Law and No Order: The Killer Cop in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me

Pages:56-62
Maysaa Husam Jaber (University of Baghdad, Jadiryia Campus, Baghdad, Iraq)

We’re living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the Good People are fighting to keep it from us (KIM, 105)1 This passage, from The Killer Inside Me, a 1952 crime novel by Jim Thompson about a killer cop who commits a series of crimes in cold blood, shows a dark world of crime and corruption in a small town in Texas. The Killer Inside Me, like many of Thompson’s crime novels, paints images of extreme violence and brutality and portrays a divided reality in post-war America. The passage above also illustrates a change in the portrayal of the criminal from a gangster, a mobster or a thug as it is conventional in crime narratives to the introduction of the killer cop. Thompson’s police officer is not a protector or a law enforcer; rather he is a criminal who breaks the law and even commits murder. This reversal of roles is the beginning of a new trend in post-war crime fiction that is characterized by demystifying the role of the police and destabilizing the law and societal institutions of power. Set against an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia and fears of the 1950s, Thompson’s crime fiction addresses anxieties around the police and the policing of society.