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Horace McCoy (1897-1955) | |
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American mystery writer, whose novels, written in the "hard-boiled" vein, documented the Great Depression. McCoy's characters, from idealistic reporters to criminal masterminds, struggle in vain against the society. His best known novel is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), which was made into a movie in 1969, directed by Sydney Pollack. The story depicted a tragedy during a marathon dance contest in the 1930s. Gloria, one of the participants, looks forward to death as a release from the misery of life, and her partner Robert, overcome by desperation, grants her wish. "There can only be one winner, folks, but isn't that the American way?" (Gig Young in the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) Horace McCoy was born in Pegram, Tennessee (in some sources Nashville) to parents whom he described as 'book-rich and money-poor.' McCoy was educated in schools in Nashville. At the age of 16 he left school, and worked as a mechanic, traveling salesman, and cab driver in New Orleans' Storyville redlight district. During World War I McCoy served in the United States Army Air Corps. He flew several missions behind enemy lines as a bombardier and reconnaissance photographer. He was wounded and received the Croix de Guerre for heroism by the government of France. From 1919 to 1930 he worked as a sports editor for Dallas Journal in Texas. McCoy was also co-founder of Dallas Little Theatre. In the late 1920s he started to get his short stories published in such magazines as Detective-Dragnet and Detective Action Stories. In December 1927 Black Mask published 'The Devil Man,' the first of 17 McCoy stories, written in terse style. Several of his stories featured Jerry Frost, a flying Texas Ranger. Dallasine, a periodical he edited, was closed, and McCoy continued writing for the pulps, selling his stories to such magazines as Action Stories, Battle Aces, and Western Trails. During the Depression McCoy was often out of work. He moved to Los Angeles and tried to became an actor, without much luck. At the Santa Monica pier he found a job as a bouncer at a marathon dance contest. These years provided material for his first novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), dir. by Sydney Pollack. - To catch the Depression mood, Pollack showed his cast movies from the 1930s. Gig Young's part, as Rocky the announcer, had been written for Lionel Stander, but Young won an Academy Award as best supporting actor. It marked the peak of a career that ended in tragedy when he murdered his fifth wife and shot himself in 1978. Pollack filmed the sixty-four day dance marathon largely in script sequences at Lick Pier, where the marathon set was an exact replica of the old Aragon Ballroom at Ocean Park. Jane Fonda's performance is considered remarkable. The film rights of the novel were first purchased by Charles Chaplin, whose films often had dance scenes. In France, McCoy was classed after the book with Hemingway and Faulkner; Sartre and de Beauvoir praised it as the breakthrough existentialist novel to come out of America. The story operates on many levels. On the physical level it is a Darwinist struggle for survival, and on social level it unblinkingly reveals the mechanism of a laissez-faire system. After 879 hours, the protagonists emerge from the dance hall, to look at the ocean, but it doesn't raise any hopes or dreams. The self-destructive Gloria is an existentialist hero, whose choices are always ultimate: "It's peculiar to me," she says, "that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little dying. Why are these highpowered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it?" McCoy's two other novels from the 1930s were also based on his personal experiences. In No Pockets in a Shroud (1937) a tough-guy crusading journalist wages a lone war against corruption. The protagonist, Mike Dolan, misses the old days, when "a newspaper was a newspaper and called a sonofabitch a sonofabitch..." He wants to clean the city - "and let the devil take the hindmost". "'For God's sake, don't keep telling me I'm a reformer,' Dolan said angrily. 'People can do anything they like right out in the middle of the street for all I care. That's unimportant. But what is important is printing some news about these political highbinders and about the big-time thieves... why, even the goddamn Governor of this state is crooked, and you know it.'" (from No Pockets in a Shroud) Dolan launches a magazine that tells the stories other papers will not print. Eventually he meets his fate in a dark alley. McCoy's reputation was high in postwar France, but in his own country he was not hailed as the master of modern fiction. