Noir fiction for the modern reader.

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McCoy’s hardboiled noir classic, about an Ivy League graduate’s criminal rampage through the seedy underground and glitzy high society of an unnamed American city

To escape prison, Ralph Cotter uses the same genius for planning and penchant for cold-hearted violence that helped earn him a spot in the slammer in the first place. On the lam in a city where he knows nobody, Cotter has nothing to lose, no conscience to hold him back, and no limit to his twisted ambition. But in the midst of a criminal spree, a grift leads him to the boudoir of wealthy heiress Margaret Dobson, a woman with the power to peel back the rotten layers of his psyche and reveal the damaged soul beneath.

Vicious and thrilling, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a look at one man’s relentless attack on American society, conjuring one of the most memorable antiheros of twentieth-century noir fiction.

This ebook features an extended biography of Horace McCoy.

• Biography
  • Horace Stanley McCoy (1897–1955) was an American author whose hardboiled novels documented Americans’ hardships during the Depression and post-war periods. His most famous work, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, was made into a film starring Jane Fonda and directed by Sidney Pollack.McCoy was born on April 14, 1897, in Pegram, Tennessee, and grew up in Nashville. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family didn’t have much money. Although he was an avid reader, McCoy never finished high school. After a move to Dallas, Texas, he joined his father in sales at age sixteen.McCoy worked as a traveling salesman through his teens, then joined the United States Army Air Corps. During World War I, he flew missions in France as a navigator and aerial photographer. He earned the Croix de Guerre from the French government after piloting a plane safely home despite suffering two bullet wounds. After the war, McCoy returned to Dallas and took up journalism. As a reporter, he exaggerated and invented details to make his stories more interesting, leading to frequent dismissals from Dallas papers. During this time he also met and married his first wife, Loline Sherer, with whom he had one son. He would later divorce and marry twice more, and had two children with his third wife, Helen Vinmont.By the mid-1920s, McCoy’s interest in storytelling led him to publish his first fiction. Through the 1930s, he published more than a dozen crime and detective stories in Black Mask, a popular monthly pulp fiction magazine that was also printing the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time.In 1931, McCoy moved to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. Though he failed to gain much notice as a leading man, the author did have some success writing script scenarios for the big studios. One such project described characters participating in a dance marathon; that scenario became the basis of his first novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). The novel distills many hallmarks of McCoy’s writing, including a tough style, wry observations of class disparity in the 1930s, and a hard look at the dehumanizing effects of poverty. They Shoot Horses fared better with European audiences than with American readers, a trend that McCoy would see throughout his writing career.After the publication of They Shoot Horses, McCoy returned to screenwriting, churning out scripts for successful westerns such as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and brooding noirs such as Persons in Hiding. He also continued writing novels, most notably Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), considered one of his best. That same year, McCoy suffered a mild heart attack. Though he resumed working, his health declined and in 1955, he died of a third heart attack while at home in Beverly Hills.
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    EXCERPT

    Chapter One

    THIS IS HOW IT is when you wake up in the morning of the morning you have waited a lifetime for: there is no waking state. You are all at once wide awake, so wide awake that it seems you have slipped all the opiatic degrees of waking, that you have had none of the sense-impressions as your soul again returns to your body from wherever it has been; you open your eyes and you are completely awake, as if you had not been asleep at all. That is how it was with me. This was the morning it was going to happen, and I lay there trembling with accumulated excitement and wishing it would happen now and be done with, this instant, consuming nervous energy that I should have been saving for the climax, knowing full well that it could not possibly happen for another hour, maybe another hour and a half, till around five-thirty. It was now only a little after four. It was still so dark I could not see anything distinctly, but I could tell by the little of the morning that I could smell that it was only a little after four. Not much of the morning could get into the place where I was, and the portions that did were always pretty well mauled and no wonder: they had to fight their way in through a single window at the same time a solid shaft of stink was going out. This was a prison barracks where seventy-two unwashed men slept chained to their bunks, and when the individual odors of seventy-two unwashed men finally gather into one pillar of stink you have got a pillar of stink the like of which you cannot conceive; majestic, nonpareil, transcendental, K. But it never intimidated that early morning. Ever indomitable, it always came back, and always a little of it got through to me. I was always awake to greet these fragments, hungrily smelling what little freshness they had left by the time they got back to me, smelling them frugally, in careful precious sniffs, letting them dig in the vaults of my memory, letting them uncover early morning sounds of a lifetime ago: bluejays and woodpeckers and countless other birds met like medieval knights and thrusting at each other with long sharp lances of song, the crowings of roosters, the brassy bleats of hungry sheep and the mooing of cows, saying, ‘No-o-o hay, No-o-o milk’, that is what my grandfather said they were saying and my grandfather knew. He knew everything there was to know about everything that was completely unimportant. He knew the names of all Hadrian’s mistresses and the real reason, hushed-up by the historians, why Richard took the Third Crusade off to the Holy Land and the week the Alaskan reindeers would mate and the hours of the high tides of Nova Scotia; my grandfather knew everything except how to run the farm, lying there deep in the featherbed in the side room where Longstreet once spent the night, buried under the quilts that hid me from old John Brown of Osawatomie, dead and gone these many years, but who, they said, still clumped the foothills of the Gap gathering up disobedient little boys; smelling the morning and hearing the sounds, smelling and hearing, hiding from old John Brown (but hiding from something else too, although I did not then know what it was), frightened with little-boy fright (which, I also was to find out, was not so annihilative as grown-man fright), waiting for the daylight…

