The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me is a crime novel by the American writer Jim Thompson, first published in 1952. It is narrated by Lou Ford, a mild-mannered, cliche-spouting deputy sheriff in a small Texas town who conceals a sadistic and murderous nature behind an ordinary, even dull, public persona. Ford begins a violent sadomasochistic affair with a prostitute named Joyce Lakeland, and as his self-control unravels he goes on to kill Joyce, her lover, and others who threaten to expose him, narrating his own crimes and his attempts to frame other people for them in a flat, matter-of-fact first-person voice that gradually reveals the full extent of his psychopathy; when his schemes finally collapse under police suspicion, he sets his own house on fire and dies inside it. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick called it probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind he had ever encountered, and the novel is regarded as one of the defining works of American noir fiction for its unreliable narrator and its unflinching, interior portrait of a psychopathic killer, influencing generations of later crime writers.