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

Home (1937) – were two living proofs of that sour feeling he had towards Hollywood. In
fact, they were both autobiographical and recount his sharp experiences in the cinematic
industry. Even a novel such as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? received scant attention
and only got adapted to the cinema some three decades later. The novel failed to win
widespread acclaim in the U.S (only three thousand copies were sold) but achieved
considerable success abroad, especially in France, as the French public was already
absorbing American crime and mystery stories quite extensively. The strong existentialist
message that his book conveyed made many people compare him with Jean-Paul Sartre or
rank him beside William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and he was therefore named
“the American existentialist”.
In all, McCoy wrote six novels and almost thirty screenplays but his reputation in
the United States had always been lesser than in Europe. His contribution as a screenwriter
to film noir may be minimal, but McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a fine example of
noir fiction because of the structure he developed for exploring the dark underworld of a
corrupt city. The novel was written partially thanks to praise coming from abroad, and
Warner Brothers - which has been frequently described as the most progressive American
motion picture studio of the early thirties, the one which made films that habitually
accepted the topics of Depression and the disruptions that accompanied it – aware of this
and the contents of McCoy’s previous novels, decided to acquire the rights to Kiss
Tomorrow Goodbye which ended up being a success and inspired James Cagney (who
wanted another “really nasty role” following his success in White Heat) in the role of
career criminal Ralph Cotter. “At last I was safe and secure in the blackness of the womb
from which I have never emerged” (Hilfer 1990:19), McCoy concludes his story. As a
writer, McCoy may not have been prolific when compared with the other Black Mask hardboiled
writers, but he was ingeniously able to create, as seen above, one of its strongest
serial heroes.
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