No, unfortunately I don’t have that first edition with the magnificent cover.
So here it is: Jim Thompson’s most famous and notorious work. I’m a little surprised I made it this long without reading it, but life is short and there is a whole lot to read. There are a few spoilers ahead, but not many.
Given the serial killer craze of the last few decades, this novel is less likely to seem shocking and vicious as it would have among the thicket of noir novels of the 1950s. When Horace McCoy and James Cain write of criminals, the characters always keep a packet of humanity nested away from the monsters that propel their actions… that’s the route to readerly empathy, and so the noir effect — a moral perspective rendered stark by a world of violence and vile-ence — is executed through witnessing their Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-like behavior. There is no such separation in Thompson’s seminal novel. The protagonist is monster through and through, and whatever humanity he might display is itself monstrous… we are seeing, in his meditations and reflections, a monster’s morality.
I don’t need to make a blanket statement about more contemporary noir (who doesn’t love Derek Raymond, even if he makes you feel sick?) to say that most serial killer stories are generally out-of-touch with their subject matter, which is to say that they are more focused upon the end effect — blood, guts, torture, and sadism — and less focused on the amoral impulse to demonstrate power which is the origin of such behavior in the first place. At any rate, The Killer Inside Me demonstrates this powerful focus (without shying from its horrific effects) and in its attention to detail begins to build something like empathy for its sociopathic protagonist. There are many ways that noir can be effective, and appealing to our sense of visceral horror is one of the most obvious. But causing us to empathize with a monster, to follow his trains of thought to their logical conclusion, is one of its more subtle effects. It is an effect that elevates this genre above the realm of pure (and prurient) entertainment and, in this regard, Thompson is a master.