Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Although this novel by McCoy was considered as a minor work upon its first
publication, the reason why I am discussing it and its non-noir cinematic version is
because, on the one hand, it presents the elements of the kind of fatalism and relentless
despair that we see in Ulmer’s Detour, for example, and also because, on the other, it
shows that McCoy confronted issues head-on, while others of the hard-boiled school dealt
with serious matters in a more oblique manner. In fact, McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t
They? overtly resonates with politics as a socially conscious reaction to the injustices of the
Depression era. Had the film been shot some twenty years earlier, perhaps the noir
ambiance would have been even more present. The movie places the narrative thrust in the
dance itself with flashforwards to the apprehension and trial of Robert (Michael Sarrazin),
the future murderer. At first these techniques may prove confusing for the uninitiated, but
they are from the noir stylist’s perspective an echo of film noir’s heyday, and hence the
metaphorical point about universal suffering and salvation through escape is well-achieved
in this representation of life through the metaphor of a dance competition.
As he served as an aviator during World War I, McCoy sent many of his first
World War stories to Black Mask (fig. 1), as readers were showing an avid enthusiasm for
air-adventure fiction. In 1927, McCoy started a compilation of seventeen stories which
were all published in Black Mask and many of them featured Jerry Frost, a flying Texas
ranger, and were often referred to as the “Jerry tales”. Just like in the other pulp magazines
described above, McCoy’s stories were also written in a terse style. A good example of this
is his novel No Pockets in a Shroud (1937), whose plot is about a journalist, Mike Dolan,
who misses the old days, when “a newspaper was a newspaper and called a sonofabitch a
sonofabitch” (McCoy 1998:83). His job is to clean up the city at all levels, especially
politically speaking, by denouncing the system and 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” (McCoy 1998:3).
Hollywood typically avoided McCoy’s novels (often regarded as being too
provocative and aggressive for the social context of that time) and this is evident from the
lapse of time that it took the cinema industry to adapt McCoy’s novel to the big screen,
nearly twenty years after publication. In the heyday of film noir, McCoy also worked with
such key directors as Henry Hathaway, Raoul Walsh, and Nicholas Ray, but one of the
more obscure directors he worked with was Gordon Douglas, who turned his novel Kiss
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