    The darkness began to fade slowly at the window, and a few men turned over, rattling their chains, waking up; but you did not need these noises to tell you that there was movement any more than any other wild animal needs noises to tell him there is movement; the pillar of stink which had been lying in laminae like the coats of an onion was now being peeled and a little of everybody was everywhere. There was coughing and grunting and hawking and much spitting, and then the man in the next bunk, Budlong, a skinny sickly sodomist, turned on his side facing me and said in a ruttish voice: ‘I had another dream about you last night, sugar.’

    It will be your last, you Caresser of Calves, I thought.

    ‘Was it as nice as the others?’ I asked.

    ‘Nicer …’ he said.

    ‘You’re sweet. I adore you,’ I said, feeling a fine fast exhilaration that today was the day that I was going to kill him, that I was finally going to kill him as soon as I got my hands on those pistols I was going to kill him. I hope Holiday knows what the hell about those pistols, I thought; I hope they’re where they’re supposed to be, I hope Cobbett doesn’t let us down. Cobbett was the clerk of the farm who doubled on Sundays as the guard in the visitors’ cage, an old man who had spent his life as a chain-gang andprison-farm guard, now too feeble to have a squad of his own, and pensioned off to sinecures. He had taken a shine to Holiday the first time she had come to visit us, and from then on he had been less and less strict in the matter of her visiting hours, and now she had gotten him to help us make the break. He was to have met her last night and got the pistols and stashed them for us. They were to be sealed in an inner tube and hidden in the irrigation ditch that ran along the upper end of the cantaloupe patch where we were working. The exact spot of their submergence was to be marked with a rock the size of a human head, on which there would be a dab of white paint, placed in line with the pistols but on the other side of the ditch where it would be less likely to attract attention. This was all that Cobbett had to do. I hoped he had done it. If he had, if the pistols were there I was going to kill this swine Budlong, as sure as God made little apples I was going to kill him…

    All of a sudden the door banged open and there was Harris, the sergeant, standing in the gloom no eyes, no nose, no mouth, just a great big hunk of obscene flesh standing there in the doorway with his arm hooked under a Winchester, yelling for us to hit the deck. Always he stood there in the same way and always he yelled the same thing and always the prisoners in the rear of the barracks called him the same names. But I never called him names. I was too busy being glad that the door was finally open. I lay there waiting for him to come and take the manacles off my ankles, and the fresh morning rushed through the door like children coming into the living-room on Christmas morning.…

My new short story, The Session, just went live on Kindle. Here’s a brief description:

Jeff Dryden is a top recording session guitarist in LA. Makes big money. Has a beautiful wife and a big house. Life is good.

But one night, he’s awakened by a phone call from a record producer who needs him for a session right away. The money is good, so he agrees, but this late-night session will dredge up long-buried memories and dreams, and wind up changing his life forever.

THE SESSION calls together Mike Dennis’ past as a professional musician and his present as a noir fiction author in a harrowing portrayal of a man who can’t quite grab the brass ring.

This is a good story, if I do say so myself. And it’s only 99¢. Come on, what are you waiting for. Go here and pick it up.

Michael Lipkin has done me the honor of featuring me and several of my titles very prominently on his terrific website, Noir Journal. It begins with a piece I wrote summarizing my introduction to noir fiction, to even the term itself, and continues with excellent reviews of The Ghosts Of Havana and Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Eyes. Please go here and check it out. And dig into their archives. They featured Reed Farrel Coleman in a similar fashion two months ago.

