Horace McCoy was born near Nashville, Tennessee in 1897. During his lifetime he travelled all over the US as a salesman and taxi-driver, and his varied career included reporting and sports editing, acting as bodyguard to a politician, doubling for a wrestler, and writing for films and magazines. His novels include I Should Have Stayed Home (1938), Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), which was made into a film. He died in 1955.
Praise for Horace McCoy
‘Aficionados of hard-boiled fiction who think that Hammett, Cain, and Jim Thompson set the standard ought to take a look at Horace McCoy’ Kirkus
‘Horace McCoy shoots words like bullets’ Time
‘A spare, bleak parable about American life, which McCoy pictured as a Los Angeles dance marathon in the early thirties … full of the kind of apocalyptic detail that both he and Nathanael West saw in life as lived on the Hollywood fringe’ New York Times
‘Captures the survivalist barbarity in this bizarre convention, and becomes a metaphor for life itself: the last couple on their feet gets the prize’ Independent
‘I was moved, then shaken by the beauty and genius of Horace McCoy’s metaphor’ Village Voice
‘It’s the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the book’s durability’ Booklit.com
‘Takes the reader into one of America’s darkest corners … The story has resonance for contemporary America and the current craze for reality television. How far are we from staging a dance marathon for television?’ readywhenyouarecb.com
‘This almost sadistically frank pulp fiction from 1935 will cure anyone of the delusion that earlier generations didn’t know the score. With murder, incest, abortion, and the like generously added to a plot about people entertaining themselves by watching the misery of others, it’s like one of these eliminationist “reality” television shows (Survivor, Big Brother, etc.) as conceived by the creative team of Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin. These lives are indeed nasty, brutish, and short. It doesn’t make for a pretty story, but you have to admire the zeal and energy with which Horace McCoy drives his point home’ Brothersjudd.com
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Horace McCoy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 1935 Horace McCoy
Introduction copyright © John Harvey 2010
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in the USA in 1935
First published in the UK in 1938
First published in 1995 by Serpent’s Tail
First published in this edition in 2010 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 739 6
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
I first became aware of Horace McCoy, appropriately enough, through the movies: as the writer upon whose novel the violent and unforgiving 1950 film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was based, and as one of the two principal scriptwriters on The Lusty Men, which shows director Nicholas Ray and actor Robert Mitchum at their absolute best. Appropriately, for McCoy was in many ways a movie man, initially as a struggling extra and bit-part player and later, more successfully, as a screenwriter. It was this close-quarters experience of the Hollywood studios, of course, that furnished him with the material for his first, and still best-known novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) and the later, not wholly dissimilar, I Should Have Stayed Home (1938).
I bought my first copy of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in the mid-sixties, at a time when I was snapping up as many of the Penguin green jacket crime series as I could – those by American authors, in particular. I had read my way through Hammett and Chandler and was looking for anything similarly racy and hard-boiled, and the cover, with its smiling, hopeful female face partly obliterated by the blood-red centre of a target, suggested that here I would find what I was looking for.
So I did, and more besides.
For one thing, the smiling face was completely, utterly wrong. Gloria Beatty may once have smiled, once have harboured optimistic thoughts about her future, but not here. From her first fateful meeting with Robert, the story’s narrator – ‘Let’s go sit and hate a bunch of people’ –through to her climactic rage against the women from the Mothers’ League for Good Morals, Gloria drives the story with a tremendous negative energy that wells up from her understanding that the world – her world, the world that plays out beneath the Hollywood sign – is one of amorality and illusion.
Even before arriving at my understanding of Gloria’s almost complete nihilism (and how brilliant of McCoy that he can keep us interested for so long in a character who cares about little or nothing, including herself), I think I realised that what I had in my hand was a book that was in some ways extraordinary. This is signalled clearly from the beginning – the first words from the courtroom presented starkly on their own page, followed immediately by the narrator’s remembrance of Gloria’s murder, and then the judge’s words which will lead inexorably towards the final sentence (growing larger and bolder on the page as they do so, thanks to the original book’s designer, Philip Van Doren Stern), these alternating with passages which move between the events leading up to the shooting, reminiscences of Robert’s past, and descriptions of what is going on in the courtroom.
