Product Description

Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer with a penchant for nicotine, alcohol and blondes with money, struggles towards consciousness twenty-four days and nights after his wide has left him. He has a bad case of alcohol amnesia, a fresh and throbbing tattoo and a car drenched in blood. Just to make his hangover complete, Provincetown's Chief of Police would like a quiet word...So begins Madden's disquieting journey into the dark recesses of America's psyche. TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE is Norman Mailer at his tough, raw and uncompromising best. And Madden's tormented efforts to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening turn, inevitably into fragments of the American Nightmare.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203658 in Books
• Published on: 1992-11-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
'Hypnotic...thrilling.' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Mailer writes like an angel- a master of small surprises that may be precursors of seismic shocks.' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'A First-rate murder mystery... the suspense is as finely tuned as in any of the best films of Hitchcock.' CHICAGO TRIBUNE 'Think of it as a novel by Dashiell Hammett and transpose it into Mailer's style.' NEW YORK TIMES

About the Author
After graduating from Harvard Norman Mailer served in the South Pacific during World War II. He published his first book in 1948 and won the Pulitzer Price twice for THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT and THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG.

Customer Reviews

Sex and severed heads at the seaside
This is the first Norman Mailer I've read, and I am impressed. You can almost smell the sea of Mailer's ghostly, winter Provincetown. I became caught up in the protagonist's horrible situation, so that when I occasionally had to put the book down, I was that man. This might well not be one of Mailer's best reads, but if you like a scary, dirty, human read, then this is it.

Tough, hard-boiled, brilliance
Norman Mailer is a bit of an enigma; I have read several of his books, "the Fight", "Naked and the Dead", "Harlot's Ghost" and he cannot be said to have ever written consistently in an particular genre. In this he tries his hand at the hard-boiled, no-detail-missing, James Ellroy style thriller. This is good stuff by any standard. There is an overwhelming seediness throughout the whole book; no character has any qualms about philandering , murdering, drug-taking or disposing of the bodies. As a one-time visitor to Provincetown I never would have guessed that, beneath the surface, the place was such a Soddom and Gommorah style cesspit! The characterisation and exageration work, however; the dialogue is gritty and very rarely feels forced even though the wisecracks are up there with David Mamet's best. This is definitely a success and even though, as far as I am aware this is Mailer's only thriller it doesn't feel like he is indulging himself with a vanity project (such as Martin Amis's attempted police thriller "Night Train").
Great book and although written in a very elaborate style for the genre, a compulsive read.

Another stunning novel by Norman..
More brutality and vicious writing from Norman. His obsession with the "metaphysical" gets more of a free-reign on this one but it still hits hard, hard.
Some chapters knocked me flat. The man must have lived some life to get words like this in his head.