The Real McCoy

The Real McCoy is a historical novel by the American writer Darin Strauss, published in 2002.

Its subject is Charles McCoy, known as Kid McCoy, a boxer who won a genuine championship and spent the rest of his life being taken for a swindler, which he also was. Strauss follows him from an Indiana childhood through a career in the ring, a second career in crime, a series of marriages and the company of a period that was happy to be entertained by a man like him. The novel is narrated in McCoy's own voice, so the reader gets his account of his own life, which is the kind of account he spent his career perfecting, and the book treats his claims about himself as material rather than as fact.

Strauss's novels often take a real American figure and work outwards from the record of what that person did. The book is as interested in how a reputation is manufactured as in the fights themselves, and its narrator is the least reliable guide to his own story that it could have chosen.