And while you’re there, please leave a brief comment. It’s a great site, worthy of your attention.

EVERY SHALLOW CUT by Tom Piccirilli (2011)

Review by Mike Dennis

What’s the deal with Tom Piccirilli? Doesn’t he realize too much backstory is fatal to any novel? That it absolutely has to be woven in to the story, not dumped up front? Doesn’t he realize you need ample dialogue to move everything along? The reader will, you know, get awfully bored reading all that narrative. There are, after all, rigid rules all writers must follow.

Well, maybe he doesn’t realize the existence of these rules, because if he did, he might not have written Every Shallow Cut (ChiZine Publications, 2011), a shattering novella of our times.

On second thought, maybe he does know about the rules, but broke them anyway, which makes him a far better author than most people realize.

Incredibly, the entire first half of this compact book (I read the paperback in its unusually small format) is nearly all backstory, with Piccirilli pulling a reverse, deftly weaving in the actual story while he recites the grim history of his nameless central character. Dialogue is virtually absent throughout this first half as well, leaving the reader to turn the page solely on the strength of the author’s bleeding prose, as he plunges us into a hard-edged tale of a man whose life has evaporated, who has lost everything in our troubled economic times.

This character is the quintessential noir protagonist. From the first page, he’s in deep shit, largely because of his own bad choices, and it only goes downhill from there. And as with all of us when we make bad decisions, the fiddler must be paid. Yes, Piccirilli follows the noir playbook perfectly.

But somehow, Every Shallow Cut transcends noir and its conventions. It leaps up and slaps you in the face and screams at you that maybe we’re all in deep shit, and maybe our decisions have nothing to do with it. Maybe we all have a screw quietly loosening somewhere in the darkest corners of our souls which, given the right circumstances, could eventually cause all of us to become unspooled.

In addition to the central character, none of the characters has a name, and this fits the story well, because, like it or not, names carry connotations which help bring fictional characters into sharp focus. Piccirilli’s characters are meant to remain cloudy in our mind’s eye, as if seen through a window streaked over with grime. This way, they are almost interchangeable with people we might know, maybe even with ourselves. Even the cover is hard to read. This all adds up to very little distance between the reader and the characters, making the reader uncomfortable and providing a more powerful emotional wallop.

Piccirilli is an excellent author, having written over twenty novels, along with numerous short stories and novellas, and this is not the first of his books that I’ve read. It is, however, the best. I’ve wondered why he’s not better known, why his books don’t sell in such numbers as to propel him into permanent status on bestseller lists. It might be because the American reading public is not ready for the likes of Every Shallow Cut. It’s a masterpiece far ahead of its time.

Yes, you’ve heard the buzz! You’ve seen the TV ads! You’ve felt the thrill! Now, at long last, my new novel, The Ghosts Of Havana, is available on Kindle, Nook, and iPad. Paperback will follow soon.

It’s a tense tale of old vendettas, the second book in my Key West Nocturnes series, where I lift the veil off Key West, revealing it as a true noir city. Here’s a brief description of The Ghosts Of Havana.

A young woman is brutally murdered in the back of a Key West nightclub. Robbie, the club’s owner, and Elena, the victim’s sister, believe that a local strip club operator is to blame. However, they soon learn that larger, far more sinister forces are behind the killing, and they become ensnared in a deadly race to a safe deposit box in Las Vegas, whose contents hold the key to decades-old secrets and threaten national security.

The second exciting novel in Mike Dennis’ Key West Nocturnes series, The Ghosts Of Havana continues to lift the veil off Key West, revealing it as a true noir city, on a par with Los Angeles, New Orleans, or Miami.

This book can fairly be called a noir thriller, if there is such a thing. It’s currently available on Kindle, Nook, and iPad for $3.99. The paperback, which is a couple of weeks away, will be $14.95. All formats come with a sneak preview of Man-Slaughter, the third novel in the series.

Please, everyone rush to Amazon, specifically here, or B&N’s Nook page (here), and buy the book. You won’t be sorry. And neither will I.

The folks over at DailyCheapReads.com have featured the first novel in my Key West Nocturnes series, Setup On Front Street, today. You can check it out here.

I’ve watched this site become very popular among readers over the last year or so. Daily references to it can usually be found on the Kindle Boards Writers Café. Indie authors are often lined up to secure a spot on it. They’ve worked hard over there at building their reputation. So please check them out. You won’t be disappointed.

