Ralph Cotter escapa brutalmente y sin mirar atrás de la prisión donde estaba recluido con la ayuda de una mujer tan atractiva como peligrosa que le envolverá en un sórdido ambiente de ladrones, estafadores, y policías corruptos.

review of
Horace McCoy's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 29, 2018

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1081751-the-fake-mccoy

McCoy, like Ross MacDonald, is another crime fiction writer that I was tipped off to by a comment from a Goodreads reader. Thank you. W/ this one I might've reached my turning point where I'm beginning to accept that there're as many great mystery writers as there are science-fiction ones. In other words, w/ just about every new crime fiction writer that I read I find something new to appreciate. After I read the bk I checked out the original movie, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950, directed by Gordon Douglas). There's a 2000 made-for-TV movie called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye too (directed by Jason Priestley) but, apparently, that has nothing to do w/ this bk. For once, I wdn't mind a remake, the 1950 movie softsoaps the sex & violence too much & that wdn't be 'necessary' in a version made these days. Maybe there cd even be explicit sex. That might do the bk justice.

"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." - p 3

This was first published in the US in 1948, according to a front page in the edition I have. The movie was only made 2 yrs later. The differences between the 2 show the limits of what's acceptable to the powers-that-be in relation to the respective mediums. As Andrew Spicer points out in his bk Film Noir:

"Because films were exhibited to such a broad public, including the 'unsophisticated and the impressionable', they were not allowed the same freedom of expression as literature, theatre or the press." - p 36, Andrew Spicer's Film Noir

"The Production Code's three General Principles attempted to ensure that films showed 'correct standards of life', including the injunction that crime must never go unpunished, while its numerous Particular Applications closely regulated the ways in which sex and violence might be depicted. 'Adultery and illicit sex' could not be explicitly treated nor justified, nor could 'lustful embraces' be shown and nudity was expressly forbidden. In addition to proscribing any sympathy for the criminal, the Code also refused to allow the detailed and explicit depiction of criminal methods. In sum, the Code was an attempt to make films promote home and family values and uphold American legal, political and religious instituitions and acted as 'a determining force on the construction of narrative and the delineation of character in every studio-produced film after 1931.' (Maltby, 1993, p. 38)" - p 37

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye isn't in Spicer's Film Noir filmography so he may've felt that it qualified more as a more generic crime film or it might've just been excluded b/c he didn't have the space to include 'everything'. Nonetheless, I think what I quoted above is relevant in relation to the film adaptation. McCoy's narrator is in prison, waiting for his prison break. In the meantime, he's sexually harassed:

"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 exhiliration that today was the day that I was going to kill him, that I was finally going to kill him" - p 5

That's not in the movie. It cd be these days. In the movie, Holiday, the woman who's arranged for her brother to escape from prison w/ the narrator's help, covers their escape wearing men's clothes & shooting a rifle. In the bk, it's a machine gun. That's much more the weapon of a killer. In the movie Holiday is more of an innocent trying to free a brother that she thinks is innocent. In the bk:

"'That was pretty good,' I said. 'Wearing a man's suit . . .'

"She smiled at me, unbuckling her trousers but not unbuttoning the fly, slipping them off, arching her shoulders against the back seat to raise her buttocks out of the way. Her legs were slim and white. I could see the skin in the minutest detail, the pigments and pores and numberless valley-cracks that criss-crossed above her knees, forming patterns that were as lovely and intricate as snow crsytals. And there was something else I saw too out of the corner of my left eye, and I tried not to look, not because I didn't want to, not because of modesty, but only because when you had waited as long as I had to see one of these you want it to reveal itself at full length, sostenuto. I tried not to look, but I did look and there it was, the Atlantis, the Route to Cathay, the Seven Cities of Cibola . . ." - p 23

In other words, her cunt. On the narrator's 1st trip to Holiday's apartment:

"Holiday opened the door and I went inside. Before I had time to say anything, to look around, to even put down the newspaper I was carrying, she grabbed me around the neck, kicking the door shut with her foot, putting her face up to mine, baring her teeth. I kissed her, but not as hard as she kissed me, and then I saw that she was wearing only a light flannel wrapper, unbottoned all the way down. I had the impression that her breasts were small and hard and firm, but they were not in focus; I was looking at that Eldorado again" - p 35

Holiday & the narrator argue about her brother, who was killed in the escape:

"'Go on, be jealous,' she said.

