Gordon Them! Douglas' 1950 noir Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is one of the genre's overlooked jewels. Tough, cynical, relentless melodrama, it's ganged with some of the most remorselessly cold-blooded characters ever to grace the screen. Returning to the original text, as this valuable reprint of Horace McCoy's 1948 novel now allows, we anticipate a pulpy disappointment but find instead that, if anything, Harry Brown tapped out his meaty screenplay with kid-gloves.

Kiss is the tale of one Ralph Cotter, sociopathic career-crim, sprung from a prison farm at the opening with the help of the improbably christened Holiday Carleton, whose own timid brother is killed in the break-out. Cotter hitches up with the recently bereaved in a small out-of-the-way town and promptly robs a local convenience store. However, when the law comes a-knockin' for Ralphie Cotter, he swiftly grasps that most anyone hereabouts is for sale and hatches a knotty blackmail, compromising big-wigs from the local constabulary. But violence and damnation await, especially when Cotter meets Midge Dobson, daughter of Ezra Dobson, local political-connectee and multi-millionaire, and crooked lawyer Keith 'Cherokee' Mandon (essayed with lascivious brilliance on film by Luther Adler).

Aside from practical niceties (the set-up requires a recording on acetate discs), this is frighteningly fresh stuff for a novel of such advanced years. Indeed, those twin titans of authentic neo-brutalism - Charles Willeford, Ed Bunker - seem to dog its every step for the contemporary reader. The movie - a hostage to its period - inevitably fudges the darker edges of McCoy's vision, making seeing it again in the light of the book's machiavellian intrigues all the more enthralling. This novel is not so much amoral as flat-out immoral.

For example, in the novel, Holiday - "a pure animal" - is far less the victim of her lover's ambition than its willing participant; the book makes their sexual relations relatively explicit - something Hollywood of the time would never dare. (There is a delicious plot tweak in the Douglas when Ezra Dobson bursts in on his daughter sharing a bedroom with this hoodlum - all soundly buttoned pyjamas and separate beds.)

There is an energising violence to the language throughout. Phi Beta Kappa, Cotter is an intensely bright man, allowing McCoy to narrate all of this in some rich, occasionally beguiling prose - "propliopithecustian awareness" anyone? - and to shoot it through with an almost heroic mean-spiritedness. Anyone even half-decent who should stray through these pages is immediately marked-down for a victim. Like the aforementioned Willeford and Bunker, this novel transcends any mere restriction to 'genre': this is literature with a capital 'L'.

Great title, great cover, and, make no bones about it, a great book.

*****