Tough Guy

KISS TOMORROW GOOD-BYE (372 pp.)--Horace McCoy--Random House ($3).

If one of the dead-end kids were to write a novel, with the aid of an unabridged dictionary, the result might be something like Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye. It is one of the nastiest novels ever published in this country.

Literary Caveman Horace McCoy has driven to an absurd extreme the hardboiled, feel-my-muscles style of James Cain and Dashiell Hammett, and, to add cultural tone, has dipped into the bowely bathos of the wasn't-Bix-wonderful, oh-blow-that-beautiful-horn school. The result is a gutter-minded, gutter-tongued shocker of alley-cat sex, sadism and unmourned murders--relieved only by odes to Satchmo's and Muggsy's horn blowing.

Author McCoy, a Hollywood hand, keeps firing words out of the side of his mouth as if they were bullets, though often enough when they land they seem more like spitballs. Occasionally, to show he knows his way around a dictionary (or beyond it), he tosses in a word like "propliopithecustian." But most of the time he sticks to the literary method which assumes that the height of human expression can be reached in a monosyllabic grunt.

Among some Parisian cafe thinkers, who seem to believe that Chicago is run by Al Capone and that New Yorkers live in nightclubs, McCoy has been honored as the peer of Hemingway and Faulkner. The trash he writes is closer to the literature of men's-room walls.

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