Horace McCoy is my favorite writer of the early 20th Century; his first book, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is the single best novel of the Depression– a bleak, short dose of hell centered on a Dance-a-thon– and his last proper novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is equally remarkable, though less compact, and achieves the kind of dense Freudian tapestry that (our hero) Dashiell Hammett aimed for in The Glass Key. The other books are variable, but I’m particularly fond of I Should Have Stayed Home, a slight, pre-Day of the Locusts look at life as a Hollywood loser; if nothing else, it has the most applicable title of any book ever written about this here city of Los Angalayze.
I’ve never been comfortable with McCoy’s classification as “hard boiled”; he certainly wrote for the same pulps as the originators and best known practitioners of the style, but I’m partial to the idea that “hard boiled” has connotations as an off-shoot of the mystery genre. Throughout all of McCoy’s work, the only mystery is this: “Why are people so awful?”
In my mind, his work fits more clearly into a tradition of near-hallucinatory, vaguely inchoate narratives of indirect, brutish emotion being kept at bay through force of will and repression.
It is a sub-literature, adapting the developments of genre and modernism to describe the basic inability of the lower class American male to express his desires, and more truly, his pain. When bored, I often taunt women by accusing them– facetiously– of never being able to understand the “awful pain of being a man.” Novels within this school are quite serious about the idea; the shame and the misery of frustrated masculinity are their building-blocks.
The staccato rhythm of the 1920s and 1930s is employed as a distancing mechanism– a way of keeping the male narrator from revealing himself; this mirrors the sexual inadequacy of the protagonist, which is, of course, the source of his many shames. The only question is climax; and when it comes, the novel ends, usual in bloodshed and tears.
Fun fact: of this tradition, one of the most interesting books is You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up, by Eric Knight, the man who went on to create Lassie.
McCoy is an interesting case; clearly his genre designation only came with time, after the failure of his work to catch fire within the mainstream. Below is a collection of varying cover art– arranged by novel and vaguely chronologically– where one can see the passage from novelist to crime writer.
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THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1935)
NO POCKETS IN A SHROUD (1937)
I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME (1938)
KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE (1948)
SCALPEL (1952)
CORRUPTION CITY (1959)
