Sam McCain—everyone calls him just McCain—is a young man who finished law school and instead of striking out for new territory, returned to the little Iowa town where he grew up. There he moons after the beautiful girl he fell in love with in high school, who is in love with someone else. He tries to be nice to the girl who’s loved him since high school, meanwhile being bullied by his boss the judge and by the police chief. Some of us would think of suicide at this point, and in fact one of McCain’s old schoolmates does commit suicide in the first chapters of the book, thus starting an investigation that no one seems to think McCain capable of finishing.
The book begins on the night of February 3, 1959, as McCain drives back from the last concert given by Ritchie Valens, Buddy Hollly, and the Bog Bopper, J. P. Richardson. Gorman captures the late fifties in small town America and its mix of innocence, provinciality, racial bigotry, complacence, and Cold War tension. He neglects neither the good side of the social cohesion of small-town life sixty-five years ago, nor the ugly side that included coat-hanger abortions and the aggregation of power in the hands of two or three moneyed families.
One of the town’s plutocrats, a spoiled and alcoholic do-nothing, has apparently killed his wife and himself—McCain arrives on the scene just before the suicide. But McCain discovers that the guns for the two killings were different, and as he searches for the wife’s real killer, his own family, his boss, and his old friends from high school all become part of the story.
I won’t quibble that it was a yellow, not a pink polka-dot bikini, that the record players ought to be Hi Fi rather than stereo, or that the car in Route 66 was a Corvette rather than a Thunderbird. For the most part, Gorman gets it right. His picture of 50s life is hardly sugar-coated: his people are not happy and terrible things happen. Yet the book will still feed nostalgia for the 50s. If you have that old-time feeling and want to go back to when Ike was still in office, J. Edgar Hoover was railing about the Communist menace, John Kennedy was a rising Senator, and poodle skirts were just beginning to lose their fashion edge, you’ll like The Day the Music Died, and probably the other McCain books Ed Gorman has written, including Wake Up Little Susie, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? and seven more in this series.
