No Pockets in a Shroud (A Mask Noir Title)
The often underrated Horace McCoy, whose classic ``hard-boiled'' fiction includes Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, came a cropper with this hyperbolic and preachy 1937 novel about a tough-guy crusading journalist. In a rapidly paced succession of intense confrontational scenes, McCoy records the adventures of Mike Dolan, a newspaperman who quits his job when his editor kills Dolan's story about a baseball bribery scandal. Managing (rather unbelievably) to publish his own magazine (Cosmopolite), Dolan goes after a murderous abortionist and a KKK-like racist group, loses the highborn girl he loves, marries a senator's daughter on the rebound, and meets his predictable fate in a predictably dark alley. Dolan's righteous fury is intensely communicated, but he's an unconvincing paragon of liberal energies, and the novel is a clich-ridden endorsement of his stagy macho morality. Probably the talented McCoy's worst book.  --Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.