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...

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