One of last year's most controversial films was The Killer Inside Me, an adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 novel. The film closely followed Thompson's original in depicting an atrocious series of murders from the killer's own perspective, and some critics complained furiously about the film's prolonged depictions of violence, its resemblance to "torture porn." British critic Jenny McCartney wrote that in the film's sadistic treatment of women, director Michael Winterbottom proved himself "a nasty blockhead"; still, beyond question, Winterbottom was being faithful to Thompson's voice.

The violence in Jim Thompson's books often is problematic, but it is essential to understanding the central themes that drove his work, which are acutely spiritual and moral. Few other writers better understood the nature of personal depravity, or so clearly mapped the path to damnation. It would be sad if the violence issue alone prevented readers from exploring the work of a writer who may be the best twentieth century American novelist few people have heard of. However bizarre the analogy might have sounded in his lifetime, Thompson today can properly be read alongside Flannery O'Connor, while French critics freely compare him to William Faulkner.

I exaggerate when I suggest that Thompson is unknown. His crime thrillers have a lively cult following, and several have been turned into films, the best known of which are The Getaway (1972) and The Grifters (1990), while the recent Killer was the second adaptation. In 1995, Robert Polito published a superb biography of Thompson, Savage Art. Even so, it's not unusual to find well-read Americans with a taste for contemporary literature who have never heard of Thompson, or who consign him (unread) to the distant fringes of genre crime-writing. They should take a look at Thompson's best novels, which are also the ones that most frankly explore spiritual themes: The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway (the book, not to be confused with the diluted film treatment), and, above all, Pop. 1280, which I would unhesitatingly claim as a modern classic.

Jim Thompson (1906-1977) was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, the son of local sheriff Big Jim Thompson, and that last fact is more than biographical trivia. Diabolical sheriffs with dark secrets are central to Jim junior's best writing. The younger Thompson floated between jobs in the 1930s, until he found his métier as a pulp novelist. He thus joined the ranks of those authors of disposable paperbacks commonly marketed with sensational pictures of scantily clad women and well-armed men.

But he used the genre to subversive effect. Some innocent commuter hoping for an undemanding read about gunfights and casual sexual encounters would be puzzled to find himself exposed to quite radical experimental fiction. A Hell Of A Woman (1954) culminates with the text broken into parallel columns to reflect the character's disintegrating psyche. Provided he supplied the sex, the action, and the bloodshed—which he did, abundantly—Thompson was in a world where he could do whatever he pleased. He became the "dime-store Dostoevsky," as Geoffrey O'Brien called him.

And what he wanted to do was to understand evil. The Killer Inside Me tells the story of sheriff Lou Ford, an erudite and often sensitive man who is also a sadistic monster of evil, molesting, raping, and killing where he pleases, without a shadow of conscience. He escapes the world's attention by portraying himself as a sententious buffoon, virtually as Forrest Gump. (Did I mention that Thompson's father, Big Jim, was an educated man who liked to pose as a simpleton?)

We see the story of Killer entirely through Lou's eyes. Partly, we see here the influence of James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which also examined evil through the gaze of a perpetrator. Where Killer differs crucially from Confessions is that Lou Ford knows exactly what he is doing (Hogg's villain blames his crimes on an imaginary other self). That illustrates a recurring theme in Thompson's work, which was written at a time when religious and scientific concepts of evil were drawn into curious proximity. Before the 19th century, scholars and lawyers confidently distinguished between sanity and madness, as insane people so clearly identified themselves by their bizarre and delusional behavior. But then doctors made the disquieting discovery that some people seemed to be compelled to commit awful crimes, for which they showed no remorse, and yet they manifested no symptoms of mental illness.

By the mid-20th century, a growing body of expert literature described what came to be called psychopathic mental states. In 1941, Hervey Cleckley published his classic account, The Mask of Sanity, a title that would have appealed mightily to Lou Ford (he's an avid student of contemporary psychoanalytic theory). The image of the psychopath became a national nightmare during the sex offender panic that raged in the noir decade after 1945. The concept of psychopathy appealed mightily in these years, and not just within the confines of medical science. Here after all was a well-recognized medical condition that bore a striking resemblance to traditional concepts of individual evil, or even of diabolic possession. For a while, it looked as if psychiatrists really were diagnosing the demonic.

