Tennessee-born Horace McCoy joined the American Air Service in WWI, was wounded flying over France, became a reporter-actor in Dallas. In Hollywood, he was popular as a handsome actor, then toiled as a prolific movie-script writer. McCoy burst into fame with his first novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, about Depression-era marathon dancers. His No Pockets in a Shroud features a social climber bribed to have his marriage annulled by the bride’s rich father, then establishing a radical magazine. I Should Have Stayed Home exposes Hollywood moguls and rich old women exploiting would-be actors and actresses. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye features warfare between a professional criminal and corrupt law-enforcement agents. When made into a movie it starred Jimmy Cagney. Additional films were based on McCoy’s fiction. McCoy visited England and France where translations of his works were admired by existentialists. Scalpel, his best-seller, features Tom Owen, a successful WWII military surgeon at odds with his superiors, including General Patton. Owen returns to his Western Pennsylvania roots to investigate his brother’s death, is drawn into high-society–temporarily? Well-educated Owen perhaps resembles what McCoy aspired to be. But love of cars, wine, travel, and the high life clipped his wings. He left Corruption City, a sixth novel, in fragmentary form–completed by a ghost writer and blasting yet another set of unclean cops and thieving politicians. McCoy’s popularity in Europe may be better than in America, a land he loved and wished were cleaner. This book begins with a chronology of major events in the life of Horace McCoy (1897-1955), and then in one alphabetized sequence synopsizes the plots of his six novels and identifies each of their 494 characters–often with critical comments by publishing scholars, including Gale. It concludes with a select bibliography showing the range of scholarship on McCoy, then an index.