Nebraska Noir: Legendary crime writer forgotten man in home state
Seventy years ago this month, a 25-cent paperback called “The Killer Inside Me” hit newsstands across the country. Featuring a shadowy montage of noir staples – a burning cigarette, a bottle of whiskey, a hint of cleavage and a pool of blood – the cover promised “a novel of murder unlike any you’ve ever read.”
For hundreds of thousands of readers, both then and now and around the world, the superlative proved disturbingly accurate. Written by Jim Thompson, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln alum who spent much of his childhood in Burwell, “The Killer Inside Me” is the confessional tale of Lou Ford, the deputy sheriff of Central City, Texas. On the surface, he’s all hokum and handshakes, the small-town everyman. But as the title implies, something far more sinister – he calls it “the sickness” – lurks inside.
I’ve loafed around the streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other – hell, you’ve probably seen me if you’ve ever been out this way – I’ve stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn’t piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I’m laughing myself sick inside. Just watching people.
Thompson’s fourth novel has since become a staple of the genre, a cult classic, a crown atop the crime writing canon. Famed director Stanley Kubrick said it was “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” Horror icon Stephen King, in his foreword to the latest reissue, calls it “an American classic, no less, a novel that deserves space on the same shelf with “Moby-Dick,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Sun Also Rises” and “As I Lay Dying.’” It’s now been published in more than 20 languages, and twice adapted to the silver screen.
And yet Nebraska – where Thompson first scratched his literary itch, where he studied his craft and courted his wife and wrote for literary magazine Prairie Schooner and ag magazine Nebraska Farmer alike – has all but forgotten its ties to one of the most influential crime writers of the 20th century. Unlike Willa Cather or John Neihardt, his name hasn’t been etched in stone at the university. His bust doesn’t sit inside the capitol building. No historical markers. No heritage society.
Nothing.
“His fiction is inherently and seductively alienating,” says novelist Timothy Schaffert, creative writing director at UNL and fan of Thompson. “There’s nothing at all precious about his work, or his life, and that makes it hard to cradle him in our arms.”
