My timing was off with James Ross. I bought a paperback copy of They Don’t Dance Much, Ross’s 1940 crime novel, a few years after his 1990 death. If I had discovered the book in 1975 when Southern Illinois University Press reissued it as part of the Lost American Fiction series, I would have been able to meet the author that William Gay called, “the man who invented Southern noir.” Ross never published a second book, but as Gay suggested, “maybe one was enough.”
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