Again, McCoy’s technique is superb here, never deviating from the tightness of focus and expression he would have learned in his early days labouring (along with Chandler, Hammett and others) at Black Mask magazine under its editor, Joseph T. Shaw, yet moving us effortlessly, nevertheless, between time and place, between long shot and close-up.
It’s little wonder that McCoy was taken up with particular seriousness in France, where he was raised to the same pantheon as Faulkner and Hemingway, the mixture of fatalism and realism in his work seen as the burgeoning of American existentialism. In the United States, he was far more likely to be linked with another writer of noirish tales from the years of the Depression, James M. Cain, a comparison with which McCoy was less than happy. As he informed his publishers, if they continued to label him as being ‘of the Cain school’, he would be forced either to slit Cain’s throat or his own.
What McCoy’s work exhibits, more clearly perhaps than that of Cain or any other of the hard-boiled American writers, with the possible exception of Hammett, is a strong and clearly expressed sense of the ways in which the fate of individuals is inextricably linked to broader political and social movements, a strongly left-wing, anti-capitalist stance being most clearly expressed in No Pockets in a Shroud, based upon his time as a newspaper man, in which the journalist hero is murdered to prevent him from exposing the truth. There is also a lightness of touch within the harshness of the world McCoy depicts. As he stated in an address to aspiring writers, reported in the Pasadena Star-News, one of his prime intentions when writing was ‘dwelling on the lyrical quality that lies in any dramatic action and the transfer of that lyrical quality to the pages of a book by means of graphic and telling words’.
What all of this means is that you have in your hands a remarkable novel, worthy of admiration, both as an example of the writer’s craft and as a portrait of a particular time and milieu.
With They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and, perhaps to a lesser extent, I Should Have Stayed Home, McCoy has made a place for himself alongside other writers of the period, such as Nathanael West, John O’Hara or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who sought to shine a light through the miasma of Hollywood and, through that, the perils and falsities of the American Dream.
They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
The prisoner will stand …
I stood up. For a moment I saw Gloria again, sitting on that bench on the pier. The bullet had just struck her in the side of the head; the blood had not even started to flow. The flash from the pistol still lighted her face. Everything was as plain as day. She was completely relaxed, was completely comfortable. The impact of the bullet had turned her head a little away from me; I did not have a perfect profile view but I could see enough of her face and her lips to know she was smiling. The Prosecuting Attorney was wrong when he told the jury she died in agony, friendless, alone except for her brutal murderer, out there in that black night on the edge of the Pacific. He was as wrong as a man can be. She did not die in agony. She was relaxed and comfortable and she was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. How could she have been in agony then? And she wasn’t friendless.
I was her very best friend. I was her only friend. So how could she have been friendless?
… is there any legal cause why sentence should not now be pronounced?
What could I say? … All those people knew I had killed her; the only other person who could have helped me at all was dead too. So I just stood there, looking at the judge and shaking my head. I didn’t have a leg to stand on.
‘Ask the mercy of the court,’ said Epstein, the lawyer they had assigned to defend me.
‘What was that?’ the judge said.
‘Your Honour,’ Epstein said, ‘ – we throw ourselves on the mercy of the court. This boy admits killing the girl, but he was only doing her a personal favour – ’
The judge banged on the desk, looking at me.
There being no legal cause why sentence should not now be pronounced …
It was funny the way I met Gloria. She was trying to get into pictures too, but I didn’t know that until later. I was walking down Melrose one day from the Paramount studios when I heard somebody hollering, ‘Hey! Hey!’ and I turned around and there she was running towards me and waving. I stopped, waving back. When she got up to me she was all out of breath and excited and I saw I didn’t know her.
‘Damn that bus,’ she said.
I looked around and there was the bus half a block down the street going towards Western.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you were waving at me …’
‘What would I be waving at you for?’ she asked.
I laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You going my way?’
‘I may as well walk on down to Western,’ she said; and we began to walk on down towards Western.
That was how it all started and it seems very strange to me now. I don’t understand it at all. I’ve thought and thought and still I don’t understand it. This wasn’t murder. I try to do somebody a favour and I wind up getting myself killed. They are going to kill me. I know exactly what the judge is going to say. I can tell by the look of him that he is going to be glad to say it and I can tell by the feel of the people behind me that they are going to be glad to hear him say it.
