McCoy was born in Pegram, Tennessee. During World War I McCoy served in the United States Army Air Corps. He flew several missions behind enemy lines as a bombardier and reconnaissance photographer. He was wounded and received the Croix de Guerre for heroism from the government of France.
From 1919 to 1930, he worked as a sports editor for the Dallas Journal in Texas. In 1924, he did the play-by-play of a baseball game for radio broadcast. In the late 1920s he began getting stories published in various pulp mystery magazines.
He performed as an actor with the Dallas Little Theater. He had a prominent role in Philip Barry's The Youngest. He described the acting experience in a Dallas Morning News piece.[clarification needed] His acting was good enough for him to be cast in the leads in Molnár's Liliom (1928), and Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted (1929). A 1928 column in the Morning News described McCoy as "a sort of enfant terrible of journalism and amateur theatricals in Dallas."

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