Thompson: "The Killer Inside Me"

I'd finished my pie and was having a second cup of coffee when I saw him. The midnight freight had come in a few minutes before; and he was peering in one end of the restaurant window, the end nearest the depot, shading his eyes with his hand and blinking against the light. He saw me watching him, and his face faded back into the shadows. But I knew he was still there. I knew he was waiting. The bums always size me up for an easy mark.

I lit a cigar and slid off my stool. The waitress, a new girl from Dallas, watched as I buttoned my coat. "Why, you don't even carry a gun!" she said, as though she was giving me a piece of news.

"No," I smiled. "No gun, no blackjack, nothing like that. Why should I?"

"But you're a cop--a deputy sheriff, I mean. What if some crook should try to shoot you?"

"We don't have many crooks here in Central City, ma'am," I said. "Anyway, people are people, even when they're a little misguided. You don't hurt them, they won't hurt you. They'll listen to reason.

She shook her head, wide-eyed with awe, and I strolled up to the front. The proprietor shoved back my money and laid a couple of cigars on top of it. He thanked me again for taking his son in hand.

"He's a different boy now, Lou," he said, kind of running his words together like foreigners do. "Stays in nights; gets along fine in school. And always he talks about you--what a good man is Deputy Lou Ford."

"I didn't do anything," I said. "Just talked to him. Showed him a little interest. Anyone else could have done as much."

"Only you," he said. "Because you are good, you make others so." He was all ready to sign off with that, but I wasn't. I leaned an elbow on the counter, crossed one foot behind the other and took a long slow drag on my cigar. I liked the guy--as much as I like most people, anyway-- but he was too good to let go. Polite, intelligent: guys like that are my meat.

"Well, I tell you," I drawled. "I tell you the way I look at it, a man doesn't get any more out of life than what he puts into it."

"Umm," he said, fidgeting. "I guess you're right, Lou."

"I was thinking the other day, Max; and all of a sudden I had the doggonedest thought. It came to me out of a clear sky--the boy is father to the man. Just like that. The boy is father to the man."

The smile on his face was getting strained. I could hear his shoes creak as he squirmed. If there's anything worse than a bore, it's a corny bore. But how can you brush off a nice friendly fellow who'd give you his shirt if you asked for it?

-Jim Thompson is a favorite of Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, and Bruce Springsteen, among many others. He's famous for having written the novel that became "The Grifters," with John Cusack. (But--also--he wrote a major Kubrick screenplay, and his novel "The Killer Inside Me" became a Casey Affleck flick.)

-The opening of "The Killer Inside Me" plants a question. "Him"--whom does that refer to? "I'd finished my pie when I saw him." By the end of the first paragraph, you piece together that the narrator is sitting in a diner, and he has spotted a "bum" just off the train. He imagines that the bum is lurking in the shadows, hoping to attempt a mugging. (In Jim Thompson's lurid comic-book world, someone is always hoping to attempt a mugging.) And so there's a kind of time bomb right in the first paragraph, waiting to go off; the violence is in tension with the mundane act of having "a second cup of coffee." (Thompson likes setting time bombs. In "The Grifters," we're told very early that Roy has three days to live. There's a sense of things having been fated, and your mind wanders back to the ancient Greeks. Greek tragedy--particularly the struggles that happen within families--clearly helped to give birth to the troubling nanny/child relationship in "Killer Inside Me," and to the weird incestuous subtext in "The Grifters.")

-Thompson isn't especially lyrical, but his choice of words is admirable. The narrator "slides off" his stool; there's something a bit reptilian about that. And the way he labels the waitress--"a new girl from Dallas": There's no warmth, no human connection, in that language. (Which is not to say that's enough to diagnose the narrator as a sociopath. It's just something to note.)

-So much of Thompson's work is dripping with irony. "You don't hurt people, people won't hurt you," he says, with momentary folksiness. But of course the opposite is sometimes true: You can be thoroughly blameless in your dealings with the narrator, and he might still kill you.

-Another great pleasure of Thompson's writing is the way that it demands inferences, and guesses, from the reader. We aren't formerly introduced to the proprietor of the diner. We have to piece together that the narrator has some kind of history with the proprietor, and that the narrator has played a big-brother role in the proprietor's son's life. (A major tragic storyline is thus introduced, in the quietest way.) And then something startling happens, through showing-not-telling. It emerges that the narrator has a favorite sadistic game: He likes to find intelligent men and bombard them with cliches, just as a way of creating boredom and discomfort. (This is like Patrick Melrose's father, drowning ants for the fun of it.) So we have this extraordinary dialogue: The narrator delivers one thudding platitude after another, with a look of earnestness, and the torture goes on and on. (And can't diner chit-chat become something close to torture? You know it can.)

-And so how do you introduce the reader to a sociopath? By having him say things like: "The child is father to the man." And: "You don't get more out of life than what you put into it." The lamest possible words--used as tools of mild sadism. We haven't met a narrator like this before. Sui generis. A scene no one else could imagine. That's the work of Jim Thompson.