"'Jealous? Of him? That bum? That popcorn thief?'

"She took a step towards me and in a sudden flinging motion she clawed at my face. I closed my eyes to protect them and slipped my head, jerking my knee up, slamming her in the crotch." - p 38

"'There you go getting jealous again,' she said.

"'You're nuts,' I said. 'I'm not jealous. I never saw you until two weeks ago and after tonight I'll probably never see you again. You're nuts.'

"Her eyes narrowed a little and she took off the green-checkered coat and flung it over her shoulder with a cheap theatricality. Then with both hands she ripped off the shirt, pitching it, underhanded, into my face. I caught a fast faint flavor of woman-smell, and when I got the shirt from in front of my eyes she was unzippering her skirt, which she let fall to the floor. She wore no brassiere. She yanked the top button of her shorts and kicked them clear over the bed. Then she moved a couple of steps in front of me, standing spreadlegged, her hands on her hips.

"'Tell me that again,' she said. 'Tell me you won't be seeing me any more after tonight.'

"I stood up slowly and slapped her across the face." - pp 39-40

The violence & its function as a sexual stimulus is more explicit in the bk than in the movie but I'll at least say that in the movie they argue & he slaps her around & from then on she's hooked, she's hugging & kissing him, she loves him.

"'Is that all we got left?' she asked.

"'Are you kidding?' I said, taking the rest of the currency out of my pocket, showing it to her. 'I'm a hard-working man. And it seems to me that the very least a man's woman can do when he comes home all tired out is to have some hot coffee for him.'

"She laughed, kicking off the sheet with both feet and turning her naked body towards me. 'What were you saying about the coffee?' she asked.

"One of these days I hope I can look at that thing and not hear wonderful music, I thought, cramming the money back into my coat pockets. 'Why, you must be having hallucinations,' I said, taking off my coat and getting into bed with the rest of my clothes on. 'I didn't say anything about hot coffee. . . .'" - pp 52-53

Butt, perhaps I'm getting too into the matter at hand. While he's still on the prison farm, he's thinking about money:

"this is what came of not having any money. Jesus, that was the answer — money. You got just what you paid for — be it a handkerchief or a prison-farm guard. Money. That was the answer to Nelson's success, and the success of all the other bums — money. Jesus, would I ever have any money?" - p 12

Later, he pretends to be having diarrhea so that he can go off from the farming & retrieve some hidden guns. A guard accompanies him to the outhouse from wch he slips away & then returns to. This takes long enuf to attract the guard's attn:

"'I thought maybe you had fell in,' Byers said.

"You're a bowel-watcher, I thought. You're reviving a lost art. 'It was that supper I ate last night,' I said. 'I have a very delicate stomach.'

"'Everything about you is delicate, ain't it?' he said.

"Including my trigger finger, you peasant bastard, I thought. 'I'm sorry, me-lord,' I said.

"'For God's sake, stop whining!' he said. 'Move along.'" - p 17

Then, waddya know? He's out & he's making money. Well, he's taking money. SO the $64 question is NOT "would I ever have any money?" but what the following big word means:

"I was asleep, of course, but even when you are asleep you possess a kind of propliopithecustian awareness that enables you to know and very acutely feel certain things." - p 35

Now "propliopithecustian" presumably means: having the properties of or being from the era of propliopithecus, wch I take to mean having a primeval back-brain awareness. I find "propliopithecus" defined as "a genus of small primitive short-jawed anthropoids from the Lower Oligocene of Egypt related to the gibbon but having the same dental formula as man" ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Propliopithecus ) so maybe he was really just referring to dentistry. From there it's only one small step to planning to frame the cops:

"'How do you expect to get 'em back here to make the recording? You've got to have 'em here to make the recording. How're you going to manage that?'

