Mon 23 Nov 2009
A Review by Bill Crider: JIM THOMPSON – The Killer Inside Me.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[13] Comments
by Bill Crider:
JIM THOMPSON – The Killer Inside Me. Lion #99, paperback original, 1952. Reprinted many times since. Film: Warner Bros., 1976; with Stacy Keach, Susan Tyrrell, Tisha Sterling, Keenan Wynn; director: Burt Kennedy.
The back cover of this paperback original has the following statement from the publishers: “We believe that this work of American fiction is the most authentically original novel of the year. The Killer Inside Me is Lion Books’ nomination for the National Book Award of 1952.”
Lion was not a major publisher, even in the paperback field, and their novel had little chance to win. But there are those who believe it should have, because Thompson’s book is one of the most powerful and frightening looks into a madman’s mind that has ever been written.
Lou Ford, the narrator, is a deputy sheriff in a small west Texas town. He is a “good old boy,” well liked by everyone. He is also a psychopathic killer. Two men in one body, trapped by “the sickness,” he is set off on his trail of murder by a prostitute. Before he is done, he has killed or caused the death of everyone he cares for.
It takes a tough mind and a strong stomach to read this book, but the amazing thing about it is that Thompson manages to make his monster sympathetic, and that the sympathy comes from understanding. The reader is made to feel what it must be like to be Lou Ford, and the tortured violence of the book clearly reflects the tortured nature of Ford’s soul.
One thing that can be said about few books can be said with certainty about The Killer Inside Me: No one who reads it will ever forget it.
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Talk about hype! The 1952 National Book Award winner was James Jones FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, a novel I’ve read and thought deserved the award. THE KILLER INSIDE ME is excellent but no way deserving of the award. Typical over praising by Lion Books.
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:29 pm
The Killer Inside Me for the National Book Award — was that before or after they gave it to Spillane for One Lonely Night?
Even in my PR days I never had that much chutzpah.
You have to wonder if Thompson got a laugh out of that.
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:21 pm
All I can say is that there wasn’t any book that could have beaten FROM HERE TO ETERNITY that year, nor should there have been!
Looking back from a perspective of 50 years later, the National Book Award has a pretty good track record over its first decade or so:
1960: Philip Roth. GOODBYE, COLUMBUS
1959: Bernard Malamud. THE MAGIC BARRELL
1958: John Cheever. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE
1957: Wright Morris. THE FIELD OF VISION
1956: John O’Hara. TEN NORTH FREDERICK
1955: William Faulkner. A FABLE
1954: Saul Bellow. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
1953: Ralph Ellison. INVISIBLE MAN
1952: James Jones. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
1951: William Faulkner. THE COLLECTED STORIES
1950: Nelson Algren. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM
Some of these are better than others, but there’s no losers in the bunch. I’m just wondering: Is there a work of crime fiction that could have competed in any of those years?
I’d say that THE KILLER INSIDE ME comes as close as any, and it’s still nowhere near.
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 pm
In that period the closest to a crime novel I can think of that might have won — or deserved to — is Knock on Any Door (which arguably isn’t a crime novel but a novel with crime), The Asphalt Jungle, and maybe Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle (1958).
But it would be hard to top their choices. And honestly I think you could call Algren’s Man With The Golden Arm a crime novel.
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Willard Motley’s KNOCK ON ANY DOOR was a book from 1947, but your suggestion is well taken. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but now that you’ve brought it up, I agree.
Your other two choices are excellent, but after thinking them over for a few minutes, I’d have to say not quite good enough.
As for THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, I had the same reaction you did when I posted the list of book award winners. I looked, and Al Hubin doesn’t include it in CRIME FICTION IV, but maybe he should have.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced. I’ll ask him about it tomorrow.
— Steve
November 24th, 2009 at 12:01 am
I know Algren didn’t intend Man as a crime novel, but maybe it should be in Hubin with a dash — for that matter Walk on the Wild Side could darn near be a Charles Williams or JDM Gold Medal original (and was Fawcett in paperback)in many ways — certainly deserves a dash and some of the collected short fiction falls at least as much in the crime category as some of Irwin Shaws stuff.
I knew Knock on Any Door was borderline, but didn’t bother to look it up. One other I might have suggested is Come Fill The Cup, but I again I think it is slightly out of the time frame.
But other than Asphalt Jungle and The Eighth Circle I really can’t think of any others of quite that quality unless Ellin’s short story collection Specialty of the House falls in that decade — of course, being an Aussie Carter Brown wasn’t eligible, which is the only reason he didn’t trump them all.
November 24th, 2009 at 1:05 am
And which Mavis Seidlitz book did you have in mind, exactly?
November 25th, 2009 at 7:17 am
I’m going to flaunt my lack of class by saying I got much more out of Jim Thompson and KILLER INSIDE ME than I ever got out of Nelson Algren or James Jones. Or Norman Mailer, whose AMERICAN DREAM is a pale reflection of Thompson’s best.
