The Getaway: Jim Thompson (1958)

“Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.”

A few months ago, I committed to a Jim Thompson Noirfest. I had several Thompson titles sitting neglected on my shelf, and I’d intended to read his books for years. A conversation here sparked the commitment to hold a Thompson Noirfest, and I selected 7 titles for the read-a-thon. I blasted through The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Swell Looking Dame, and A Hell of a Woman. Then I made the strategical error of watching Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway right as I started the book. I couldn’t wash away the images of Steve McQueen as bank robber Doc (along with his side kick wife played by Ali McGraw). So I put aside the book and let some time pass and the film fade.

The Getaway (and I’m glad I read this title BTW as it’s a complete change of pace from the other Thompsons I read), is about a bank robbery and the subsequent attempt to escape to Mexico. The unreliable narrator is absent, and also absent is an intense character study. Instead it’s a rapid robbery, the double-crossing relationships between the thieves and then the getaway takes up most of the story. The story is punctuated by a very strange ending, but more of that later.

Thompson doesn’t neglect character in The Getaway, but neither does he linger on it (as in The Killer Inside Me). His characters are wrapped up in just a few succinct sentences. There are no layers here (The Killer Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman); what we see is what we get, and what we get isn’t nice at all. Doc, for example, is the son of a small town corrupt sheriff (back to that Thompson biography again), and Doc’s seemingly pleasant and generous nature coats the character of a cunning predator:

Doc, then, was born popular; into a world where he was instantly liked and constantly reassured of his welcome. Everyone smiled, everyone was friendly, everyone was anxious to please him. Without being spoiled–his father’s  strictly male household took care of that–he acquired an unshakeable belief in his own merit; a conviction that he not only would be but should be liked wherever he went. And holding such a conviction, he inevitably acquired the pleasant traits and personality to justify it.

Doc’s moll is Carol–a former librarian, the daughter of a nice middle-class family. Her walk on the wild side has negated any return to her former life. When the book begins, she has a taste for the bad boy in Doc–or at least she thinks she does, but things are about to get wilder than she imagined.

When the book begins, career criminal Doc McCoy is out of jail on parole. This was his second sentence. The first sentence was no biggie, but the second sentence is different as McCoy now has a much younger wife, Carol who’s “almost fourteen years his junior” left on the outside to worry about. Doc is looking at a twenty-year sentence, but with his loot to pay for the services of a “topflight criminal lawyer,” the sentence is reduced to ten years. Any hope of early release is dashed when Doc’s appeal to the parole board is denied, and at that point, Carol decides to approach one of the board members, Beynon, personally. This works, Doc is out on parole and when the book begins, he’s about to pull off his final heist before ‘retiring’ to El Ray, a remote area in Mexico that specialises in harbouring wealthy criminals on the lam.  

The robbery is swift and brutal in its execution. Doc’s partners are the horribly misshapen and mentally twisted Rudy, and a young kid named Jackson. The money is going to be split after the robbery, but both Rudy and Doc have no intention of splitting the pot, so Carol and Doc hightail it to Mexico with Rudy in hot pursuit.  Here’s Rudy–a paranoid sadist who, in many ways, is the opposite of the self-assured, confident Doc:

He was afraid to sleep, and equally fearful of awaking; from the dawn of his memory, the days had also been identified with terror. In the latter case, however, his fear was of a different kind. A cornered rat might feel as Rudy Torrento felt on coming into full consciousness. Or a snake with its head caught beneath a forked stick. It was an insanely aggressive, outrageously furious fear; a self-frightening, self-poisoning emotion, gnawing acidly at the man whose existence depended upon it.

He was paranoid; incredibly sharp of instinct; filled with animal cunning. He was also very vain. On the one hand, then, he was confident that Doc McCoy intended to kill him, as soon as he had served Doc’s purposes, and on the other, he could not admit it.

The book is full of interesting contrasts. Doc is an affable, well-liked criminal whose past behaviour has secured many allies, and this proves to be a useful factor along the escape route. Rudy, on the other hand, has no friends to help, and he kidnaps the Clintons, a veterinarian and his lascivious wife for the trip. Doc and Carol make a tight team, and Rudy sees them as an enviable couple, but as the pursuit lengthens, Doc discovers some truths about Carol that begin to irk him and which threaten to sever their partnership. Underneath Doc’s affability, lurks a predatory reptile, and it’s clear that Carol is out of her depth. 

A thread of sadistic action runs throughout The Getaway and this mainly explodes on to the many characters who fall into Rudy and Doc’s paths. There are some wonderful characterisations here–my favourite has to be Ma Santis: “Daughter of a criminal, wife of a criminal, mother of six criminal sons.” She’s a Ma Barker figure–well she would be if all that shit fabricated about Ma Barker by the FBI were true, so instead I’ll say that Ma Santis is the sort of Ma Barker figure J Edgar Hoover dreamed about.

As for the novel’s unexpected ending (not at all like the film BTW)…think nasty shades of Shirley Jackson. While the film ends on a happy note, well, that’s Hollywood for you, the book’s savagely twisted ending somehow fits the sadistic action of the rest of the book. 

On a final note about the film–It’s amusing really to hear the criticisms lobbed against Peckinpah who was known as “Bloody Sam” for his use of violence. Obviously the critics hadn’t read the book–otherwise they’d have appreciated how the screenplay toned down the book’s sadistic passages. Although I must add that the touches added regarding the Clintons are brilliant. Sally Struthers plays Dr. Clinton’s hot-to-trot wife, and the film elaborates on her role as she giggles and floozies her way into a sleazy relationship with Rudy which is openly flaunted against her tormented husband. This elaboration is a truly subversive addition to the film as Rudy’s insertion into the Clinton’s marriage acts as a sexual liberator for skanky Fran–yet another woman with a secret taste for the dark side of life:

He’s seen this babe before–her many counterparts, that is. He knew her kin, distant and near. All her mamas, sisters, aunts, cousins and what have you. And he knew the name was Lowdown with a capital L. … This babe got around. She was the original square-plug-in-a-round-hole kid. But she never changed any. She had that good old Lowdown blood in her, and the right guy could bring it out.