And when you’re there, please leave a brief comment.

THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL by Heath Lowrance (2011)

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

Enigmatic stranger rides into town, kicks ass, rides out.

You’ve seen it a thousand times, right? Didn’t most Randolph Scott movies follow that story line? Some might say that terse little synopsis sums up Heath Lowrance’s short story, That Damned Coyote Hill. But if they said that, they’d fall way short of nailing the essence of this riveting western-horror-noir tale that defies all known genre boundaries. You’ve never seen that story line unfold like this.

Set in the Old West town of Coyote Hill, Lowrance’s stranger shows up in a driving rain as two fight promoters are issuing challenges on behalf of their fighter. Money changes hands, cowboys step up to face the fighter, aptly named Goliath Bunker, and the spectators look on, all of them oddly mute. Hawthorne, the laconic, Charles Bronson-ish stranger, steps forward and everything changes. I’ll just leave it at that.

Lowrance, who shot onto my radar with his terrific debut novel, The Bastard Hand, has shown he’s not afraid to take chances, to take the reader into parts utterly unknown. The beginning of The Bastard Hand threw me a real curve ball, catching me totally off guard, but his prose kept me turning the page. I know this about him now, so I’ll delve into anything he writes, knowing he can transport me to uncharted areas of fiction. And That Damned Coyote Hill fulfills that promise. Lowrance has vowed to keep the Hawthorne stories coming, and when he does, I’ll be there to pick up the next one.

A great story, highly recommended.

Once again, James Scott Bell has reeled me in to his topic du jour over at The Kill Zone. Today he waxed eloquent about the treacherous path from idea to story. Seems he had an idea for a full chapter some years ago, so he wrote it down. Then he set it aside as other projects commanded his attention. Eventually, though, he went back to it and extracted a novella from it. That brought to mind a similar experience of mine.

Approximately 25 years ago, a friend of mine said, “When I write my novel, I’m going to start off with this line: I moved into the Napoleon House on the day XXXXX died.” (I forget the guy’s name who died, but he was well-known around the Napoleon House in New Orleans) The line struck me as a good one. I loved the idea of tying a new-day-dawning event with someone’s death. I was well into my first novel at the time, but this line stayed with me.

Fast forward to 2009. I’m ready to start a new novel. I’m casting about for ideas. I know that, since I can’t really make up stories in advance, I’m going to have to wing it, as always, letting my characters tell the story while I merely write it down. That line, which had festered in the outer swamps of my memory, awaiting reclamation, finally showed itself and I jumped on it.

I changed it around a little, turning it into, “I got back to Key West on the day Aldo Ray died.”

Of course, I now had to add tens of thousands of additional words to complete that story, and I had no idea what those words would be, but the line got me going. I asked myself, “Who’s coming back to Key West, why is he coming back, and what’s the deal with Aldo Ray?” Ray was a movie actor from the 1950s, usually assigned to tough guy roles, so I took it from there and before you could say “Key West noir”, the book had taken flight.

Which brings me to the title.

I had actually completed the first draft without a title. I had absolutely no hints as to what this novel would be called. I was getting desperate and my title-idea well was virtually dry. Fortunately, I was playing professional poker at the time at Bellagio in Las Vegas and that would be my salvation.

In Las Vegas cardrooms, if a player wants a new deck, he/she requests it from the dealer. The dealer then calls out to the floorman for a setup, which is casino parlance for a little box containing two new decks of cards. One day, a player at my table made such a request and the dealer hollered out, “Setup on fourteen!”, since we were playing at table fourteen at the time. Something snapped inside me and I mentally transformed that to “Setup On Front Street“, and I had my title.

I’m just glad we weren’t sitting at table five or something. I’d probably still be searching.

Big Al, over at BooksAndPals.blogspot.com, has reviewed my short story collection, Bloodstains On The Wall, and given it 4 stars (out of a possible 5). You can check it out here. It’s clear to me from his review that he totally gets noir and has therefore earned a place in my pantheon of Guys With Great Insight. If you have a moment, please go there and leave a brief comment.

And while you’re there, check out some of his other reviews, equally insightful, including a now-classic review of The Greek Seaman by Jacqueline Howett. That one has so far attracted 309 comments. That’s not a misprint. 309! Believe me when I tell you, all of cyberspace was buzzing about this review and the subsequent comments. It’s worth a look.

The print version of Setup On Front Street went live today. It’s available on CreateSpace and Amazon now. Price: $12.95 (cheap).