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Library of America Noir Collection #3
David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s
In 1997 The Library of America's Crime Novels: American Noir gathered, in two volumes, eleven classic works of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s--among them David Goodis's moody and intensely lyrical masterpiece Down There, adapted by François Truffaut for his 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player. Now, The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up again to celebrate the full scope of Goodis's signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career. Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia- born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder (Dark Passage); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money (Nightfall); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sister's brutal death (The Moon in the Gutter); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion (The Burglar); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction (Street of No Return). Long a cult favorite, Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers.
848 pages, Hardcover
First published March 29, 2012
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717 people want to read
About the author
David Goodis
97 books322 followersBorn and bred in Philadelphia, David Goodis was an American noir fiction writer. He grew up in a liberal, Jewish household in which his early literary ambitions were encouraged. After a short and inconclusive spell at Indiana University, he returned to Philadelphia to take a degree in journalism, graduating in 1937.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
December 9, 2024
David Goodis In The Library Of America
I first read David Goodis in the two-volume Library of America set of 11 noir novels written from the 1930's -- 1950's. The second volume of the set included Goodis' 1956 novel, "Down There" which because the basis of Francois Truffaut's 1960 film, "Shoot the Piano Player". I needed to know more of Goodis. Fortunately, the Library of America had recently published this volume devoted entirely to Goodis and including five novels he wrote in the 1940's and 1950's. Robert Polito, a noted scholar of noir who prepared the earlier LOA volumes, edited this volume of Goodis' novels. I have read and reviewed each of the five novels individually here on Goodreads. It has been a long time since I have been so taken with the works of a writer new to me.
An enigmatic person and writer, Goodis (1917 -- 1967) was born in Philadelphia to middle-class Jewish parents and graduated from Temple University. He published his first novel at the age of 22 and spent several years producing a large quantity of words for pulp magazines and learning the craft of a writer. In the mid 1940's, Goodis moved to Hollywood, had a short unhappy marriage, and wrote further novels. Then, in 1950 he returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and did the remainder of his writing. The novels he wrote in Hollywood were published in hardcover while the many novels he wrote in Philadelphia were published in cheap paperback editions with lurid covers and were probably deemed to have no lasting value. Goodis did most of his writing between 1951-- 1961. In 1966, Goodis was mugged, and he died the following year with no surviving family.
The background in pulp magazines and in screenwriting is apparent throughout this volume of Goodis' writings. Each of these books has its share of raw violence, fighting, murders, and robberies. Goodis seems to write with the screen not far from mind, as each of the five books in this volume became a noir movie (four in the United States and one in France.) But it would be a mistake to think that the background in pulp, cheap fiction, and Hollywood gives an adequate portrayal of Goodis.
The author has acquired the nickname of "poet of the losers" (A loosely similar writer, Charles Bukowski has acquired the nickname "poet of Skid Row")and it is deserved. Crime, and plot, are at best secondary elements in Goodis' writings. The novels are largely internalized and introspective. Goodis writes about lonely failures, people who are isolated and who seem never to receive a break in life. Several of the books center on a character who is falsely accused of a crime. The characters in his book have little, and they tend to be searching for love and for other forms of human connection. In these novels, love happens to the characters in a moment. It tends to be irresistible and to drive the protagonists forever after. The passions are lasting but they seldom if ever end well. Goodis' books each include many characters for short novels. The protagonists and the secondary characters are sharply drawn, and they tend to illustrate many sides of a single pessimistic view of the human condition.
Besides emphasizing lonely and lost people, Goodis' novels display a strong sense of atmosphere and place. Goodis writes in the short hard-boiled sentences of noir fiction, but the writing is rhythmic and lyrical, with a painter's eye for detail. Of the works in this volume, one novel is set in San Francisco, one primarily in New York City and three in Philadelphia. In each book, he captures a sense of the streets, neighborhoods, bars, alleys, and people that is readily identifiable to the place and not readily transferable. There are also scenes of cold lonely nights, endless walking on city streets, lonely city rooms, busy crowded but empty streets that Goodis finds characteristic of modern urban life.
The first two novels in this volume, "Dark Passage" and "Nightfall" date from the 1940's. They tend to be slightly more optimistic than the novels written in Philadelphia. "Dark Passage" tells the story of a relatively ordinary man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife who subsequently escapes from San Quentin and has an operation on his face to avoid detection and capture. The primary character, Vincent Parry, never loses his determination to better his condition.
