Rating: 
Summary: Classic Thompson
Review: "The Getaway" is another classic crime noir from Jim Thompson. The main character, Doc McGraw, is a bank robber who is sprung from jail by his wife, Carol, who may or may not have slept with a member of the pardon board. After he's released, Doc robs a bank and he and Carol go on the run. Everything that can go wrong does, which builds a great deal of anxiety and mistrust between Doc and Carol. The book has some great twists and turns and a fairly surreal ending.A 1972 movie was made from the book starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. That movie is pretty good, but differs vastly from the novel. Specifically, the movie is a love-on-the-run chase movie, while the book is about the mistrust between cons. As such, the book is much more complex and enjoyable. Highly recommended for fans of Jim Thompson and/or crime novels.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Thompson
Review: "The Getaway" is another classic crime noir from Jim Thompson. The main character, Doc McGraw, is a bank robber who is sprung from jail by his wife, Carol, who may or may not have slept with a member of the pardon board. After he's released, Doc robs a bank and he and Carol go on the run. Everything that can go wrong does, which builds a great deal of anxiety and mistrust between Doc and Carol. The book has some great twists and turns and a fairly surreal ending. A 1972 movie was made from the book starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw. That movie is pretty good, but differs vastly from the novel. Specifically, the movie is a love-on-the-run chase movie, while the book is about the mistrust between cons. As such, the book is much more complex and enjoyable. Highly recommended for fans of Jim Thompson and/or crime novels.
Rating: 
Summary: A classic novel, of crime, double cross, and murder!!!
Review: An excellent crime/noir novel, about a bank robbery that went bad. There are no heros here, Thompson's characters, are two faced, manipulators, liars, and killers. It was a fast paced read, which held together well. Although the ending is a bit unusual, (with hints of cannibalism, in a Mexican town used as a hideout for fugitives), it is still a believable finale. I agree with another reviewer, as far as the film versions of this novel are concerned, the 1970 classic directed by Sam Peckinpah, starring Steve McQueen, and Ali McGraw is a classic crime film. The remake in 1994, is of poor quality, and might as well be passed up. Instead read another of Thompson's novels, such as The Killer Inside Me" or "After Dark My Sweet", all classic noir worth adding to your library.
Rating:
Summary: Married Life a la Jim Thompson
Review: I honestly wish some producer or director had the courage to make a true adaptation of this book. This is a caper story, a chase story, and a descent into personal and professional hell. Whereas the films follow this up to a point, they leave out the stunning and shocking denoument. Thompson shows the decay of a marriage through distrust and greed. His El Rey is mostly a metaphor for the worst of bad relationships. pray you never wind up there.
Rating:
Summary: Married Life a la Jim Thompson
Review: I honestly wish some producer or director had the courage to make a true adaptation of this book. This is a caper story, a chase story, and a descent into personal and professional hell. Whereas the films follow this up to a point, they leave out the stunning and shocking denoument. Thompson shows the decay of a marriage through distrust and greed. His El Rey is mostly a metaphor for the worst of bad relationships. pray you never wind up there.
Rating:
Summary: Comment on Doug Vaughn's review of Jim Thompson
Review: I like your first sentence. One can also replace the name 'Jim Thompson' with the name 'Doug Vaughn' and the words 'pulp fiction' with the word 'criticism' and you get the same outcome. Hey Doug, what is art? I guess Kafka or whatever you decide. I have not even read any Jim Thompson but, your review seems riddled with generalizations and/or statements insufficiently fortified. You might want to start with why Kafka is artistic and Thompson is not. How many things gone wrong are too much? Define character insights and literary flourishes. You are assuming that you, the reader, are catching everything. Did you ever think you may be reading it incorrectly? Again, I state I have not read The Getaway but, it seems that you may be the pretentious one not merely the ending of the book. Then, again I may be reading your review wrong.
Rating:
Summary: Thompson the Misanthropic Genius
Review: I've read all the novels and storys of 'Dougs' Kafka. Who writes great surreal tense stuff. But no writer I've ever read can hit like Thompson does, Reading his books leaves me feeling more sick and bewildered than kafka ever could (not that i'm saying he's better than Kafka). I read American Psycho and it did absolutely nothing for me this book is ten times as sickening. Thompson gets in your head slowly, making you think you know and like his charachters, know whats going on, then he opens it wide with a hatchet and all the conceptions you had fall away with your oozing brains as the charachters reveal themselves to be utter scum. Thompson is a goddamn misanthropic genius! It may be true that pulp is "bush league" but some writers can transverse genre. Thompson is one of those writers.
