Horace McCoy

"The depression of the 1930s led people to desperate measures to survive. The Marathon Dance Craze, which flourished at that time, seemed a simple way for people to earn extra money--dancing the hours away for cash. But, the underside of that Craze was filled with a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms. [author's] classic American story captures that dark side in this powerful novel."--Back cover.

This adventurous volume, with its companion devoted to the 1930s and 40s, presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force, they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing. Far from formulaic, they are ambitious works which bend the rules of genre fiction to their often experimental purposes.