After Dark, My Sweet(1955)

Jim Thompson

Bill Collins is young, good looking, agile and strong but he's a drifter with mild multiple neuroses, in and out of institutions, and dangerously violent on occasion. When he gets involved with the hard-drinking Fay Anderson and the deceptively pleasant ex-police officer everyone knows as Uncle Bud in a ruthless kidnap plot, everything goes to hell in a hurry, and the end, for Bill, is inevitable and shattering. This is a tour de force of paranoia and violence from the master of the crime noir novel.