Tue 3 Aug 2010
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: JAMES ROSS – They Don’t Dance Much.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[8] Comments
JAMES ROSS – They Don’t Dance Much. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1940. Paperback reprint: Signet #913, abridged edition, April 1952. Hardcover reprint: Southern Illinois University Press, “Lost American Fiction” series, 1975; reprinted in ppbk by Popular Library, 1976 (scarce).
Okay, a few weeks ago I was all set to read some Henry James when someone here mentioned Richard Hallas’ You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, and I decided I should have another look at it. Only on the way to dig out Play, I stumbled across something else I hadn’t read in 30-odd years and took up that instead.
James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much (1940) is about murder in a small southern town, which got to be a pretty over-worked sub-genre, but this one stands out.
Ross creates vivid characters with a strong narrative voice, and slowly (but not too slowly) eases them into a plot about murder and double-cross, with some very brutal action and a few cunning twists.
Over it all, there’s the stifling atmosphere of a town with nothing much there, and the casual brutality of boredom.
There are also some memorable bad guys; Smut Milligan and Aston LeGrand are two of the most striking nasties in literature since Captain Hook and Ming the Merciless, and their presence looms over the book like a gathering thunderstorm.
In fact, even the minor characters have that little something extra, and together with Ross’s terse-but-leisurely prose, it goes to make Dance something very memorable.
From the SIU edition:
“Called by Raymond Chandler ‘a sleazy, corrupt but completely believable story of a North Carolina town,’ this tough, realisÂtic novel exemplifies Depression literature in the United States.
“Falling somewhere between the hard-as-nails writing of James M. Cain and the early stories of Ernest Hemingway, James Ross’s novel was for sheer brutality and frankness of language considerably ahead of his reading public’s taste for realism untinged with sentiment or profundity. In his brilliant Afterword to this new edition, George V. Higgins, author of the recent best-seller Cogan’s Trade, pays tribute to Ross for his courage in telling his story truthfully, in all its ugliness.”
James Ross was born in North Carolina in 1911, was a newspaper man there and died in 1990. The book is his only novel.
August 3rd, 2010 at 1:20 am
This is a fine example of the more literary vein of the Depression era fiction that takes some of its power from the hard boiled voice, but isn’t really pulp hard boiled as we usually define it. Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, Hallas, YOU PLAY THE BLACK AND THE RED COMES UP, Faulkner’s SANCTUARY, and McCoy’s THEY SHOOT HORSES DON’T THEY are other examples of this off-shoot.
For some reason these books aren’t as common as the better known (and loved) pulp school, but in many ways are closer to the kind of Gold Medal paperback original that would dominate the fifties and early sixties.
This is a hell of a fine book, and as Dan says the villains are memorable. It’s close to forgotten today, but undeservingly so. Great title too.
August 3rd, 2010 at 11:49 am
I read this book earlier this year and liked it a lot. I found it extremely well written, with a great narrative voice, as Dan mentioned in his review. It also possesses a strong sense of location and paints a visual, if bleak, picture of the depression era times. Sadly, it is a book basically out of sight and out of mind these days. I stumbled across it in some online list of “forgotten books” a couple years ago and tracked down a copy. I’m glad i did.
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:02 pm
I have the Signet edition, but I’ve put off reading it because it’s abridged. I also have a copy of the Popular Library paperback — I think.
If I remember it correctly, it’s badly worn. The reason I’m hesitating on this is that there are no copies offered for sale on ABE, so maybe I’m thinking of a different book in the series.
But there are plenty of copies of the Southern Illinois edition, some not too pricey (in the $20-30 range).
As for the hardcover first edition, you might as well forget it. Two copies on ABE, both in jacket. One for $1000, the other for $3000 (signed).
August 3rd, 2010 at 5:10 pm
I have the HARRAP LIMITED edition, published in Great Britain in 1986. THe cover is not that great. I don’t remember what i paid for the book, but it couldn’t have been much, as i felt I was rolling the dice buying it. Worked out to be one fine read.
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:34 pm
This title was highly recommended to me a few years ago, so I started to read the Signet p.b. edition. I swear I read over half of the book and gave up because “Nothing Happened”! Things were hinted at, alluded to, etc. but I just gave up. Now I’ll have to find the book again and give it another try. Dan mentions the Hallas book “You Play the Red,” and I finished it last month some time for the first time. It was pretty good and as I mentioned to Steve on our way to Pulpfest a few days ago, If I had read it thirty+ years ago when I really was getting into pulp fiction it’d probably be a cornerstone book for me, but I’ve read so much of the same thing by other writers since it just didn’t have that “Kick” I thought I’d get.
August 4th, 2010 at 2:07 am
Those of you who’ve read the book, would it make a good movie? I have the feeling that it might, in the right hands.
— Steve
August 6th, 2010 at 8:17 am
I love that title-YOU PLAYED THE BLACK AND THE RED COMES UP. Have to look for that one, too. Have you seen the pictures going around taken during the Depression by the Farm Bureau. Something like America in Color. There’s a story in every one.
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