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), a classic of noir, was written partly due to his applause from abroad. The story is narrated by the amoral protagonist, Ralph Cotter. "A hell of a lot of good my intellect was doing me locked up in this nidus of stink with offal like these, a hell of a lot of good, and hearing for month after month after month of the achievements of bums like Floyd and Karpis and Nelson and Dillinger, who were getting rich off cracker-box banks, bums who had no talent at all, bums who could hardly get in out of the rain" Cotter escapes from a prison farm, and gets involved with dangerous women, corrupt establishment with crooked cops and layers. "At last I was safe and secure in the blackness of the womb from which I had never emerged," McCoy ends the story, which inspired a James Cagney film in 1950. However, Cagney did not manage to repeat his electrifying performance as a psychotic criminal from his earlier film, White Heat (1949). When Signet published an abridged paperback edition of the novel in 1949, the blurb declared: "Horace McCoy has been around. He's been a taxi driver, a war pilot, a wrestler, a body guard, a bouncer, a newspaperman, and a highly successful screen writer." Scapel (1952) was an unsuccessful attempt to follow in the footsteps of the enourmosly popular medical novelist Frank Slaughter. In Hollywood McCoy wrote westerns, crime melodramas, and other films for Columbia Pictures and then Paramount, Warner Bros., Republic, and other studios. However, McCoy's picture of Hollywood was as disillusioned as in Nathanael West's novels. "On Vine Street I went north towards Hollywood Boulevard, crossing Sunset, passing the drive-in stand where the old Paramount lot used to be, seeing young girls and boys in uniform hopping cars, and seeing too, in my mind, the ironic smiles on the faces of Wallace Reid and Valentino and all the other old-time starts who used to work on this very spot, and who now looked down, pitying these girls and boys for working at jobs in Hollywood they might was well be working at in Waxahackie or Evanston or Albany..." (from I Should Have Stayed at Home, 1938) Most of McCoy's screen work was unmemorable. The Trial of the Lonesome Pine (1936) was the first outdoor film to be shot in three-colour Technicolor and remake of a 1916 Cecil B. De Mille film. Henry Fonda and Nigel Bruce were the feuding Blue Ridge Mountaineers and Fred McMurray was the railway engineer. Gentleman Jim (1942) was about a bank clerk, James J. Corbett, who became one of the famous figures in boxing. Bad For Each Other (1953), directed by Irving Rapper, was about an ex-army doctor (Charlton Heston) and a Pennsylvania mining town. McCoy wrote the screenplay with the bestselling novelist Irving Wallace. The Lusty Men (1952), directed by Nicholas Ray, was a semi-documentary drama about a pair of rider friends on a rodeo tour. Robert Mitchum wants to settle down, but his friend, Arthur Kennedy, wants to continue in the ring. Susan Hayward domesticated the caravan life-style. Mitchum and Ray rewrote the script during production. In the minor Western Montana Belle (1952) Jane Russell played Belle Star. The film was completed several years before its release by Republic and bought from that company by Howard Hughes, who had Russell under contract, for RKO McCoy worked with such major directors as Henry Hathaway, Raoul Walsh, and Nicholas Ray, and with lesser known professionals. James Hogan directed Texas Rangers Ride Again (1940), about Modern Rangers who capture cattle rustlers. Wild Geese Calling (1941) was also a Western, directed by John Brahm, and starring Joan Bennett and Henry Fonda. Hunted Men (1938) was a competent second feature, directed by Louis King. In the story a racketeer (Lloyd Nolan) kills a doublecrosser, and uses a private home as a hideout. He is outwitted by the head of the house and ultimately sacrifices himself. "Among the many points in the film's favor, foremost was the refusal to compromise with a happy ending by scenarists William R. Lipman and Horace McCoy, even though Nolan's portrayal was sympathetic. His performance, and the writing of his role, delved considerably more deeply that most routine hoodlum characterizations, and did so without resorting to any psychological Freudian flummery - that would be foisted upon moviegoers somewhat later." (Don Miller in B Movies, 1973) The best film based on McCoy's text, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, was made fourteen years after the author's death. McCoy died in Hollywood of a heart attack on December 15, 1955. He had suffered from a heart ailment already for some years. Posthumously published Corruption City (1959) was originally a treatment for Paramount, filmed by William Dieterle as The Turning Point in 1952. In the film a young upright lawyer (Edmond O'Brien) is appointed by the state governor to smash a crime syndicate. William Holden is a cynical journalist; both he and the lawyer are romantically linked to the same woman. O'Brien's father (Tom Tully) is a former policeman who proves to have been on the payroll of the mob. For further reading: The Life and Writings of Horace McCoy by John Thomas Stuark (University of California, 1976); Horace McCoy by Mark Royden Winchell (paperback, 1982); Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by John M. Reilly (1985); Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers by Lee Server (2002) - See also 'hard-boiled' writers: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Latimer, Mickey Spillane Novels:
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