What Thompson brings to Literature is the element of incongruity/surprise/shock at seeing writing this good selling for two bits on the rack at a drug store or bus station. Good writers are supposed to strut their stuff in classy stores, quiet libraries, college classes or between the pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS, but Thompson slaps his art between gaudy covers and flings it on the street where any bored working stiff or horny kid can pick it up and be amazed by it as I was.
November 25th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Dan
It’s not so much a lack of class on your part as it is wishful thinking, I submit to you, to suggest that an unknown paperback writer from a fly-by-night publisher was going to win a national book award in the 1950s.
It wasn’t going to happen, as much as we might dream it could be so. And should KILLER INSIDE ME have won? All snobbery aside, and all other factors being equal — if KILLER had been published in hardcover by the same publisher as James Jones’ book?
I wonder.
But then neither you nor I nor any of your other working stiffs and horny kids back then would have been attracted enough to it to think it was worth reading.
There are a lot of trade-offs based on hypotheticals here, aren’t there? I’ll have to think about this some more.
— Steve
November 25th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Much as I love Thompsons’s work, and the considerable power he brings to it, I don’t think he is in the same class as a James Jones. There is an element of slap dash to his writing — to some extent it gives it great energy, but it is why he is not quite in a class with a Chandler, a Cain, Hammett, or ever John D. MacDonald or Ross Macdonald. Thompson’s work has power, but it lack sense of control that marks better literature.
It isn’t snobbery, just honesty. To say I enjoyed The Killer Inside Me more than say Cheever’s Wapshot Scandal is just speaking the truth, but to compare them artistically is a sort of intellectual dishonesty. We all have favorite books that we know are not literature or art, but we still love them.
But while I would probably rather read a Gold Medal (or even Lion) by Thompson, Rabe, Goodis, Charles Williams, Wade Miller, or John McPhartland that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that despite my love of their work they are not quite in the same class as most NBA winners.
Thompson was a talented writer who might have developed his gift in other circumstances, but his personal demons and perhaps a touch of kismet prevented that. It in no way lessons the legacy he left, but we do him and his work no favors to pretend it is more than it was. Personally I prefer a good steak, but I don’t pretend it is cordon bleu cooking.
Thompson exceeded the demands of the form he was working in — and can you imagine the pressure he must have felt when he saw that cover copy? It’s a tribute that he didn’t take it seriously and continued to refine doing what he did best and producing books that have stood the test of time as well or better than many NBA winners. For a writer of paperback originals to have the reputation and recognition he has is tribute to his skills. But we do his memory no favors — as Lion’s editors did his career none — by putting demands on his work it was never designed or fashioned to bear.
November 25th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
I’m with David and Steve on this one. I think alot of readers for instance think of the film version of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. The book is alot better and far more gritty and honest about peace time army life. I spent two years in the service as an enlisted man and sometimes felt I was reliving the novel.
For instance in the book it is quite clear that the girls are nothing more or less than whores. The movie changes all this to such an extent that the viewer might rightly think the girls were wholesome volunteers selling girl scout cookies. Jones novel was quite an excellent portrait of army life in peacetime. And speaking of Mailer, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD was not only his best work, but also an excellent account of the wartime army life.
Jim Thompson is very good but not in this class at all.
November 26th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Walker
It’s ironic that both Mailer and Jones failed when they tried to write something close to genre fiction. Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance is by far the bigger failure in my opinion, and pretty worthless save for a few good lines scattered along the way. Oddly I thought his American Dream a good book, though I don’t think he was trying to write a book like Killer Inside Me with it.
Jones, Touch of Danger is an altogether better attempt at a pi novel, and it’s hero, Lobo, interesting, but it is not Jones at his best, and too often seems to lose the narrative line that a genre novel calls for. More a noble experiment than a success, but well worth reading.
But that doesn’t mean that at their best they weren’t more serious and generally more literary writers than Thompson, and I really don’t know that Thompson could have competed in that league. Luckily for us he had more sense than to try, and instead did what he did so well.
Of course there are ‘literary’ writers who did both well — C.P. Snow, C. Day-Lewis, Philip Wylie, Peter Ackroyd, Lawrence Durrell, Aldous Huxley (in short form), and a few other come to mind, as well as intellectuals who liked the playfulness of the genre such as Michael Innes (J.I.M. Stewart), but in general it’s an uneasy mix.
That said I don’t think either Jones or Mailer could have written a book as compulsively readable as The Killer Inside Me any more than Thompson could have written From Here to Eternity or Naked and the Dead.
We are the ones making a mistake comparing apples to oranges, and confusing readability and entertainment value with artistic or literary merit. They do meet at times in a rarity like Charles Dickens, but usually it is more like Dumas versus Balzac.
However Balzacian the overall impact of Thompson’s novels his true merit falls in the school of Dumas and entertainment.
December 20th, 2010 at 11:08 am
James Jones and Jim Thompson both belong to different class because they were writing for different demography. Both were masters of their class and to me a comparison between them reeks of a snobbery of its own kind. James Jones never wrote a crime novel, so we can’t judge his work there. Thompson didn’t exactly achieved pinnacle with ‘Now and on earth’, but that was his first novel and no indicator for what was coming from him, greatest noir writing.