Tough Guys Don't Dance (novel)

Set in Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the protagonist is Tim Madden, a former bartender and drug runner, currently struggling to make a living as a writer. After waking one morning with a hangover 24 days after his wife has left him, Madden discovers that he has a new tattoo, the passenger seat of his car is covered in blood, and he has no memory of the previous night. Following a tip from the Acting Chief of Police, Madden travels to his marijuana patch to check on its status and finds, to his surprise, the head of an attractive blonde woman has been deposited in a burrow in the exact place he stashes his cannabis harvest.

With all the evidence for the murder pointing towards him, Madden elects to solve the mystery himself, which brings him into contact with one shady character after another, including corrupt police, criminals, and washed-up boxers. Even a dodgy medium enters the fray as the weary Madden staggers through a succession of dangerous and unforeseen situations.^[2][3]

Similar to many of Norman Mailer's writings, Tough Guys Don't Dance contains themes of sexuality throughout. There are explicit homophobic and misogynistic slurs, descriptive details of male and female genitalia, and an overarching exploration of nearly every character's sexual interests and escapades. Tim Madden becomes entangled with his ex-wife, his current wife (whom he met while swinging with another couple which led to his first wife's leaving), a closeted homosexual childhood classmate, his current wife's new lover, a large black man whom Madden simply refers to as 'Mr. Black,' and other characters that are a part of Madden's sexually driven social network. Throughout the story, Mailer's reliance upon sex as a tool is evident, appearing in the form of Madden wanting to 'screw' someone, Jessica Pangborn's "large, well-turned promiscuous breasts," the "part-queer" Bolo Green, and a dependence for the storyline upon a number of nude, obscene photographs of dead women.

This book is Norman Mailer's attempt at creating hard-boiled detective fiction. This narrative forms around writer Tim Madden, who, in a hazy fog of remembrance, sets out to piece together what happened to him the night before. On his journey, Madden discovers more death and a serious emphasis coincidences that are too convenient to simply be coincidences. Who can he trust? Unknown new policemen, a spirit inducing medium, his own father, and many faces from Madden's past enter the fray as he must delicately find a balance between who to trust, who beheaded the woman and left her head in his burrow, and how to avoid appearing guilty.

As seen in this novel, and also present in Mailer's The Time of Her Time, among others, is a major emphasis on masculinity. Mailer's works are notorious for defining masculinity in a myriad of ways. In this book, violence and homosexuality are two major challenges to the protagonist's masculine image, "with two gay suicides, oral/anal graphics, and Madden's confession to his macho Irish father. ("You think I feel like a man most of the time? I don't.")."^[4] Also, the title of the book appears in the text about halfway through the story, with a flashback from Tim Madden's days a child learning how to box when his dad told him that "tough guys don't dance." Madden has spent the rest of his life figuring out how not to dance in order to prove his masculinity, until it is challenged to its very core in the book.