The Plot of the Dime Store Dostoyevsky

Mystery fiction is inherently conservative. Like in horror, the agents of change are transgressive forces that must be contained, suppressed, or killed. What must be protected, in many mystery stories, is the white middle class’s aspirational ideals of a supposedly fair and just world. Endings should restore the comfort of the status quo. 

But the best mysteries break templates. Their authors are skeptics who know that chaos and ambiguity shape reality. The world is not fair; cops are as capable of murder as criminals are. In the mid-20th century, the undisputed master of the psychodrama mystery was Jim Thompson, author of such novels as The Grifters, The Getaway, After Dark, My Sweet, and his dark masterwork, The Killer Inside Me. “There is only one plot,” he argued: “Things are not as they seem.”¹

Born in Oklahoma Territory, Thompson was the son of a corrupt sheriff whose failings forced the family to move to Texas. Jim supported the family as a bellhop at the luxury Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, but side hustles for patrons during the Roaring Twenties made him a mint. He became a pimp, cocaine-chaser, bootlegger, and escort. These nightshifts of sex, drugs, and violence would fill his future stories, including his talent for lockpicking and short cons. These experiences also bred within him a cynicism towards wealth and privilege, especially the idea that either had anything to do with talent or merit. His whisky-invigorated vampire lifestyle crashed after two years with a full mental and physical breakdown. “He was eighteen going on fifty,” his brother recalled.²

Thompson recovered, though he remained an alcoholic for life. He left the hotel for the oil fields as a roughneck, where the management’s corruption made him long for his days among criminals. He became a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World and a brief member of the Communist Party. He attended a University of Oklahoma program for students with unconventional educations, but eventually abandoned it. He held an endless parade of jobs — door-to-door sales, office management, baker, peddler, pipeliner, movie house operator, cook. What made this life bearable was his conviction to become a writer — the side hustle for many of the poor and talented during the Depression.

A natural talent, Thompson was well-read for his education and applied himself with rigor to various forms – journalism, true crime, and short stories. He detested true crime because of the required template, including that all perpetrators “be convicted and sentenced at the conclusion.”³ His first novel, about his war years in an aircraft manufacturing plant, was a commercial failure, so Thompson reached into his harsh and sordid experiences to produce pulp fiction. Nearly broke by the early 1950s, Thompson signed with Lion Press, an eclectic paperback publisher of young, offbeat talents doing transgressive work (including Richard Matheson of The Twilight Zone, Pyscho author Robert Bloch, and fantasy legend Fritz Lieber). They had a manila envelope of lurid premises, and writers got to pick one they liked. Thompson picked “one about “a New York City cop who got involved with a prostitute and ends up killing her.”⁴ Two weeks later, the editors received the first half of a novel that blew their minds.

The Killer Inside Me inverts the mystery novel into a crime horror show. Country bumpkin sheriff Lou Ford, with his corn-pone humor and cheerful affect, is tasked with solving the murder of a country club mogul and a sex worker. Told in first-person, Ford quickly reveals that he is the murderer investigating his own crime in order to find a scapegoat. Ford is smart, cagey, and sociopathic in justifying his actions, blaming what he calls “the sickness,” a compulsion to hurt and kill which he cannot control.⁵ Ford was based on Thompson’s father and a sadistic deputy once sent to fetch Thompson for a trespassing fine during his oil days. The deputy was handsome, well-groomed, and joylessly grinned as he implied that he could kill Thompson with impunity because he was popular among the locals. The deputy then said, ominously, “There ain’t no way of telling what a man is by looking at him. There ain’t no way of knowing what he’ll do if he has the chance. You think maybe you can remember that?”⁶

Thompson never forgot. One of the key themes in all of his fiction is that personality is a performance that may or may not reflect the actor within. Such contempt for appearances and normalcy made his work endure past the sensationalist premises. Once called the “Dime-store Dostoevsky,”⁷ Thompson has been heralded for stories that offer a dark reflection of supposed reality — that for the American Dream to be true, the American Nightmare must be ignored, breeding madness in those who can no longer believe in the status quo. Historians should heed such Thompson’s warning when reading diaries, or speeches, or letters or interviews with our subjects. No matter the source, “things are not as they seem.”

1. Robert Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 295.
2. Ibid., 110.
3. Ibid., 192.
4. Ibid., 342.
5. Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (New York: Lion Books, 1952).
6. Jim Thompson, Bad Boy (New York: Lion Books, 1953), chap. 30.
7. Geoffrey O’Brien, afterword to Jim Thompson, Savage Night (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts/Black Lizard, 1985 [1953]).