Summary
Before Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, there was Jim Thompson’s charismatic killer Lou Ford. The main character of The Killer Inside Me, Ford is an early, vivid, and at times extremely human portrait of a sociopath. Lou does not just pass for normal in the novel: he is normal—except when he is killing, or having violent sex, or injecting himself with drugs left over from his father’s medical practice. As a result of this juxtaposition of a friendly next-door neighbor with a casually savage killer, The Killer Inside Me is hypnotic. The way Lou’s life, his small Texas town, and his surface persona disintegrate throughout the novel leads to an inevitably calamitous ending, but readers for over half a century have not been able to look away.
The Killer Inside Me won considerable praise in 1952 when it was published, and in the years since, the book has come to be seen as one of the pivotal texts in the American noir tradition. In the novel, Jim Thompson turns a critical eye on small-town America and exposes it as corrupt and perverted, a verdict that would be shocking even now, but which in the 1950s seemed like sacrilege.
Extended Summary
The Killer Inside Me opens in and around a diner. A homeless man is hanging around outside, so Deputy Lou Ford shows his badge and tells the bum that he must move away from the diner and ideally out of Central City. To emphasize the message, Lou puts out a cigar on the bum’s hand.
Generally perceived as a nice guy, though a bit dull, Lou is often given the task of running the unwanted out of town. Three months earlier, Sheriff Maples had told him to drive a new prostitute, Joyce Lakeland, out of Central City. When Lou warns her away, she becomes furious. She yells at Lou, slaps him, and then knees him in the chin. Her violent reaction releases “the sickness” again. He beats her senseless, almost to death—and she finds this sexually exciting. They become lovers.
When Lou speaks with Joe Rothman, a town labor leader, Joe asks Lou how he felt about his adopted brother, who had died several years ago, and about whom there had been a scandal. Lou goes home, where he finds his girlfriend Amy waiting for him, upset that they have not spent more time together recently. Amy pressures Lou to leave and then to marry her, claiming he will have to because she is pregnant. Lou counters that his father had him sterilized when he was younger.
Chester Conway, the richest man in the area, visits Lou to ask him to roust Joyce from Central City. Conway’s son, Elmer, has become too attached to Joyce, and Conway disapproves. Lou refuses to attempt bribing Joyce, but says he will help resolve the situation. When Elmer comes to talk to him, Lou suggests that Elmer leave the area with Joyce.
After Elmer agrees, Lou goes to Joyce and beats her into a coma. When Elmer shows up, Lou shoots him, planting the gun in Joyce’s hands so that it looks like they killed each other. Lou talks with the authorities and then heads home, stopping on the way to visit with Johnnie Pappas, the diner owner’s son, at the gas station.
Amy is waiting for him at his house. She is mad at Lou for getting mixed up in the killings, and madder still when she realizes that he has been with Joyce. She starts to walk out, but Lou wins her over by promising to marry her.
As soon as she...
(This entire section contains 1184 words.)
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leaves, the county attorney and sheriff show up. It is clear they think Lou may have killed Joyce, but he largely puts their suspicions to rest. They do tell him that Joyce is not dead and that Chester Conway is flying her to Fort Worth for medical treatment. Sheriff Maples and Lou go to Forth Worth as well, and Lou ends up sitting around while Maples gets drunk and mumbles about something Conway had said to him. When they get back to Central City, Joe Rothman quizzes Lou about the killings. Joyce has now been declared dead at the hospital.
Once back home, Lou stumbles across a picture of his old housekeeper, Helene. The sight of her scarred thighs brings back a memory of his father fighting with and discharging Helene because she had slept with Lou. Then the county attorney calls, telling Lou they have arrested Johnnie Pappas for the murders. Lou goes in to talk with Johnnie and, fearing he will incriminate Lou, hangs him using his belt, thus making it look like a suicide. When Johnnie is found, the authorities take the suicide as an admission of guilt.
Lou gets sick with a cold or flu for a while, but once he has recovered, he has a conversation with Joe Rothman about the remodeling that is being done at the diner and the fact that Conway Construction is handling it. In that conversation, it comes out that there is evidence someone else was at Joyce’s house the night she was killed. Rothman broadly implies it was Lou and that he killed Joyce. Rothman suggests that Lou leave town.
Three days later, the bum that Lou had run out of town at the beginning of the novel shows up at Lou’s house. The bum says that he was watching Joyce’s house the night she was killed and thus knows that Lou committed the murders. Blackmailed, Lou agrees to pay him five thousand dollars in two weeks. Soon thereafter, Lou proposes to Amy. Not long after that, Dr. Smith arrives at Lou’s home, wanting to buy it because it still houses key supplies from the medical office that Lou’s father operated. Lou mocks him and in the process displays a far greater learning, especially in medicine, than he has made public before.
In the days that follow, Lou realizes that Sheriff Maples is having him followed or accompanied at all times, confirming that the sheriff knows what Lou did and is getting ready to act on that knowledge. Pretending he is innocent, Lou tells Maples that he will be taking some days off for some special time with Amy. When Amy comes in, thinking they are going to elope to get married, Lou kills her. It is the night Lou had arranged for the bum to come back to get his blackmail money, and when the bum shows up, Lou tries to kill him in a way that frames him for Amy’s murder. However, Lou slips and the bum runs. Lou chases him through town, yelling that the bum killed Amy. Deputy Plummer shoots and kills the bum, and Lou is sedated because he seems so upset over Amy’s death.
When he wakes the next morning, he is told that Sheriff Maples killed himself. The county attorney accuses Lou of having killed Elmer, Johnnie, Amy, and the bum, but Lou plays dumb. The attorney tries to shock Lou into revealing guilt by reading a letter Amy had been planning to give Lou. She has written that she knows Lou is in some kind of trouble.
Lou plays it cool, but they arrest and lock him up as a murder suspect. They put him in the same cell Johnnie Pappas had been in and play a recording of Johnnie’s voice over and over, to break Lou. Lou is in jail for eight days, thinking over his life and how he became the killer he is. He is then taken to the insane asylum to be examined and is shown pictures of Amy and otherwise interrogated for days.
His lawyer eventually shows up and makes a big show of getting Lou out of jail and drives him back to Lou’s house. Realizing he has reached the end of the road, Lou spends more time thinking over his life. After looking out the window and seeing that the house is surrounded by law enforcement personnel, Lou goes out anyway. The various deputies step aside to reveal that Joyce had not really died; she was just terribly injured but conscious. Knowing what will happen, Lou lunges at her, and everyone shoots him dead.