There is no way to escape can be read in at least two ways: as a detective novel with all the ingredients of the genre or as a particular collaborative work between Boris Vian and Oulipo, the potential French literature group born in 1960, a year after the author's death.

We are located in the forties, in a city in the interior of the United States. Frank Bolton returns from Korea with a crippled body: he lost his left hand in combat and has been replaced with an uncomfortable steel prosthesis. The ghosts of the massacres that occurred there still haunt him. When he arrives at his family's mansion, he is shocked by the news of the murder of his first girlfriend. Soon other victims will be added, as if someone had been merciless with important people from his past. Accompanied by the eccentric and effeminate private detective Narcissus Rose and a gallery of characters from the time, surrounded by luxury cars, bourbon and lots of jazz, Bolton tries to find the culprit and, meanwhile, narrates in the first person how the war made dent in his life and in the society of his time.

Boris Vian came to write four chapters and sketch a synopsis before leaving this novel unfinished. The project, comparable to the series of black police that he himself signed with the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan –like I will spit on your grave and Kill the ugly ones–, was filed for years in a folder in the care of his widow. Several decades later, Oulipo's writers received the manuscript and finished it with a dazzling result. Here is Vian's distinctive style, with his witty and elegant humor, continued by those who feel closest to his legacy and translated into Spanish by Eduardo Berti, the only Argentine member of the group. In addition to adding actions, characters and nods to other works, Oulipo celebrates and takes up the rhythm and suspense proposed by Vian. The reading effect is remarkable: the voice is recreated with such skill that we don't know who we are reading to, which shows that literature can be a collective and stimulating game.