It was only a matter of time before writers took on the challenge of viewing the world through the eyes of these monsters. In 1947, Robert Bloch's pioneering serial-murder novel The Scarf told the story from the perspective of a deranged killer, prefiguring Thompson's Killer. The Scarf was regarded as a sufficiently serious contribution to merit a laudatory review in a professional medical journal from leading psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Psychiatry and pulp fiction seemed to be speaking the same language. If Lou Ford is not described as possessed, that interpretation is nevertheless available to the reader, who can read Lou's "sickness" either as disease or devil, according to taste. Lou apparently narrates his story from beyond the mortal world.

Thompson's interest in supernatural evil also shaped his 1959 novel The Getaway, which told the story of escaping bank-robber Doc and his girlfriend Carol. Sam Peckinpah's film version perfectly catches the book's frantic mayhem, but it ends happily as the lovers escape across the Mexican border to seek refuge in the hands of the mysterious El Rey. What the film conspicuously omits is the book's closing section, in which the fugitives do indeed reach the land of El Rey, who is in fact the King of Hell. Thompson here creates one of the most unnerving infernal visions in American literature. Doc and Carol are trapped in the Hell they have created and chosen, where they survive only as long as they can spend their ill-gotten loot; when that runs out, they will themselves become food. Only by betraying each other can they stave off their deadly fate a little longer. In its emphasis on the voluntary choice that drives sinners to perdition, The Getaway reads well alongside C. S. Lewis' Great Divorce.

Pop. 1280 (1964) includes some of Thompson's most explicitly religious themes, although portions of it are so riotously funny that you may find it hard to believe that there is serious content: but indeed there is. Pop. 1280 has unsettling autobiographical overtones. It is the story of a claustrophobic small town named Pottsville around 1917, with its apparently hapless sheriff, Nick Corey: a setting that sounds a lot like the real-life Anadarko of Thompson's childhood. Although the title refers to the sign you see entering the town, "Pop" also suggests the paternal theme. But it is not just a historical work, written as it was at a time of the most intense racial violence against the civil rights movement, giving leftist veteran Thompson a platform for his bitterest condemnations of small town racism and bigotry. It is the American South of 1964 that Thompson is damning to perdition. When French director Bernard Tavernier triumphantly adapted the novel into the film Coup de Torchon ("Clean Slate"), he moved the action to colonial French West Africa, in order to preserve the atmosphere of pervasive racial oppression.

Coup de Torchon caught precisely the religious and apocalyptic tone of the book, an impressive feat for anyone not as immersed as Thompson was in the language and worldview of Bible Belt hellfire revivalism. Although we first meet Sheriff Nick as a comical loser, exploited and put upon by family and neighbors, he ultimately appears as a Miltonic or even biblical figure, sent as judge and executioner of an utterly evil society rotted by racism, hypocrisy, cruelty, and exploitation.

In his own messianic fantasy, Nick sees himself as Christ on the Cross, sent to Potts County "because God knows I was needed here." At the same time, he is something between an avenging angel and the Indian Trickster. He gradually purges and slaughters the town's sinners, using their own crimes and lusts in order to destroy them. After all, "Just because I put temptation in front of people, it don't mean they've got to pick it up …. I was just doing my job, followin' the holy precepts laid down in the Bible …. It's what I'm supposed to do, you know …. To coax 'em into revealin' theirselves, and then kick the crap out of them." Driven by that holy mission, he commits deeds even bloodier than Lou Ford's.

Only at the end do we fully comprehend Nick's spiritual role. Old Nick—El Rey himself—is the sheriff of Potts County, a microcosm of the sinful world, in which he goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. But his victims are not individual sinners. As Nick says, "There can't be no personal hell, because there ain't no personal sins. They're all public … we all share in the other fella's and the other fella shares in ours." The whole society demands purgation.

According to your reading, Pop.1280 is an apocalyptic satire of America or a masterly case-study of religious mania. But like Killer and Getaway, the book towers above its pulp genre. It demands to be read as a religious classic as much as a thriller.

Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author most recently of Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (HarperOne).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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