Novel Module 5: They Shoot Horses,  Don't They?
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   "Take it and pinch-hit for God," she said, pressing it into my hand. "Shoot me. It's the only way to get me out of my misery."
    "She's right," I said to myself.  (11-20)


"  . . . McCoy went to Hollywood. But the screen test failed and the Great Depression hit. A tramp, a bum, McCoy slept in abandoned cars, picked fruit and vegetables in the Imperial Valley, worked as a soda jerk, a bodyguard and a picket – until he was hired as a bouncer at a marathon dance contest in Santa Monica. Still focussed on Hollywood, he wrote up this experience as a movie script called 'Marathon Dancers.' That did not sell, but he got on as a contract writer with R.K.O. studios, beginning what he called "my notable career as a studio hack." . . .. But McCoy managed to finish a novel based on his movie script, which was titled They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and published in 1935. Although later a favorite of French existentialists, McCoy's book sold only 3,000 copies the first year.

It tells the story of failed actress Gloria, who in desperation enters a marathon dance contest that becomes an endurance nightmare. Realizing that this punishment is her life, Gloria convinces her partner to kill her as a testament to the meaning/meaninglessness of life. By turns lyric and grim, the novel combines irony and fear with a subtlety McCoy would never again achieve.

. . . . French writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Gide and Andre Malraux discovered They Shoot Horses, Don''t They?, and Simon de Beauvoir said that it "was the first existentialist novel to have appeared in America." Europeans began to rank him beside Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway. McCoy, however, was broke, depressed and "fat from too much food and booze." What raised him for the last time was a manuscript he had been working on, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, which Random House liked and published in 1948. His best work since They Shoot Horses, Don't They? , the novel displayed a masterly alternation between action and reflection. Eastern reviewers may not have liked it, but Warner Brothers bought the story as a vehicle for James Cagney, who wanted another "really nasty role" to cement his screen persona. On top of this, in early 1951, McCoy sold an original script called "Scalpel" to Hall Wallis Productions for $100,000. The novel and the movie were winners, and McCoy was working on a new book called The Hard Rock Man when he was struck by a heart attack. At fifty-eight, McCoy was broke when he died December 15, 1955, and his widow had to sell his books and jazz collection to pay for his funeral.

 --William Marling. Hard-Boiled Fiction at Case Western Reserve University
Relevant Topics
  • American novels of the Great Depression
  • The Proletarian Novel
  • The Hollywood Dream: Becoming a Star
  • Reality Television Programing


  Alice Faye  (photographs)

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