"Nightfall" was Goodis' most successful book during his lifetime. It tells the story of a commercial artist and WW II veteran who through circumstance is wrongly suspected of participating in a bank robbery and of hiding the $300,000 heist. In a story told from at least three different perspectives, the protagonist Jim Vanning struggles to clear himself and to find a home and a woman to love.
The three subsequent novels in this volume date from Goodis' years in Philadelphia and are much darker and pessimistic in tone than the two prior works. "The Burglar" is an exploration of love and loyalty. When the main character, Nat Harbin, falls for a femme fatale named Della, the cohesiveness of the gang of thieves which he heads is severely tested. Harbin must weigh his infatuation against the good of the family group and against his relationship to a young woman, Gladden.
My favorite novel in this collection was "The Moon in the Gutter", set in a hopelessly unredeemable Philadelphia slum. The novel portrays Philadelphia low life as well as the city's docks and wharves. The novel conveys a sense of sadness and loneliness, and of failed love across social divisions. The main character, William Kerrigan, engages in a search for a man who had violated his younger sister, leading to her suicide.
The final novel, "Street of No Return" portrays two different Philadelphia neighborhoods: the Skid Row and an adjacent community called Helltown which is experiencing violence and racial conflict. The book explores the character of Eugene Lindell, who has lost the chance of a successful career as a popular singer through his love of a woman with criminal connections and who has become a lonely alcoholic drifting through Skid Row.
Goodis' books are much more sad, poetical reflections on lonely lives and places than formulaic noir stories of violence. American experience and American literature are broad enough for many kinds of writing. I was moved greatly in my discovery of this author. Goodis' works deserve a place in the Library of America, which chronicles the breadth and diversity of America and its people.
Robin Friedman
I first read David Goodis in the two-volume Library of America set of 11 noir novels written from the 1930's -- 1950's. The second volume of the set included Goodis' 1956 novel, "Down There" which because the basis of Francois Truffaut's 1960 film, "Shoot the Piano Player". I needed to know more of Goodis. Fortunately, the Library of America had recently published this volume devoted entirely to Goodis and including five novels he wrote in the 1940's and 1950's. Robert Polito, a noted scholar of noir who prepared the earlier LOA volumes, edited this volume of Goodis' novels. I have read and reviewed each of the five novels individually here on Goodreads. It has been a long time since I have been so taken with the works of a writer new to me.
An enigmatic person and writer, Goodis (1917 -- 1967) was born in Philadelphia to middle-class Jewish parents and graduated from Temple University. He published his first novel at the age of 22 and spent several years producing a large quantity of words for pulp magazines and learning the craft of a writer. In the mid 1940's, Goodis moved to Hollywood, had a short unhappy marriage, and wrote further novels. Then, in 1950 he returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and did the remainder of his writing. The novels he wrote in Hollywood were published in hardcover while the many novels he wrote in Philadelphia were published in cheap paperback editions with lurid covers and were probably deemed to have no lasting value. Goodis did most of his writing between 1951-- 1961. In 1966, Goodis was mugged, and he died the following year with no surviving family.
The background in pulp magazines and in screenwriting is apparent throughout this volume of Goodis' writings. Each of these books has its share of raw violence, fighting, murders, and robberies. Goodis seems to write with the screen not far from mind, as each of the five books in this volume became a noir movie (four in the United States and one in France.) But it would be a mistake to think that the background in pulp, cheap fiction, and Hollywood gives an adequate portrayal of Goodis.
The author has acquired the nickname of "poet of the losers" (A loosely similar writer, Charles Bukowski has acquired the nickname "poet of Skid Row")and it is deserved. Crime, and plot, are at best secondary elements in Goodis' writings. The novels are largely internalized and introspective. Goodis writes about lonely failures, people who are isolated and who seem never to receive a break in life. Several of the books center on a character who is falsely accused of a crime. The characters in his book have little, and they tend to be searching for love and for other forms of human connection. In these novels, love happens to the characters in a moment. It tends to be irresistible and to drive the protagonists forever after. The passions are lasting but they seldom if ever end well. Goodis' books each include many characters for short novels. The protagonists and the secondary characters are sharply drawn, and they tend to illustrate many sides of a single pessimistic view of the human condition.
