I think I’ve found one of the most hardboiled, violent, and
pulp novels of the early 20th century. Horace McCoy’s 1948 novel,Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, packs a nasty one-two punch and drags the reader through
the literary mud. In fact, the novel’s bullet pace contains a healthy body
count to keep even the most modern jaded readers interested and these events
happen in the first few chapters. More importantly, the crime genre elements
hang on parts of McCoy’s story that isn’t written in the text. I’ll explain…
Ralph Cotter, A Phi Beta Kappa scholar, escapes from a
prison work farm with the assistance of his Tommy-gun toting lover Holiday. Her
incarcerated brother is a part of the escape plan too, but Ralph has to shoot
him in cold blood or risk capture. After numerous prison guards and inmates die
in pandemonium of the escape, Cotter hides out in town establishing a new
identity under the name Paul Murphy with the aid of a local chop shop’s owner
and con man named Mason. He plots a new heist to get some travelling and hiding
out money only to have the plan go astray with the accidental murder of a milk deliveryman.
Mason’s insulted that Cotter would pull a heist in his own back yard, especially since Mason has the police in his back pocket. He dispatches a pair of dirty cops shake down Cotter and Holiday to retrieve the heist money. Burned and determined to prove his superior intelligence, Cotter devises a plan to blackmail the dirty cops and get the entire town in his pocket while hiding under his new name.
If you think the plot takes a turn here, well, yes. It does!
Under the name Paul Murphy, Cotter meets a young woman, Margaret Dobson,
attending a cultish church led by a former mob lawyer. Slowly, Cotter’s frame
of mind starts to untangle and the reader begins to realize events and
discussions happening between the lines and off the page. What we have here is
a perfect example of the unreliable narrator. Up until this point in the story,
everything has been literally a first person narrative told by Ralph Cotter.
The problem is, Ralph is turning on radios that do not work and he hears music.
When Margaret’s prominent father discovers that Paul Murphy and Margaret have married without his consent, he offers Paul a large sum of money to sign annulment papers and to walk away. Not wanting the money to interfere with his crime syndicate, Cotter turns the money down. So begins the tumbling cascade of events that brings forth the downfall of a criminal mastermind. Ralph starts to confuse his own identity with the new identity of Paul Murphy. Acerbated by the complex relationship with Margaret and his crumbling relationship with Holiday the reader starts to see mental cracks through his inability to keep his stories and lies straight.
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a great example of an American 20th Century novel. Labeling it, merely a crime novel would be, in fact, criminal. Much of this novel takes place inside the mind of the lead character and to have his mind unravel while we are inside of it is quite entertaining and an amazing piece of work. James Cagney stars in the 1950 film adaptation. McCoy is from Pegram, Tennessee not terribly far from where I grew up, so I already feel a kinship to him. His other novel of noted significance is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? published in 1935.
