Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye Book

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is hardboiled fiction in the finest tradition. Whatever you believe pulp noir or hardboiled writing is, you'll find it here. Tough guys, sexy women, crooked lawyers, dishonest cops, blackmail, betrayal, manipulation, sex and violence, it's all in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and it all hits home hard.

As a fan of hardboiled crime fiction, you'd think I'd have fallen in love with this one and I would have had the cover bronzed and framed to sit above my fireplace. If so, you'd think wrong because I didn't really enjoy Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye that much.

Ralph Cotter is a career criminal. A genius and a psychopath, Cotter's story begins with a violent prison escape. Once again a free man, Cotter continues his life of crime in his new city and with his new criminal colleagues. It doesn't take long before he eventually hooks up with those dishonest cops and one of those crooked lawyers. Along the way he connects with his ex-partner's sister and he doesn't hesitate to beat her or anyone else who gets in his way. Through Cotter's first person narration, Horace McCoy has given is a big old chunk of hardboiled heaven.

So why didn't I enjoy Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye that much? About halfway through the story, Ralph meets Margaret Dobson and it's there that the story took a downturn for me. I didn't mind the Dobson character and I didn't mind Cotter falling for her, but she brought back memories from someone in Cotter's past that would influence his decision making and behavior and it was from there that the story moved on to what I found an unsatisfying, and disturbing, ending.

What I loved most about Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye had nothing to do with the story, but that it was written by a talented writer of the genre and that it was written in 1948. Yes, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is violent and sexy even by today's standards, but had it been written today, the violence would have been overly graphic and the sex would have been disturbingly lurid and together, they would have overshadowed the characters and the story leaving us with something far less than a classic.