Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in They Shoot Horses Don't They 

with a note of reference.

(from introduction by John Harvey)

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.

(from introduction) . . . 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.

Raymond Chandler                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

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.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                             Ernest Hemingway      

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.                                         

McCoy’s work exhibits . . . 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.

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.