The Getaway
Jim Thompson's Experimental Pulp Fiction
Jim Thompson was an an American crime writer who, in a whiskey-fueled frenzy, banged out around thirty novels from the late-1940s to the mid-1960s. He didn’t get a ton of acclaim, but made a living from his writing and did see the subject of this week’s post turned into a (pretty average) movie by Sam Peckinpah in 1972. It was later remade in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. I hear that one is not very good either.
Although not a writer of horror, Thompson ‘s Pop. 1280 (1964) and especially The Killer Inside Me (1952) exerted an enormous influence on Brett Easton’s Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). In fact, reading these two earlier books can give the reader an idea what the Ellis novel might have looked like without all the Cannibalism.
And within the confines of crime fiction Thompson conducted a number of interesting experiments, mostly around the use of reliable/unreliable narrators. For example, in Pop. 1280 the narrator is the most trustworthy character in the book, and shares relatively enlightened opinions with the reader on the subjects of Race, Class, Unions, and so forth. He is also psychopath and admitted serial killer, and by the end he’s speculating that he might be an instrument of God Himself. It’s like a Hitchcock film, where the reader is kept so close to the villain of the piece that in the end they start to sympathize.
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But The Getaway is a bit different. I’m not sure there is anything like it even in Thompson (though I have not read everything by him). It starts as a simple crime thriller. Career criminal Doc McCoy and his wife Carol pull off a heist that goes bad. In the course of their escape to the kingdom of El Rey (a sanctuary somewhere in Mexico where criminals can live without fear) the bodies start piling up.
All in all, pretty standard pulp fare.
However, in the last couple of chapters things take a turn. Having killed so many people, getting into El Rey proves difficult Doc and Carol are forced to hide in partially submerged caves for two days, and then live for another three in a hollowed out mound of manure. If you are, like me, claustrophobic and hate little white worms, these sections are pretty intense. Finally our pair take a boat-ride to their final destination.
At this point the reader will likely think: Hey! It’s like they’ve died and gone to Hell across the River Styx! And it is. Thompson is not being subtle here.
In The Getaway, Hell presents as a swank hotel in a pretty little town called El Rey, named after its owner, El Rey. Criminals can live openly, but the price is high. Everything there is upscale and priced to match, so even the biggest score will be whittled down eventually. When this happens, the citizens either find new money by killing off another inhabitant and confiscating theirs, or they are shuffled off to a neighboring village where the inhabitants survive by…wait for it…cannibalism.
The book ends with Doc and Carol both plotting to murder one another while drinking a toast to their successful Getaway.
And that’s it. Again, there is nothing subtle about the story. It is an increasingly grim heist novel that swerves left at the 2/3rds point into an allegorical vision of that corner of Hell reserved for gangsters, and ends with a twist like something you fight find in Poe or Hawthorne. Not surprisingly, both filmed versions of the novel end before the El Rey sections. What is surprising is that Thompson was able to get this stuff published in the first place. The Getaway, and maybe Thompson’s entire body of work, show that genre conventions are not as constraining as they are often thought.
PS. Another example that comes to mind of an author’s being able to smuggle unusual concerns and themes into their pulp is Guy N. Smith, whose dozens of novels about Giant Crabs and Demon Hunters also serve as paeans to masturbation. And while it may not be entirely fair to compare “The Great Scribbler” to Jim Thompson, that’s all I could think of at the moment.