Horace McCoy.

Charlton Heston and
Dianne Foster in Bad 
for Each Other (writ.
Horace McCoy, 1953)

On the occasion of the publication of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) by the British Serpent's Tail Classics, John Self looks at McCoy's "skinny and brutal account of existence at the edge of Depression America."

Not much mystery action at June 23rd Bloomsbury auction.

The June 23rd Bloomsbury auction that received press for the lack of interest in some of the Steinbeck items also displayed tepid attention to the mystery-related offerings:

• James Grady signed works, including books from the Condor series (Six Days of the Condor, etc.): Unsold.

• M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: Unsold.

• Ross Macdonald, The Far Side of the Dollar, $300 (valued bet. $1000 and $1500); Sleeping Beauty, $150 (valued bet. $500 and $700) ; proof of The Instant Enemy, with "Boucher" written and circled in red pencil (probably critic-writer Anthony Boucher), $150; Self-Portrait, signed by Macdonald and Eudora Welty, $150.

• Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Copy owned by John Dos Passos, valued bet. $1200 and $1800: Unsold.

• Mary Roberts Rinehart, signed card: Unsold.

There was also a completely delightful inscribed copy of Christopher Morley's I Know a Secret for Dorothy Parker, in which Morley drew pixies (valued bet. $1200–1800, unsold).

Greatest characters in fiction?

Over on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's First Tuesday Book Club is a request for nominations for the most powerful or moving fictional characters, which is slated as the subject of a future program.

In considering such characters from mystery fiction, one on my list would be the serial killer Dix Steele from Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place (1947). Hughes does a tremendous job in showing the reader how this character became what he was. You may find him chilling, but you do understand him. Are there other nominations from the floor?

In addition, the First Tuesday Book Club has an archived list of recommended reads in crime fiction—not a lot of surprises, methinks, with the possible exception of American Horace McCoy, who is best known for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), but also was a hardboiled writer of considerable skill.