50 Years Later, Reconsidering Norman Mailer's Wild, Bloody Provincetown Noir
Scott Adlerberg's June 2026 CrimeReads reconsideration of Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) and Mailer's 1987 film of it. Adlerberg reads the novel's 'failure' as a hard-boiled mystery as its real interest, finding closer kinship with Poe's grotesque-and-arabesque mode than with Hammett or Chandler, and judges the film a watchable curio. An about-Mailer clipping.
Scott Adlerberg. “50 Years Later, Reconsidering Norman Mailer’s Wild, Bloody Provincetown Noir.” CrimeReads, 15 June 2026.
A critical reconsideration of Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984) and Mailer’s 1987 film of it. Adlerberg’s argument is that what reviewers (Denis Donoghue in the New York Times) faulted as the novel’s failure to be a proper hard-boiled mystery is precisely its virtue — its digressiveness, its anecdotes within anecdotes, and its treatment of Provincetown as a character. He relocates the book’s lineage from Hammett and Chandler to Edgar Allan Poe (“a blend of the grotesque and the arabesque”) and judges the film a watchable curio, unmistakably Mailer’s. (The headline’s “50 Years” is loose; the novel is forty-two years old.)