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Loading... Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984)by Norman Mailer
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   archivomorero | Jun 27, 2022 |  Kind of all over the place, too many tangents (  ) jimifenway | May 18, 2022 | A woman's head is discovered where he grows his hash, then another head. He doesn't think he committed these murders. There are a few dodgy characters and the chief of Police is actually the murderer. Very confusing book, I didn't like the characters and was glad to finish it. (  ) Daftboy1 | Oct 8, 2018 | As the hangover clears he finds his car's passenger seat sticky with blood, a new tattoo with an old flame's name and the discovery of not one but two severed heads in the nearby woods, next to his secret marijuana stash. Was he responsible for the murder of two women, or was the crooked police chief setting him up? Madden, a failed writer, has the story of a life time to write if he can sleuth his way through it and live. A couple of ex-cons and a pissed off homosexual, his own former cell-mate, all want him dead. In Tough Guys Don't Dance, Mailer gives us many colorful characters, in his usual descriptive style, but don't be fooled. Through all the hard-nosed Irish and Portuguese on the streets of Cape Cod this book is worht the read for the flowing narrative language alone, and besides Madden is a tough guy, so why not give him the last dance. (  ) MarkPSadler | Jan 17, 2016 | As the hangover clears he finds his car's passenger seat sticky with blood, a new tattoo with an old flame's name and the discovery of not one but two severed heads in the nearby woods, next to his secret marijuana stash. Was he responsible for the murder of two women, or was the crooked police chief setting him up? Madden, a failed writer, has the story of a life time to write if he can sleuth his way through it and live. A couple of ex-cons and a pissed off homosexual, his own former cell-mate, all want him dead. In Tough Guys Don't Dance, Mailer gives us many colorful characters, in his usual descriptive style, but don't be fooled. Through all the hard-nosed Irish and Portuguese on the streets of Cape Cod this book is worht the read for the flowing narrative language alone, and besides Madden is a tough guy, so why not give him the last dance. ( ) MarkPSadler | Jan 17, 2016 |
 The most typical episode in ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' occurs when Madden, accompanied by Stunts, discovers the severed heads in his marijuana patch and carries them back to his car. He is attacked by the villains, Nissen and Stoodie, Nissen with a knife, Stoodie with a tire iron. The details of the fight can't be paraphrased. Madden survives it and drives home. ''Shall I tell you the virtues of such a war?'' he offers. In fact, he doesn't recite them, but reports that ''if not for the war by the side of the road, I could never have slept.'' As it was, ''I slumbered as well as any of those who were dead.'' ''Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated,'' the poet Keats said, ''the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel - by a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone - though erroneous they may be fine.'' Madden, Mailer's surrogate in this respect, would offer a Keatsian justification for his violence, if the question were raised. Mailer would justify it further by seeing it as heroic resistance not only to evil at large but to the naturalism that demeans his energy. So a fight with thugs becomes ''the war.''
After an encounter with a woman who reminds him of the wife who deserted him, Timothy Madden awaken with fragmented memories and an agonizing suspicion that he committed murders. No library descriptions found. 
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