Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Top 10 unreliable narrators

Henry Sutton's novels include the critically acclaimed Gorleston and The Housesitter, and the newly released Get Me Out of Here. For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of novels with unreliable narrators.

One book on the list:
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)

It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he's in possession of a secret he doesn't even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.
Read about another novel on Sutton's list.

The Killer Inside Me is also one of Alex Barclay's top 10 psychological thrillers.

--Marshal Zeringue