...In fact The Chase has more going for it than that. Admittedly there's not much in the way of character development, but then neither is there in the movie; Unekis is more interested in exploring applied mathematics and probabilities, in particular how to "maximise or minimize the chances for interception" – in other words, Game Theory.

In making their escape, Rayder and Grozzo utilise the gravel roads "running straight by the compass in all four directions" to the south of Chicago. "From the air," Unekis notes at the novel's outset, these roads "make the countryside look like a giant checkerboard, running perfectly flat all the way to the horizon. There are so many roads that, in any manhunt, it is impossible to block them all. The state police do not even try. They just block the major highways—and hope." Enter Superintendant Franklin, the man heading up the hunt for Rayder and Grozzo. Instead of following the standard protocol, Franklin draws on his naval background plotting positions of submarines in order to work out where Rayder and Grozzo are heading, and what their most likely route will be. The result is a tense, clammily exciting game of cat-and-mouse, as Franklin deducts that the pair are headed for Chicago and directs the police cars at his disposal to cut them off, and Rayder and Grozzo barrel along at terrifying speeds on the dangerous gravel roads, a couple of times escaping seemingly certain death by the skin of their teeth.

Aside from a 2009 obituary, there's little in the way of information about Richard Unekis available online; The Chase was his only published novel, and fell out of print decades ago – there are only around twenty copies of the book in any edition available on AbeBooks (among them a single Gollancz first). But the Edgar Awards committee for 1962 thought highly enough of The Chase to shortlist it for the Best First Mystery Novel prize, and to my mind it deserves rescuing from obscurity: it's not perfect by any means, but in its intriguing deployment of mathematics in a high speed pursuit scenario, it displays enough ambition to make it worth a second look.