Besides emphasizing lonely and lost people, Goodis' novels display a strong sense of atmosphere and place. Goodis writes in the short hard-boiled sentences of noir fiction, but the writing is rhythmic and lyrical, with a painter's eye for detail. Of the works in this volume, one novel is set in San Francisco, one primarily in New York City and three in Philadelphia. In each book, he captures a sense of the streets, neighborhoods, bars, alleys, and people that is readily identifiable to the place and not readily transferable. There are also scenes of cold lonely nights, endless walking on city streets, lonely city rooms, busy crowded but empty streets that Goodis finds characteristic of modern urban life.
The first two novels in this volume, "Dark Passage" and "Nightfall" date from the 1940's. They tend to be slightly more optimistic than the novels written in Philadelphia. "Dark Passage" tells the story of a relatively ordinary man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife who subsequently escapes from San Quentin and has an operation on his face to avoid detection and capture. The primary character, Vincent Parry, never loses his determination to better his condition.
"Nightfall" was Goodis' most successful book during his lifetime. It tells the story of a commercial artist and WW II veteran who through circumstance is wrongly suspected of participating in a bank robbery and of hiding the $300,000 heist. In a story told from at least three different perspectives, the protagonist Jim Vanning struggles to clear himself and to find a home and a woman to love.
The three subsequent novels in this volume date from Goodis' years in Philadelphia and are much darker and pessimistic in tone than the two prior works. "The Burglar" is an exploration of love and loyalty. When the main character, Nat Harbin, falls for a femme fatale named Della, the cohesiveness of the gang of thieves which he heads is severely tested. Harbin must weigh his infatuation against the good of the family group and against his relationship to a young woman, Gladden.
My favorite novel in this collection was "The Moon in the Gutter", set in a hopelessly unredeemable Philadelphia slum. The novel portrays Philadelphia low life as well as the city's docks and wharves. The novel conveys a sense of sadness and loneliness, and of failed love across social divisions. The main character, William Kerrigan, engages in a search for a man who had violated his younger sister, leading to her suicide.
The final novel, "Street of No Return" portrays two different Philadelphia neighborhoods: the Skid Row and an adjacent community called Helltown which is experiencing violence and racial conflict. The book explores the character of Eugene Lindell, who has lost the chance of a successful career as a popular singer through his love of a woman with criminal connections and who has become a lonely alcoholic drifting through Skid Row.
Goodis' books are much more sad, poetical reflections on lonely lives and places than formulaic noir stories of violence. American experience and American literature are broad enough for many kinds of writing. I was moved greatly in my discovery of this author. Goodis' works deserve a place in the Library of America, which chronicles the breadth and diversity of America and its people.
Robin Friedman
March 13, 2024
Goodis, man! He’s one of a kind. His plotting is ridiculous! But it’s how he pitches it - just slightly otherworldly - that makes each absurdity a revelation. In this he’s truly (and it’s a shame this word is so misused) Kafkaesque. A naturalistic depiction of the logic of dreams. Here’s the opening of The Burglar:
Vintage Goodis: the target and the missile, like a diagram, and the cartoonish depiction of setting, all blocks of colour, which could almost be the Castle, or the House of Usher. What follows is the careful (almost too careful) work of a trapeze artist, struggling to retain his balance amid the clashing currents of genre and fantasy. How to read this? Like all great writing it demands its own species of reader - contributes to the evolution of that species. The plot, though absurd, has none of the baroque flourishes of the wilful absurdist; rather it’s cooked down to 2 or 3 simple and quietly mindblowing contortions, which expand our vision of the reality we are witnessing precisely because they’re so close to unbelievable yet thanks to the context (that arrow, that missile) are not so. Yes, it’s a love story, but so monstrously simplified that it’s like the love in dreams - a nightmare, a warning. And no, it’s not much of a crime story, if by this you mean a story loaded with crimes, but the idea of the crime story is ever-present, and again, pushes us ever-further towards accepting the non-realistic revelations that Goodis urges upon us, with as much calm as he can muster, in patient increments. The ending is awesome, laughable, haunting - not even Kafka could have pulled this off. And almost, Goodis doesn’t either. But he does, and it’s something like genius. It’s been a week since I finished this and the settings and the atmosphere and the haunting linger.
