What a great book with a strange ending. 9/10 of the book is a straight out crime book, the last part turns into some a dystopian future. Knocked off one star for the abrupt turn of the story. Short book (185 pages), Quick Read. ( )

Personally I loved the whacked out ending ( )

Given he falls into genres of which I read a lot, I'm gobsmacked to have discovered Jim Thompson only recently. Why is reading so motivated by fashion? If there is something that should be above fashion, or outside it, why would this not be it?

Of course, it could just be a case of trying to corner the market in rabbits. ( )

I suppose I am like many others who came to this novel after seeing the film. The Steve McQueen version, I should emphasize. What is remarkable is that both film and novel are masterful in their own, separate and distinctly different ways. It is the last part of Thompson's book that is so different and so abstract as to divert the reader from the film completely. Its description of Doc and Carol on the run and their hideaway among Ma and Earl makes for one of the most harrowing and claustrophobic passages in contemporary literature. But then Thompson does himself one better with the final chapter, where Doc and Carol make their "getaway" to El Rey, which turns out to be the world's most sophisticated and luxurious charnel house. No other work in this genre turns on its protagonists so utterly and viciously. At novel's end, metaphor and reality merge in an indecipherable way. This book is a masterpiece. ( )

Jim Thompson's The Getaway is, for the most part, a solid hard-boiled crime story. I was a big Steve McQueen fan as a teenager and enjoyed the 1972 Sam Peckinpah adaptation of this book, but when I finally got around to reading the source, I wondered if I was perhaps not being forced to rely on the memory of the film as a crutch. I saw Doc and Carol as Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, of course, but the book didn't have enough in the characterisation to separate itself from those shadows. My favourite scene from the film, one which has stayed with me vividly after all these years (where Doc buys a shotgun over-the-counter and lays waste to a police car) is not in the book at all.

None of this hindered my enjoyment of the book, which was heading to a respectable 3-star rating in my mind. But then the final act was just so weird. Some people have said that the progression from the dark caves to the manure pile and then on to El Rey is symbolic of a death and descent into Hell, and normally I am all about that sort of thing, but in Thompson's book it comes completely out of left-field. One moment you are reading a realistic, hard-boiled crime thriller and the next you have this strange, surrealistic world-building of a criminal dystopia. Thompson does nothing to facilitate this abrupt shift, and I closed the book feeling rather scrambled and dissatisfied. ( )