Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye – Horace McCoy

I think I’ve found one of the most hardboiled, violent, and pulp novels of the early 20^th 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 20^th 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.

Wild Town – Jim Thompson

Way out west lives an oilman, Mike Hanlon, who manages prolonged success with a thriving hotel despite a debilitating injury that left him in a wheelchair. However, his aged years and wealthy heritage didn’t prevent him from marrying a trophy wife, twenty years his junior, named Joyce. The Hanlon Hotel resides in the jurisdiction of Sherriff Lou Ford, a questionably wealthy officer of the law who by all appearances lives on the grift. Enter the ex-convict drifter, Bugs McKenna, with an uncanny knack for being unable to stay out of trouble, who the Sheriff convinces to apply for the job of the hotel detective, and in turn, convinces Mike Hanlon to hire him. Bugs suspects the crooked Sheriff is up to no good and using an ex-convict as his patsy. Gather these elements together and you will find that the novel is the perfect recipe for criminal mischief.

Bugs McKenna begins his job as the hotel dick at the Hanlon Hotel trying to second-guess the motivations behind his employment. All signs point to Sheriff Ford and Joyce Hanlon working in conjunction to dispose of Mike Hanlon, so Joyce and Sheriff Ford can profit on Joyce’s inheritance and have a fall guy to take the wrap. Despite the obviousness of Ford’s motivations, Mike Hanlon’s motivations seem quite murky. Why does Mike Hanlon decide to trust McKenna? Does his boss realize that a plot is forming around his demise? It isn’t long before other trouble begins to brew at the hotel when $5000 goes missing from the books. The head accountant encourages Bugs to lean on the new accountant in order to save his own job.

Jim Thompson succeeds in taking the conventions of the crime story such as murder, blackmail, grifting, and double crosses and throws each one for a loop. I believe that Thompson’s goal is to keep the reader guessing at every turn and allow enough evidence to sustain a logical assumption of the direction of the story only to deliberately steer it onto a different track. Thompson’s personal sense of humor also matches the streak of black humor that runs throughout the story. For example, my favorite is the death of the hotel accountant, who’s accused in a subplot of stealing $5000, picks a fight with Bugs McKenna and accidentally flies out a window when Bugs dodges his lunge. Our anti-hero Bugs, is the embodiment of Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong, it goes wrong and in quite a slapstick sort of way.

If it’s discovered that Bugs was in the accountant’s room, his unsavory reputation will jeopardize his safe position at the hotel. This causes him to panic and destroy evidence only later to realize that he couldn’t have been the only other person in the room. Suicide is ruled but quickly changed to murder as evidence of intoxicants in the accountant’s bloodstream turn up in an autopsy. The accountant would have died anyway, despite falling from the window. The Sheriff suspects a female as the culprit, as drugs, according to the Sheriff, are “a female’s weapon of choice.” Even after Bugs establishes his alibi away from the scene of the crime, a blackmailer emerges and puts the heat on him to pay $5000 or risk exposure as a suspect.

The novel takes another turn into quasi-detective fiction. McKenna, who’s hired as the hotel detective despite having no experience as a detective or in law enforcement, must solve the mystery of who is blackmailing him and, in turn, the murderer. The novel could easily fit into an amateur detective sub-genre, but it continues to morph and change styles. I don’t want give away all the twists and turns, but reading it is like listening to a great progressive rock album that shifts sounds and rhythms at will but always manages to impress at the skill of playing.

Wild Town doesn’t sit easily within any confined description of the crime sub-genres. It is all of those things at once and that’s what makes it so damned entertaining. Published in 1957, Wild Town rests comfortably between the more recognized publications of The Killer Inside Me, After Dark,My Sweet, and later publications such as The Getaway and Pop. 1280. I understand that Thompson’s recognition came only after his death, but it makes me question what the public considered great crime fiction at the time. As I’ve read several of his other works, I’m convinced that Thompson was an author that could always invert the crime genre and revitalize it.