Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me is one of the classic noir books. It gives us a picture of psychopath from the inside; as the novel starts, he's managed to restrain himself for 15-20 years (at a guess), but he's about to start killing.
For a book written in 1952, The Killer Inside Me feels very modern. There's a bit of psycho-analysis to explain why Lou went off the rails, and at first I felt like "oh, no, he's taking it out on the women because they remind him of an experience when he was 14," but then Lou asks himself the question "why all the men?" and realizes that, in the end, he can only guess but his own thought processes are not really open to himself.
One other thing I liked was that, although this is a violent book, the violence is clearly not intended to be titillating. Overall, Killer deserves its reputation as one of the great noir novels.
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