Tough Guys Don't Dance [Mass Market Paperback]

Norman Mailer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 1985

"A novel that is as brash and brooding and ultimately as mesmerizing as the author himself...The dazzling balance betwen humor and horror keeps us plunging on....As for characters, each is a gem....It is a book to read with infinite pleasures."
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tim Madden awakes one morning with a gruesome hangover, a painful tatoo on his upper arm, blood all over the passenger seat of his Porsche, a severed female head in his marijuana stash, and almost no memory of his actions on the preceding evening. He is about to discover what they were and what he is....

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

"A novel that is as brash and brooding and ultimately as mesmerizing as the author himself...The dazzling balance betwen humor and horror keeps us plunging on....As for characters, each is a gem....It is a book to read with infinite pleasures."
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tim Madden awakes one morning with a gruesome hangover, a painful tatoo on his upper arm, blood all over the passenger seat of his Porsche, a severed female head in his marijuana stash, and almost no memory of his actions on the preceding evening. He is about to discover what they were and what he is....

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (June 12, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345323211
• ISBN-13: 978-0345323217
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,842,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Fun !, September 9, 2000

By 

Edward Scott Haas (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tough Guys Don't Dance (Mass Market Paperback)

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" is a good old fashioned thriller set in a decaying seaside New England town inhabited by a motley assortment of wealthy elitists, drug dealers, fishermen, psychopaths, and brooding alcoholic tough guys like the hero Tim Madden. Someone has it in for Tim--a struggling novelist and former criminal. After a night of heavy drinking and quazi-amnesia, severed heads are turning up on his property and the passenger seat of his car is drenched in blood. Can he find the killer (s) before he gets blamed for the killings? Mailer builds up the suspense like a true master of mystery (even though mystery is not his primary field). There is also some fine writing in this book. It should be read aloud like poetry. More than a decade before "Pulp Fiction" Mailer knew how to mix a thrilling crime drama with interesting conversations and musings about life, love, and amature philosophy. As Tim tries to solve the mystery, he broods about ethnic and cultural differences {he is a mixture of Irish and Jewish and the town is mostly Portugese}, history {he is obsessed with the Pilgrims and other aspects of local history like "hell town" a 19th century vice district}, wives, parents and family life, cops, prison, alcohol, drugs, war and on and on. In the hands of a bad {or even average} writer, this would just get annoying, but Mailer carries it off well.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fun But Disappointing, October 29, 2004

By 

Poogy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tough Guys Don't Dance (Mass Market Paperback)

I picked this one up because I'd never read any Mailer and figured it was about time. Maybe I should have stuck with one of the classics, but the library was out of Armies of the Night and Naked and the Dead. No question, he can write, and had no trouble sustaining my interest for the 225 pages or so. But the premise that sucks you in -- man wakes up to find he's gotten a tatoo he can't remember getting, and may have been on a killing spree he also can't remember -- leads to a terribly convoluted tale that deserved -- and needed -- a much more careful rendering. Had Mailer taken twice as many pages and the trouble to lead the reader through the story, it might have been fascinating to see how the intricate plot developed, but after a hundred and fifty fun pages he just decides to throw the explanation for everything at you all at once, like a B-movie in which the villain for some unexplained reason just can't stop explaining his scheme to the hero before killing him. In fact, that's exactly what happens. I felt cheated, as though he just didn't want to bother.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mailer's Brilliant Pot Boiler, April 3, 2007

By 

Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel (Hardcover)

Mailer had said that he wanted to write something fast, nasty and fun after the time and energy he lavished on two of brilliant and more ambitious projects, Ancient Evenings and Executioner's Song. Tough Guys Don't Dance is that book, in the tradition of Chandler, Hammett, Ross Macdonald. Tim Madden wakes up after a long life of wasting away as a binging alcoholic and finds his bed drenched in blood; later he finds his wife's severed head in a secret pot stash. He, however remembers none of it, and this provides Mailer ample room to ruminate about the metaphysics of hangovers and black outs and the perversions one finds themselves willing to commit when wealth and power are at stake. The cast of characters are unruly, pinched in the nerve and casting a faint whiff of what one imagines the store room where Dorian Gray's portrait was held in sick secrecy. Madden, hardly an innocent , stumbles and routs about trying to piece together the events of his last binge, terrified in the possibility that he might well be his wife's killer. This is the most horrible of personal journeys, the saga of a man seeking evidence as to whether he's a monster or merely a hapless dupe.Mailer's prose is breathtaking and poetic, and creates a tension with the gamy undertakings of the plot. This is not one of Mailer's masterworks, not be a long shot, but it has verve and drive and a splendidly sick wit, and it reminds us that Mailer can construct an odd tale and twist it in any direction he pleases.