They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

But once upon a time, it was a short and controversial novel, widely dismissed as degenerate by a hostile American press, and yet lauded by the French, who spoke of McCoy in the same breath as Faulkner and Hemingway.

The story is set in the pitiless, ultra-competitive world of American dance marathons, a particular sour fruit born from the soil of depression-hit America.

Couples would stagger around dance floors all night and all day, sometimes for weeks on end, until the last ones dropped.

Enthusiastic crowds were entertained, the dancers got the promise of food and shelter and the chance to win a cash prize by being the last couple standing.

With just a 10-minute break each hour, the organisers knew the competitors would finally fall.

The longest recorded competition lasted a staggering seven months.

We were all milling around the middle of the floor, all of us, watching the minute hand of the clock, when suddenly Kid Cam, of couple 18, began slapping his partner on the cheek.

He was holding her up with his left hand, slapping her backwards and forwards with his right hand, but she did not respond.

She was dead to the world.

She gurgled a couple of times and then slid to the floor, unconscious.

Horace McCoy had first-hand experience of these brutal contests.

He'd been a flying ace in the First World War and a successful magazine writer during the 20s, but an extravagant lifestyle and the Wall Street crash put him on the streets, forcing him to take jobs where he could.

He worked as a fruit picker, a bodyguard, a soda jerk, until one day he found himself working as a bouncer at the dance marathon contest held in Santa Monica.

When he later returned to writing, he put that experience into a movie screenplay.

It wasn't made, and indeed it took 40 years and a revolution against old-fashioned studio pictures for it eventually to be made, the vehicle that would turn Jane Fonda into a serious star.

All of that was many years ahead.

McCoy rewrote his screenplay as a short novel, and the filmic influence lingers on.

The short, hard, haiku-like sentences that mark every good screenplay are eminently suitable for hard-boiled noirish fiction.

The novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler before him would be good examples, and McCoy brings to bear a similar, terse, abrupt style.