"'By rustling, and very lightly at that, the remaining eighteen hundred dollars of Jinx's money,' I said. She frowned dumbly. Is this eternally to be my fate, I wondered, to always be over their heads, to always have to use diagrams to explain myself? 'The noise that eighteen hundred dollars makes when you rub it together is very faint,' I said. 'You hardly can hear it across the room — but a cop can hear it for miles and miles. It comes in on a wave-length to which only his ears are attuned.'" - p 69

The narrator cd be sd to be a bit of a misanthrope:

"cheap, common, appalling people, the kind a war, happily, destroys. What is your immediate destiny, you loud little unweaned people? A two-dollar raise? A hamburger and a hump?" - pp 71-72

Don't scoff, I'd go big time for a "hamburger and a hump" right now. In the meantime, the characters are going for cake instead:

"Using cops to actually help me in a hold-up had heretofore been only a thought, never specifically considered any more than the guy playing left field for Dallas specifically considers his participation in a World's Series; it had been only a vague ambition, a dream that had flashed through my mind and registered and passed on. Bot now I sensed that it might be attained without long years of bush-league apprenticeship. The Inspector's face was still hard and set, but his eyes widened, barely perceptibly, and he looked at Reece momentarily, telepathically, and then back at me.

"'What the hell,' I said. 'Let's cut ourselves a real piece of cake.'" - p 82

Narrator, allow me to introduce you to the elite Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force:

"Seven officers were arrested and indicted for racketeering, extortion and fraud: Sergeant Jenkins; Detective Daniel Hersl, a 17-year veteran of the force; longtime partners Detectives Momodu Gondo and Jemell Rayam; and Detectives Maurice Ward, Evodio Hendrix and Marcus Taylor. Only one member - oddly enough, John Clewell, the man whose name triggered the entire investigation - escaped indictment. The FBI found he was never a part of the criminal enterprise.

"“They were involved in a pernicious conspiracy scheme that included abuse of power,” the US Attorney for Maryland told reporters that day. Police commissioner Kevin Davis, who’d once praised the men’s work, now likened them to 1930s-style gangsters.

"“It’s disgusting,” he said.

"The public soon learned that the GTTF stole from drug dealers, but also from a homeless man, a car salesman, a construction worker and many others. The victims were overwhelmingly African-American.

"That they received hundreds of hours of overtime, when they were actually at the bar or on the beach, from a city that struggles to keep the heat working in its schools.

"That during the unrest, Jenkins was stealing garbage bags of opiates from pharmacies, and that he also stole and re-sold heroin, Ecstasy, crack and cocaine.

"That he planted drugs on innocent people, and was slowly building up the courage and the arsenal to commit fully-fledged burglaries."

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/when_cops_become_robbers

Now, lest you think that this GTTF was all white officers b/c of the victims being "overwhelmingly African-American", I shd point out that 5 of the 7 cops were black. I think that it's probably safe to claim that these were class-based crimes, aimed at the people who were most legally defenseless. Anyway, the GTTF wd've been perfect partners for the narrator of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Nonetheless, I think it wd've been sensible for the cops to have followed the narrator a little more closely. You just never know what this character's going to get up to:

"There were light standards along both sides of the street, but there were no lights burning, and in the lumpy glow of a moon becoming gibbous all the little houses in the block, chequered with windows that were squares and rectangles of yellowish incandescence, stood with amiable correctness, built to toy-town scale, and with scaled-up toy automobiles parked along the street. The house we were looking for was in the middle of the block, one-story, a cottage. We had no trouble finding it; we couldn't have missed it. The two front rooms on either side of the door were lighted, but with the windows shaded, and on the nice lawn near the pavement was a wooden sign, flooded with bright light from a goose-neck fixture.

DR DARIUS GREEN
PHILOSOPHIC GUIDE
ORGANON
(Aristotle)
NOVUM ORGANUM
(Bacon)
TERTIUM ORGANUM
(Ouspensky)
THE KEY TO COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS
THE SPATIAL UNDERSTANDING OF TIME
DO NOT BE LOST IN THE LABYRINTH OF
CONFUSED THOUGHT" - p 99

Back at the home front, personal relations have gotten even more dangerous:

"'I feel wonderful. . . .' I replied, asking myself why I could not dispel the compulsion to play this neurotic game, why I was wasting my time, why I didn't save my energy for more important things, why I didn't just let this dame have it where it would hurt the most, and then I laughed inside. I wasn't kidding myself. I knew why. Perversity. Dégéneré supérieur, that was why. 'I thought I'd put on some coffee,' I said. 'Would you care for some?'" - p 155

A coffee storm is brewing. The narrator recruits a lawyer in his schemes:

"Mandon knew a lot of the cops and they knew him, but of the eight or nine he spoke to, not one of them called him by either of his names, Keith or Mandon, and only one called him Cherokee. The others called him 'Shice'. I was curious about that. 'What's this "Shice"? What is that?' I asked. 'It's just a nickname,' he said, but I still did not understand and I looked at him and he saw from the frown on my face that I did not understand, and said, 'It's short for shyster,' and smiled a wan smile, plainly intended to imply that they meant nothing derogatory or even disrepectful." - p 166

