interested in pat explanations. Lou Ford was a monster who wouldn’t fit neatly in a box. He was a singular creation, and without him, it’s hard to imagine literary psychopaths like Tom Ripley (introduced by Patricia Highsmith in 1955), the nameless creep in Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room (1971) or Patrick Bateman, the indelible beast in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991).

Thompson fleshed his novel out with secondary characters who are equally unattractive and duplicitous – including corrupt businessman Chester Conway, manipulative girlfriend Any Stanton, the threatening prostitute Joyce Lakeland and the bum who reappears to pull a double-cross. Even the most likable characters are drunks or small-time crooks, making it impossible for the reader to side with anyone.

(Public Domain)

The Killer Inside Me’s lean prose moves along at such a page-turning click, it’s easy to miss Thompson’s stylistic innovations. For one thing, he experiments with language. The characters’ verbal tics are illustrated through terrified stammering or colloquialisms (“Dagnab it”), while Lou Ford’s darkest, most truthful thoughts are rendered in italics.

In one drawn-out, tortuous chapter punctuated by obvious stalling tactics, Ford promises to describe the night he committed his most grisly murder. Mid-tale, Ford offers up a curious speech. “In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea…. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff – a lot of book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddamn lazy to do his job.”

In this scathing meta-commentary, Thompson makes his aims known: he isn’t just writing crime fiction, he’s turning it on its head, shattering the genre’s clichés and venturing into the sort of dark terrain no previous writer seemed willing to explore. He propels Ford toward a twist ending in which the deranged criminal narrates his own death — an ending Thompson would employ again in novels like Savage Night (1953) and A Hell of a Woman (1954). The conclusion was devastating for readers in the 1950s, who were accustomed to endings that restored order.

Thompson churned out crime novels during that decade before sliding into obscurity and alcoholic decline, a fate as grim as any he invented for his characters. He died in 1977, but it was only after three of his books – After Dark, My Sweet; The Getaway; and The Grifters – were turned into films in the '90s that audiences realized he deserved a place in the hardboiled canon alongside Chandler, Hammett and Cain.

Thompson’s bleak worldview pervades The Killer Inside Me and is perhaps best embodied in a seemingly random story Ford tells about a Central City jeweller with a wife, two kids and a mistress. After first noting the jeweller’s “perfect” arrangement, Ford reveals that he was later found dead: after killing his family and mistress, the jeweller committed suicide. Attempting to explain such an unfathomable act, Ford says, “He’d had everything and somehow nothing was better.” It’s that nihilism that, to this day, still makes The Killer Inside Me such a bone-chilling read.

The new film version of The Killer Inside Me is tentatively scheduled to be released in June.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.