Tough Guys Don’t Dance keeps turning up at CrimeReads. This week the novelist Peter Swanson includes it in “7 Great Stories of Suspense in a House by the Sea”, a list he assembled while thinking about Grey Gables, the house on the Truro dunes he invented for his new Christmas novella, Do You See What I See? Mailer’s Provincetown mystery sits third, between Rebecca and The Talented Mr. Ripley, in the company of Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, Evan Hunter, and John Cheever.
Swanson’s verdict is a familiar one: “A flawed novel, for sure, but not boring.” He sketches the setup — Tim Madden waking in his seaside house, hungover, with a tattoo he cannot account for and a car soaked in blood — and finds that the best parts of what he calls a pulpy book are Mailer’s descriptions of Cape Cod and Provincetown. He also singles out the opening, in which the narrator wakes to the chatter of gulls and feels, on certain mornings, that they are feeding on his heart. Not as famous as the first line of Rebecca, Swanson concedes, but memorable.
He adds that the book was “apparently written by Mailer in two months.” That is about right. Mailer owed Little, Brown a book under an old contract and wrote it in sixty-one days, a feat he compared to Popeye being handed the can of spinach. The story of the novel’s composition, its reception, and the film Mailer made of it in 1986–87 is on its Works and Days page.
This is the third time in two years CrimeReads has made room for the novel, after Olivia Rutigliano’s “The Ghosts of Tough Guys Don’t Dance” and Scott Adlerberg’s reconsideration this past June. For a book its first reviewers were quick to write off, it has found a durable second life among readers of crime fiction.