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All the Dead Bodies: O’Connor and Noir William Brevda Whoever would kill most thoroughly, laughs. —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra In her prepared remarks before reading from her notorious psycho-killer story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor warned her audience to “be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother ’s soul, and not for the dead bodies” (MM 113). Perhaps O’Connor worried that people would associate her fiction with the school of dead bodies known as noir. After all, every time she read from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor found herself in the extreme situation of a Jim Thompson novel: the good Catholic writer reveals “the killer inside me.” In exploring the relationship between Flannery O’Connor and noir writers , we can presume that despite the dead bodies, these writers all shed “wise blood.” I am particularly interested in the affinities between O’Connor and two crime novelists who shared her style of violent comedy and black humor: James Ross and Jim Thompson. O’Connor admired Ross’s 1940 country noir novel They Don’t Dance Much (HB 8) and probably learned a few things about how “the Comic and the Terrible . . . may be opposite sides of the same coin” from reading it (HB 105). I don’t know if O’Connor ever read Jim Thompson, but in some ways they were opposite sides of the same coin, much like O’Connor and her own terrible Misfit. If both writers had a “penchant for writing about freaks,” then, as O’Connor says, “it is because we are still able to recognize one” (MM 44). Although O’Connor’s comedy issues from religious belief and Thompson’s from disbelief, both writers depict their freaks against a “conception of the whole man” that is “theological” (MM 44). O’Connor met James Ross at Yaddo and was so taken by his novel that she recommended him to her agent, Elizabeth McKee, in a 28 January 1949 letter: “James Ross, a writer who is here, is looking for an agent. He wrote a very fine book called, They Don’t Dance Much. It didn’t sell much. If you are interested William Brevda 114 in him, I daresay he would be glad to hear from you” (HB 8). O’Connor was probably one of the few people to have read They Don’t Dance Much before it was reprinted in the Lost American Fiction series thirty-five years after its original publication. Tony Hilfer describes They Don’t Dance Much as “a type of crime novel where the setting is effectually a kind of Hell” (46). Narrated in a dead-pan voice by Jack MacDonald, who has lost his land for not paying taxes, the central character in Jack’s story is a rogue named Smut Milligan. Smut operates a combination filling station and general store where liquor is sold and gambling goes on just outside the city limits of Corinth. When Jack stops by for a pint, Smut offers him a job in the roadhouse he plans to open. The roadhouse will include a dance hall with a nickelodeon, a back room for gambling, a filling station, and six tourist cabins that can be rented by the hour. To advertise the opening of the roadhouse, Smut puts up a big sign over the highway that reads: big formal opening, oct.  river bend roadhouse dine and dance fresh pit barbecue chicken dinners everybody welcome. () Smut Milligan’s roadhouse foreshadows O’Connor’s conception of The Tower in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as a “filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy” where the ill-fated family stops for barbecue (CS 120). Like Ross, O’Connor typographically reproduces the sign that the enterprising Red Sammy Butts puts up along the highway: “try red sammy’s famous barbecue. none like famous red sammy’s! red sam! the fat boy with the happy laugh! a veteran! red sammy’s your man!” (CS 121). Like Smut’s roadhouse, The Tower contains a space for dancing and a nickelodeon . I doubt there were many joints like this that O’Connor spent time in outside of the one in Ross’s novel. O’Connor might also have modeled the roadhouse in “A View of the Woods” on Smut Milligan’s River Bend Roadhouse. In this story, old Mr. Fortune sells his property...

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