Nightfall, in contrast, is in my opinion a failure. It’s no more ridiculous but less careful; his timing is off, and it’s just not so easy to make the leaps of faith the story requires. At times it’s brilliant, for the same reasons as The Burglar is, but at others it’s infuriating. I read this one in another edition a while back - 6 months maybe - and pretty much wrote it off at the time, but in retrospect it makes sense as a warm-up for The Burglar (with Goodis perhaps flushed and made cocky by the success of Dark Passage?): the same doomed, duplicitous love affair, the same atmosphere, the same otherworld.
***
Just finished The Moon and the Gutter and I have to say I’m disappointed. Is David Goodis a writer who should be taken in small doses? Probably. Did he ever again reach the heights of Down There (AKA Shoot the Piano Player)? Probably not. Yes, The Burglar was great, but lacking an entire level of reality that lifted Piano Player to another plane. That internal monologue! Where did it come from? Did he ever try it again? It’s Raskolnikov in Philly! In any case, The Moon in the Gutter doesn’t have it. In a sense, we’re still in the realm of Dostoevsky: the same random intuitive plot and meetings of characters seemingly for no reason other than to discuss this or that concept that has popped into their creator’s mind. But in Goodis’s case, in this instance, his mind seems close to empty - his protagonist all masculine, inarticulate silences and grunted denials and the situations he finds himself in circular and un-illuminating. Interestingly - since I’m alternating these novels with Jim Thompson’s - I find here all the traits that a writer like Thompson lacks: atmosphere, sense of place, that sense of randomness, of following the whims of inspiration. But on the other hand Thompson shits all over this in terms of plot, pacing, dialogue. Worse still, Goodis’s experience in Hollywood seems to have scarred him, and The Moon in the Gutter is full of descriptions of externalised psychic states that could have been taken straight from a film noir dream-sequence (he felt as if the walls were caving in on him, etc). It could have been written for Brando - it’s so laconic only a method actor’s expressions could give it weight. Thank God for the descriptive passages - for Philadelphia, for the river! There’s a bar. There’s a strip in a ghetto lined with overcrowded rooming-houses. There’s a storm and a fight on the docks with the river and the rain lashing that reads like a cross between Kafka and Casablanca. Every 5-6 lines there’s a line so banal or off-key it makes you want to curl up and forget David Goodis ever existed, but you keep going. Why? It’s a hard one. I ain’t gonna lie to you - the ending’s terrible. Maybe it’s inevitable, but the tone of it is so wrong! And really, maybe 80% of what’s good about this novel is what it doesn’t say. In other words, Goodis is a writer who doesn’t know his own worth. He thinks he’s a crime writer - we know better. He’s an imaginitive writer. I’m reminded of Raymond Carver, who everyone tells me is a ‘realist’. But jeez, just cos nothing unrealistic ever happens in his stories, that makes him a realist? I think of that story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’: this woman gets up at night, walks outside, talks to a neighbour, goes back in, looks out the window. That’s it. But it’s the sense of what’s outside that window that sticks with me. When I read Carver’s Elephant I felt it strongly again, all the characters looking out of windows, or over fences, out at whatever it was that made them part of Carver’s world rather than ‘reality’. And it’s that feeling I find priceless. Sure, nothing happens in The Moon and the Gutter, but every so often a character looks up at the sky or out at the river and we realise we’re not just in Philadelphia, we’re in Goodis’s Philadelphia. How he does it I’m not sure - a kind of hypnosis? But it’s virtually the only thing saving this novel from the slush pile. I mean, listen: strange as it sounds I’m not complaining. I looked forward to reading this in bed each night; it was a good transition to dreaming. And as always, there’s something great about it. But it was like listening to Rachmaninov played on an out-of-tune zither. Frustrating.