Take that morning I met Gloria. I wasn’t feeling very good; I was still a little sick, but I went over to Paramount because von Sternberg was making a Russian picture and I thought maybe I could get a job. I used to ask myself what could be nicer than working for von Sternberg, or Mamoulian or Boleslawsky either, getting paid to watch him direct, learning about composition and tempo and angles … so I went over to Paramount.
I couldn’t get inside, so I hung around the front until noon when one of his assistants came out for lunch. I caught up with him and asked what was the chance to get some atmosphere.
‘None,’ he said, telling me that von Sternberg was very careful about his atmospheric people.
I thought that was a lousy thing to say but I knew what he was thinking, that my clothes didn’t look any too good. ‘Isn’t this a costume picture?’ I asked.
‘All our extras come through Central,’ he said, leaving me …
I wasn’t going anywhere in particular; I was just riding along in my Rolls-Royce, having people point me out as the greatest director in the world, when I heard Gloria hollering. You see how those things happen?
So we walked on down Melrose to Western, getting acquainted all the time; and when we got to Western I knew she was Gloria Beatty, an extra who wasn’t doing well either, and she knew a little about me. I liked her very much.
She had a small room with some people over near Beverly and I lived only a few blocks from there, so I saw her again that night. That first night was really what did it but even now I can’t honestly say I regret going to see her. I had about seven dollars I had made squirting soda in a drug store (subbing for a friend of mine. He had got a girl in a jam and had to take her to Santa Barbara for the operation.) and I asked her if she’d rather go to a movie or sit in the park.
‘What park?’ she asked.
‘It’s right over here a little way,’ I said.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I got a bellyful of moving pictures anyway. If I’m not a better actress than most of those dames I’ll eat your hat – Let’s go sit and hate a bunch of people …’
I was glad she wanted to go to the park. It was always nice there. It was a fine place to sit. It was very small, only one block square, but it was very dark and very quiet and filled with dense shrubbery. All around it palm trees grew up, fifty, sixty feet tall, suddenly tufted at the top. Once you entered the park you had the illusion of security. I often imagined they were sentries wearing grotesque helmets: my own private sentries, standing guard over my own private island …
The park was a fine place to sit. Through the palms you could see many buildings, the thick, square silhouettes of apartment houses, with their red signs on the roofs, reddening the sky above and everything and everybody below. But if you wanted to get rid of these things you had only to sit and stare at them with a fixed gaze … and they would begin receding. That way you could drive them as far into the distance as you wanted to …
‘I never paid much attention to this place before,’ Gloria said.
… ‘I like it,’ I said, taking off my coat and spreading it on the grass for her. ‘I come here three or four times a week.’
‘You do like it,’ she said, sitting down.
‘How long you been in Hollywood?’ I asked.
‘About a year. I been in four pictures already. I’d have been in more,’ she said, ‘but I can’t get registered by Central.’
‘Neither can I,’ I said.
Unless you were registered by Central Castings Bureau you didn’t have much chance. The big studios call up Central and say they want four Swedes or six Greeks or two Bohemian peasant types or six Grand Duchesses and Central takes care of it. I could see why Gloria didn’t get registered by Central. She was too blonde and too small and looked too old. With a nice wardrobe she might have looked attractive, but even then I wouldn’t have called her pretty.
‘Have you met anybody who can help you?’ I asked.
‘In this business how can you tell who’ll help you?’ she said. ‘One day you’re an electrician and the next day you’re a producer. The only way I could ever get to a big shot would be to jump on the running board of his car as it passed by. Anyway, I don’t know whether the men stars can help me as much as the women stars. From what I’ve seen lately I’ve about made up my mind that I’ve been letting the wrong sex try to make me. …’
‘How’d you happen to come to Hollywood?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said in a moment – ‘but anything is an improvement over the life I led back home.’ I asked her where that was. ‘Texas,’ she said. ‘West Texas. Ever been there?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I come from Arkansas.’
‘Well, West Texas is a hell of a place,’ she said. ‘I lived with my aunt and uncle. He was a brakeman on a railroad. I only saw him once or twice a week, thank God. …’
She stopped, not saying anything, looking at the red, vapourish glow above the apartment buildings.
‘At least,’ I said, ‘you had a home – ’