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, realis­tic 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.

   Paul dropped me off at home yesterday afternoon around four o’clock. Not only did we have a great time, but so (I’m sure) did everybody else who went to this year’s PulpFest. Attendance was up a little, sales were down a little — if the dealers could be believed — but the room was always busy with purchases and other additions to buyers’ collections, or so it seemed to me.

   Once back home I realized that I did not make it around the dealers room as often as I often do, and there were, alas, a few friends I did not spend as much time with as usual. The time went very quickly, and all too soon the convention was over.

   I spent more money on pulps than usual, and this happened in fact before the dealers room was even open. There were as many sellers offering paperbacks this year as there were selling pulp magazines, or so was my impression. I did not see many rare pulps for sale, but I suspect that they were grabbed up before I had a chance to see them.

   I’m hoping that Walker Martin will write up his comments on PulpFest soon, as he’s been doing for other pulp and paperback shows like this one, and by the time he does I expect to have a few photos to post here as well.

   Traveling by air is the only way to go, but it’s no longer easy. We were delayed an hour going when our second plane had to be worked on before taking off. And coming back I lost a pair of reading glasses after going through security. The case fell out of my pocket when I sat down to put my shoes back on. I called Lost and Found at the Columbus airport this morning and luckily they had it. It’s on its way to me by UPS now, so all is well.

   This will be my only post today. It won’t be until tomorrow that I’ll start the blog up again, for real.