***
Street of No Return – now this one I thought was pretty good. The plot was crazy, as always – a wino on a streetcorner prevents a race riot, revisits his past as a pop singer and rekindles an old love all in one night – but the views of fifties Philadelphia along the way were pretty scintillating. This time, Goodis takes us to the blacked-out streets of ‘The Hellhole’, a ghetto of mud and broken-cobblestone streets a few blocks from Skid Row where blacks, whites and Puerto Ricans share an uneasy peace punctuated by explosions of violence. In the novel’s most intriguing, atmospheric, and ultimately irrelevant scene, our protagonist awakes inside a shotgun shack – dilapidated, its walls cracked, but with a potbelly stove radiating warmth – inhabited by a wise old black man, who draws his backstory out of him with kid gloves and then reluctantly lets him go, out onto the dark streets to meet his doom in the hands of cops (mistakenly hunting him as a cop killer) or murderous thugs or some ex-associates to whom he’s drawn like a moth to a flame. It’s a good scene, if for no other reason than it show Goodis idling, meditating, collecting himself for the thrust ahead to the finish-line; it proves the improvisation in the piece. And there’s some good minor characters: the two lieutenants – one uptight dandy, one slobbish joker – at war with each other for the chief’s job. And Bertha, the hired female thug, who packs a bigger wallop than any of them. As I say, it’s confused, but it ends well, and though it ain’t as tight as Down Here or The Burglar it’s got a dark, glutinous, sepia tone that does wonders in covering up the flaws – something like the Dark Knight trilogy without the glamour, just an unremitting view down one of the alleys Batman passes on his way to some shoot ’em up with the Joker. At this point, the only way Goodis could truly disappoint me would be by neglecting that otherworldly tint, which makes his writing live in the mind with a unique and sombre glow. Still, I suspect his books are better (at least to me) in retrospect, when only the glow remains, than when you’re trudging through the stodgy dialogue or splashing in the shallows with the red herrings waiting for the plot to flow again. For me he may always be the writer of missed opportunities. This could have been a masterpiece. It ain’t, but maybe there's another kind of beauty in that ‘could have been’.
At three in the morning it was dead around here and the windows of the mansion were black, the mansion dark purple and solemn against the moonlit velvet green of gently sloping lawn. The dark purple was a target and the missile was Nathaniel Harbin who sat behind the wheel of a car parked on a wide clean street going north from the mansion.
Vintage Goodis: the target and the missile, like a diagram, and the cartoonish depiction of setting, all blocks of colour, which could almost be the Castle, or the House of Usher. What follows is the careful (almost too careful) work of a trapeze artist, struggling to retain his balance amid the clashing currents of genre and fantasy. How to read this? Like all great writing it demands its own species of reader - contributes to the evolution of that species. The plot, though absurd, has none of the baroque flourishes of the wilful absurdist; rather it’s cooked down to 2 or 3 simple and quietly mindblowing contortions, which expand our vision of the reality we are witnessing precisely because they’re so close to unbelievable yet thanks to the context (that arrow, that missile) are not so. Yes, it’s a love story, but so monstrously simplified that it’s like the love in dreams - a nightmare, a warning. And no, it’s not much of a crime story, if by this you mean a story loaded with crimes, but the idea of the crime story is ever-present, and again, pushes us ever-further towards accepting the non-realistic revelations that Goodis urges upon us, with as much calm as he can muster, in patient increments. The ending is awesome, laughable, haunting - not even Kafka could have pulled this off. And almost, Goodis doesn’t either. But he does, and it’s something like genius. It’s been a week since I finished this and the settings and the atmosphere and the haunting linger.
Nightfall, in contrast, is in my opinion a failure. It’s no more ridiculous but less careful; his timing is off, and it’s just not so easy to make the leaps of faith the story requires. At times it’s brilliant, for the same reasons as The Burglar is, but at others it’s infuriating. I read this one in another edition a while back - 6 months maybe - and pretty much wrote it off at the time, but in retrospect it makes sense as a warm-up for The Burglar (with Goodis perhaps flushed and made cocky by the success of Dark Passage?): the same doomed, duplicitous love affair, the same atmosphere, the same otherworld.
