REVIEWED BY TONY BAER:

   

HORACE McCOY – I Should Have Stayed Home. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover,  1938. Signet #884, paperback, 1951; Berkley #328, paperback, 1958.

   Ralph Carston, a 23 year old Greek god with a Jim Nabors accent, was a local playhouse star in smalltown Georgia. A talent scout invited him out to Hollywood for a screen test. So he picked up stakes and went California way.

   He’s rooming with a coupla Hollywood extras, struggling for work.

   It’s been eight months since his screen test and he still hasn’t heard back from the scout despite leaving messages every day.

   One of his roomies gets arrested for shoplifting and hangs herself after getting sentenced to six years prison. The other gives up and becomes a mail-away bride.

   Ralph? He’s been lying to his folks back home, insinuating great success in lieu of his abject failure.

   A Norma Desmond type aging millionaire nympho (sans von Stroheim) has eyes for Ralph, but Ralph is too disgusted by her aging flab to capitulate to her desires. He’d rather starve.

   And in the end it seems that he will. We are left with his high school sweetheart newly wed to another and honeymooning in Hollywood — his ma begging him to show them the high life of the stars of whom she knows he is one.

   Relentlessly hopeless look at Hollywood in the depressed 30’s. Tough, realistic writing, sad motif — yet not quite bleak enough to qualify as noir. Not particularly criminous. Just a realist, sad look at the life of a Hollywood extra, lured from small depressed towns these high school play stars go to Hollywood to face ruination and despair. McCoy, a failed Hollywood actor, probably knew of which he spoke.

   I’d probably put this one in fourth place of the four McCoys I’ve read, with the clear winner being the Jim Thompson at his peak-esque Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye; then No Pockets In A Shroud, the solid story of a hellbent for destruction muckraker taking on a corrupt town; followed by the unrelentingly depressing dance hall euthanasia of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?