Rating:
Summary: CRIME DOESN'T PAY IN THIS GETAWAY
Review: If you have ever considered robbing a bank, then I suggest you start by reading this book. After 184 pages you'll quickly decide that all you're in for is a life of worry...and a quickly diminishing bank account. The Getaway tells the story of Doc and Carol McCoy and how they have robbed a bank with just over $200,000 and are attempting to flee the country. Of course along the way they have to escape the police, fellow henchman out to kill them, petty thieves, and numerous problems that they could never have predicted. The two work together because they are in love and know that as a team they CAN succeed. Which leaves us to their final destination the town of EL REY, where it is made painfully clear - if you want to survive you need to look out for #1. What will become of our beloved protagonists? Well Good Reader go and discover this for yourselves. Here you will find a simple tale of escape that turns shockingly into a study in ethics. To say The Getaway is a fast and exciting read would be an understatement. Characters in this story are portrayed very realisticaly. I continually come back to a 48-hour stretch where Carol McCoy is forced to sleep in a cramped watery cave that is so narrow she can't even turn around. The claustrophobia leaps off of the page! Jim Thompson's books have stayed in publication for decades for a reason. This is classic crime noir and it is highly recommended. On a closing side note - For movie fans out there I also recommend Quentin Tarantino's FROM DUSK 'TIL DAWN on DVD. In the audio commentary Tarantino comments on The Getaway and how he incorporated the setting of El Rey into his movie. It's a fun look at a celebrity's appreciation of this novel.
Rating:
Summary: CRIME DOESN'T PAY IN THIS GETAWAY
Review: If you have ever considered robbing a bank, then I suggest you start by reading this book. After 184 pages you'll quickly decide that all you're in for is a life of worry...and a quickly diminishing bank account. The Getaway tells the story of Doc and Carol McCoy and how they have robbed a bank with just over $200,000 and are attempting to flee the country. Of course along the way they have to escape the police, fellow henchman out to kill them, petty thieves, and numerous problems that they could never have predicted. The two work together because they are in love and know that as a team they CAN succeed. Which leaves us to their final destination the town of EL REY, where it is made painfully clear - if you want to survive you need to look out for #1. What will become of our beloved protagonists? Well Good Reader go and discover this for yourselves. Here you will find a simple tale of escape that turns shockingly into a study in ethics. To say The Getaway is a fast and exciting read would be an understatement. Characters in this story are portrayed very realisticaly. I continually come back to a 48-hour stretch where Carol McCoy is forced to sleep in a cramped watery cave that is so narrow she can't even turn around. The claustrophobia leaps off of the page! Jim Thompson's books have stayed in publication for decades for a reason. This is classic crime noir and it is highly recommended. On a closing side note - For movie fans out there I also recommend Quentin Tarantino's FROM DUSK 'TIL DAWN on DVD. In the audio commentary Tarantino comments on The Getaway and how he incorporated the setting of El Rey into his movie. It's a fun look at a celebrity's appreciation of this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Pulp Fiction - if your taste runs to Pulp
Review: Jim Thompson is rightly considered a master of pulp fiction, but then that's sort of like recognizing someone as the best of the bush league. Despite his attempts to infuse the story with something like art (the Kafkaesque last chapter for example) this is a pretty straight forward crime and escape story. What saves it from being just ordinary is the strange cast of characters and the bizarre series of situations that the main character Doc McCoy, a bank robber, and his young wife have to endure to insure their getaway. The number of things that go wrong is almost comic and one wonders, early on, if Doc is really as savvy a professional criminal as he is made out to be. Thompson's language bothered me more in this book than in most of his others. I don't really know what it is but there is something about his sentence structure and phrasing that seemed stiff and artificial. And as mentioned, the pretentious conclusion which shows Doc and wife in a South of the Border criminal "paradise" where they are virtual prisoners and conspiring agains one another, could have been written by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone. If you have a taste for the kind of writing that inspired Mickey Spillane and aren't expecting any great character insights or literary flourishes, you might enjoy this book. If you are just interested in reading something by Thompson, try The Grifters. It is a darker, but better, book.
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