Murder And Mayhem In P-Town-Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance

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Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer, 1984

 

The novelist/journalist/philosopher king Norman Mailer wrote many types of books, and covered a wide variety of themes. Types from pockets full of essays, non-fictional fiction, fictional non-fiction, advertisements for himself and flat out old-time journalistic commentary on iconic figures. His themes ranged from war to white hipsters to levitating the Pentagon to Marilyn to the moon landings and everything in between. Along the way he wrote a few, well, let’s call them whodunits since murder mysteries is not quite what he was into, wrote the book under review, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, under that imperative.        

The whole story-line here takes place in Provincetown, a town that the many times I have visited there in the past did not seem like the natural scene for murder and mayhem but maybe I didn’t look close enough. The protagonist here, Tim, Tim Madden, a guy who has all the symptoms of an Irish guy coming up the hard way, a guy who just because of who he was had to find out at some point in his life, hopefully early on, that tough guys don’t dance, and thems the rule, although he just happens to only be half-Irish. That has never stopped anybody from acting wholly Irish, it’s in the dominant genes, and moreover Tim is a writer to boot (although all through the book he may be thinking about writing, maybe even writing like a fiend like Mailer himself, but we never read that he had put pen to paper of late).

Hey, guess what during the period that this book was written back in the 1980s Norman Mailer, a writer, just happened to live in Provincetown so he took advantage of local knowledge to flesh out his scenario, a scenario that factors in some very strange doings (those things that I said I might not have looked at closely enough on prior visits) out at land’s end, out in that hook of land that the old time Pilgrims first spied in confronting the new land back in the day.        

Here’s the skinny and see what you think about our amateur unconscious detective, one Tim Mailer, oops, Madden. Tim was on a drinking/feeling sorry for himself binge after his snarly wife left him for parts unknown. This wife, Patty, whom he had “stolen” away from a guy he went to prep school, Wardley, with after she had latched onto him and his dough, Patty was that kind of woman, a hustling upstart cheerleader so yeah guys would part with their dough or whatever else she wanted for some grasping sex, one of those impossible Wasps with the three names and three roman numerals after their names. During his binge Tim ran into a couple of out-of-towners, Lonnie and Jessica, a little unusual in the off-season the time frame for the action in the book. To make a long story short during the binge he wound up drinking with them far into the night and the next morning woke up to a couple of new realities. The couple were both dead, the man by an apparent suicide and the woman as he would find out to his horror when he went to check out his marijuana patch in Truro beheaded by hands unknown (he also woke up to a car, Patty’s car, Patty’s everything, since he had no serious dough and she had gotten a very good settlement from old Wasp, whose front seat was splattered with blood and the proud possessor of a tattoo in the days before that personal statement symbol was “cool.” The problem with all of these scary facts is that he was not sure in his stupor that he had not done the killings. That hard fact is what the rest of the story hinges on.         

Now naturally no protagonist, drunk or sober, in a whodunit is going to be the fall guy, no way, because in this case Tim’s father, a reprobate full Irishman, didn’t raise any guy who was going to take the fall for stuff he didn’t do. So Tim had to get his best sleuthing brain working to get out of the hole that he, not only as a  writer, but an ex-con (dealing coke) has dug  for himself, or somebody has dug for him. Along the way as happens way too often in murder stories the bodies start piling up. All because of a busted real estate deal, hubris, thwarted love, including the “love that dare not speak its name,” the way they alluded to it in the old days today same-sex, or my favorite-the ghost of old fishing village P-town has come up to seek revenge on the modern day residents.

As for those bodies piling up you already know that Lonnie and Jessica have passed on (remember her in two parts one part her severed head found by Tim where he hid his stash the other part unknown then); wifey Patty who had left for parts unknown actually was hanging around but she too was wasted, beheaded  by hands unknown and (and shared a temporary resting place with Jessica where Tim hid his stash, at least her pretty little head did); a couple of townies who help Patty’s Wasp ex-husband and had to be gotten rid of because they knew too much or were loose cannons; that impossible three name three numeral Wasp who was Patty’s ex-husband: and, in the end a rancid rogue cop, or posing as a local cop (a DEA agent really) who was the lynchpin to the whole scenario. He was wasted by his wife, called Laurel although her name was Madeleine, and Tim’s ex-Mafia queen girlfriend. That’s six, count ‘em and Tim and the queen walk away free as birds. Hell, there are too many moving parts here for one small seacoast town in off-season. Don’t you think?

Of course, as with virtually any Mailer novel everybody and their brother or sister is having sex, hetero-, gay or bisexual, a whole identity politics crisis in the making, having all kinds of sex, missionary, oral or anal, you know that “love that dare not speak its name” business (and maybe some other stuff from the Kama Sutra who knows), so no wonder the conclusion I drew from this one was not some old wives’ tale about the spirits which haunt P-town seeking revenge for old time slights but hubris, pure human hubris. Still, unlike some other later, longer Mailer efforts, this one was a page-turner. Yeah, tough guys really don’t dance, just ask Tim Madden and his dad they’ll set you straight.