The Getaway

Mystery and thriller · Noir

First published: 1958
Print length: 185 pagesVintage Books, 1990

Description

Fresh from prison, expert criminal Carter “Doc” McCoy organizes a bank robbery with his wife and partner, Carol, and two hired accomplices. Their plan is to take the money, flee through California, and cross into Mexico toward a rumored refuge where criminals can disappear. Instead, the robbery erupts into violence, and the escape becomes a running contest against police bulletins, improvised roadblocks, and the fugitives’ growing distrust of one another. While Doc and Carol repeatedly abandon compromised plans, wounded accomplice Rudy forces a veterinarian’s family to carry him along a separate route. The Getaway is a bleak noir pursuit in which professional calculation gives way to panic, and the McCoys’ marriage becomes inseparable from the suspicion and brutality required to survive.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Direct · Spare

Pace

Fast

Tone

Bleak · Dark · Suspenseful · Tense

Structure

Braided · Linear

Focus

Character · Plot · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Crime and punishmentMarriageMoralitySurvival

About Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson was an American novelist and screenwriter whose hardboiled crime fiction brought concise, fast-moving prose to damaged minds and compromised relationships. Writing largely for the paperback market, he built plots from swindles, robberies, corrupt local authority, and schemes whose apparent logic buckles under fear and mistrust. His characteristic method is close alignment with men who misread themselves while calculating against everyone around them. Plain diction and rapid pacing make their excuses part of the action, while dialogue and abrupt shifts in control expose how money, desire, and violence contaminate intimacy. In The Killer Inside Me, a small-town deputy’s dull public manner conceals a returning psychological affliction. Pop. 1280 turns a sheriff’s genial, self-pitying narration into cover for manipulation and murder, adding bleak comedy to the same split between surface and motive. The Grifters widens that pressure into a triangle of con artists, where affection functions as leverage and the prospect of legitimate work competes with inherited habits of deception.