Q: Why do you describe Tough Guys Don’t Dance as a potboiler?
A: Mailer had to write a book in 60 days or pay back an advance.
It couldn’t be nonfiction because that would take research.
So he made three
decisions. The book would be a novel, it
would be set in
No, four. He would write it in the first person. That is, tell the story from the hero’s point of view.
Q: What would happen?
Something would have to happen.
A: A murder.
Make it a mystery.
The hero has been on a drunk and was in a blackout. He doesn’t know what happened. He has to ask his friends. Some of them he can trust, some he can’t.
Q: There you have it.
A: He thought if the style were felicitous it would carry a silly plot.
He wasn’t trying to write Ancient Evenings.
He was trying to work off a debt. Under some time pressure.
Q: Some of his books were written because he was an alimony slave.
A: I think he would deny that.
Q: The Spooky Art isn’t as good a writers guide as Charles Willeford’s Writing and Other Blood Sports.
A: I may just like Willeford better.
I like the idea of readers of immobilized hero novels.
Today there are still enough highly literate readers in the
world for the immobilized hero novel to exist as a sub-literary force in the
world of literature. However, as the
electronic impact of immediate information forces literature of all kinds into
microfilms where it can be stored and forgotten, the immobilized hero novel
will gradually disappear. Instead of man
reading about man writing about man writing, immobilized hero novel readers
will be reduced to small groups of semi-literate men reading the immobilized
hero novel as small groups of graduate students meet today to read Beowulf.