In case you think that's unlikely, go see a Mafia lawyer in action some time. I have, a Jewish Mafia lawyer to be exact (as opposed to the Italian Mafia - not that there's much difference). He trampled all over procedure w/ the viciousness of a juggernaut & suffered no consequences. It seemed that the courtroom figures admired his sheer aggressive audacity & weren't concerned w/ whether he was commiting crimes in the process. That cd drive a sensitive person into a murderous frenzy:

"They just sat there, talking and chewing and drinking; everybody in the place was talking and chewing and drinking, and in my mind I saw in every mouth what I had seen in the turnkey's mouth a loathsome bolus: these swine, these offals, and I could not eat the sandwich. I half-turned my face to the wall to shut out some of the scene, thinking how nice it would be to wire the walls and the floor of this place with t.n.t. and set it off some day at noon, what a great public benefaction that would be . . ." - pp 169-170

Ever wonder when dental floss came along? It didn't enter my life until at least the 1960s if not the 1970s. But here we are in 1948:

"Reece moved to the door to let me out, standing there, chewing on the splintered toothpick.

"'I see that you still prefer a toothpick to dental floss,'" - p 180

"Floss was not commercially available until 1882, when the Codman and Shurtleft company started producing unwaxed silk floss. In 1898, the Johnson & Johnson Corporation received the first patent for dental floss that was made from the same silk material used by doctors for silk stitches." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_floss

"credit for the invention of dental floss as we know it goes to a New Orleans dentist, who in 1815 began advising his patients to use a thin silk thread to clean between their teeth." - https://oralb.com/en-us/oral-health/dental-floss-history

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1081751-the-fake-mccoy ( )

"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye" is a 1947 novel by McCoy and it was made into a movie, released in 1950 starring James Cagney. That movie was banned in Ohio because of its immorality and that it showed step by step how to commit crimes.

It is too bad McCoy didn't write more novels because what he did write was absolutely terrific. This is noir-era novel that is steeped in darkness and almost never leaves that dark, foreboding world. Cotter is a on a prison work farm somewhere in the South and he's made a deal to get out of there with Holiday, whose young brother is in custody with Cotter. Holiday is sex appeal personified. She is a woman of incredible appetites and almost hypnotizing beauty. She is also a machine-gun toting moll whose loyalty lasts so long as you are in the same room as her. The passionate scenes between McCoy, whose been in custody for two years, and Holiday are powerful to say the least.

With Holiday's help, Cotter escapes the prison work farm and, although initially intent on leaving the nearby town, begins step by step to take it over. The story includes daring, violent armed robberies, crooked cops, and a romance with a wealthy dame whose perfume reminds Cotter of his childhood.

If there is one word to use in describing this book, that would be intensity. The entire story is told in the first person, including Cotter's thoughts and memories. He's tough, hardnosed, bold, and has little loyalty to anyone whose friendship is not to his advantage. Some of the scenes are just awesome such as the prison escape and Cotter's romance with the rich blonde in the sports car. The action doesn't seem to let up in this book. ( )

This is an extremely strange story of a well-educated, grandmother-obsessed, young man with a very esoteric vocabulary who escapes from prison, takes up with a moll, and goes on a murderous crime spree with the help of a crooked attorney, bent cops, and a few other assorted oddballs. Things get really interesting when he meets a beautiful black-haired woman with a very pale complexion at a quack philosophic lecture. To try to describe this meandering story would pretty much give away what makes it special. If you have read McCoy, you won't be surprised by the dark tone of the whole thing, but it is a much longer and more complex book than They Shoot Horses, Don't They, I Should Have Stayed Home, or No Pockets in a Shroud. I wouldn't be surprised if he was doing a lot of drinking when he wrote this. While some of the surreal quality of the events is undoubtedly intentional, the book is a little too strange to be solely a product of the author's conscious decisions. There are also a few flaws in the book, mostly how the convict manages to move about so freely after his escape in a town not far from the prison. Surely they would have published his picture in every newspaper!

This was made into a film with James Cagney and Barbara (I Am Not Ashamed) Payton, which amazingly I have never seen. From the descriptions, it seems to stick pretty closely to the book, reflecting both its wildness and its flaws. ( )

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