***
Just finished The Moon and the Gutter and I have to say I’m disappointed. Is David Goodis a writer who should be taken in small doses? Probably. Did he ever again reach the heights of Down There (AKA Shoot the Piano Player)? Probably not. Yes, The Burglar was great, but lacking an entire level of reality that lifted Piano Player to another plane. That internal monologue! Where did it come from? Did he ever try it again? It’s Raskolnikov in Philly! In any case, The Moon in the Gutter doesn’t have it. In a sense, we’re still in the realm of Dostoevsky: the same random intuitive plot and meetings of characters seemingly for no reason other than to discuss this or that concept that has popped into their creator’s mind. But in Goodis’s case, in this instance, his mind seems close to empty - his protagonist all masculine, inarticulate silences and grunted denials and the situations he finds himself in circular and un-illuminating. Interestingly - since I’m alternating these novels with Jim Thompson’s - I find here all the traits that a writer like Thompson lacks: atmosphere, sense of place, that sense of randomness, of following the whims of inspiration. But on the other hand Thompson shits all over this in terms of plot, pacing, dialogue. Worse still, Goodis’s experience in Hollywood seems to have scarred him, and The Moon in the Gutter is full of descriptions of externalised psychic states that could have been taken straight from a film noir dream-sequence (he felt as if the walls were caving in on him, etc). It could have been written for Brando - it’s so laconic only a method actor’s expressions could give it weight. Thank God for the descriptive passages - for Philadelphia, for the river! There’s a bar. There’s a strip in a ghetto lined with overcrowded rooming-houses. There’s a storm and a fight on the docks with the river and the rain lashing that reads like a cross between Kafka and Casablanca. Every 5-6 lines there’s a line so banal or off-key it makes you want to curl up and forget David Goodis ever existed, but you keep going. Why? It’s a hard one. I ain’t gonna lie to you - the ending’s terrible. Maybe it’s inevitable, but the tone of it is so wrong! And really, maybe 80% of what’s good about this novel is what it doesn’t say. In other words, Goodis is a writer who doesn’t know his own worth. He thinks he’s a crime writer - we know better. He’s an imaginitive writer. I’m reminded of Raymond Carver, who everyone tells me is a ‘realist’. But jeez, just cos nothing unrealistic ever happens in his stories, that makes him a realist? I think of that story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’: this woman gets up at night, walks outside, talks to a neighbour, goes back in, looks out the window. That’s it. But it’s the sense of what’s outside that window that sticks with me. When I read Carver’s Elephant I felt it strongly again, all the characters looking out of windows, or over fences, out at whatever it was that made them part of Carver’s world rather than ‘reality’. And it’s that feeling I find priceless. Sure, nothing happens in The Moon and the Gutter, but every so often a character looks up at the sky or out at the river and we realise we’re not just in Philadelphia, we’re in Goodis’s Philadelphia. How he does it I’m not sure - a kind of hypnosis? But it’s virtually the only thing saving this novel from the slush pile. I mean, listen: strange as it sounds I’m not complaining. I looked forward to reading this in bed each night; it was a good transition to dreaming. And as always, there’s something great about it. But it was like listening to Rachmaninov played on an out-of-tune zither. Frustrating.
***
Street of No Return – now this one I thought was pretty good. The plot was crazy, as always – a wino on a streetcorner prevents a race riot, revisits his past as a pop singer and rekindles an old love all in one night – but the views of fifties Philadelphia along the way were pretty scintillating. This time, Goodis takes us to the blacked-out streets of ‘The Hellhole’, a ghetto of mud and broken-cobblestone streets a few blocks from Skid Row where blacks, whites and Puerto Ricans share an uneasy peace punctuated by explosions of violence. In the novel’s most intriguing, atmospheric, and ultimately irrelevant scene, our protagonist awakes inside a shotgun shack – dilapidated, its walls cracked, but with a potbelly stove radiating warmth – inhabited by a wise old black man, who draws his backstory out of him with kid gloves and then reluctantly lets him go, out onto the dark streets to meet his doom in the hands of cops (mistakenly hunting him as a cop killer) or murderous thugs or some ex-associates to whom he’s drawn like a moth to a flame. It’s a good scene, if for no other reason than it show Goodis idling, meditating, collecting himself for the thrust ahead to the finish-line; it proves the improvisation in the piece. And there’s some good minor characters: the two lieutenants – one uptight dandy, one slobbish joker – at war with each other for the chief’s job. And Bertha, the hired female thug, who packs a bigger wallop than any of them. As I say, it’s confused, but it ends well, and though it ain’t as tight as Down Here or The Burglar it’s got a dark, glutinous, sepia tone that does wonders in covering up the flaws – something like the Dark Knight trilogy without the glamour, just an unremitting view down one of the alleys Batman passes on his way to some shoot ’em up with the Joker. At this point, the only way Goodis could truly disappoint me would be by neglecting that otherworldly tint, which makes his writing live in the mind with a unique and sombre glow. Still, I suspect his books are better (at least to me) in retrospect, when only the glow remains, than when you’re trudging through the stodgy dialogue or splashing in the shallows with the red herrings waiting for the plot to flow again. For me he may always be the writer of missed opportunities. This could have been a masterpiece. It ain’t, but maybe there's another kind of beauty in that ‘could have been’.
Want to read
November 16, 2017Contents:
001 - "Dark Passage"
193 - "Nightfall"
335 - "The Burglar"
477 - "The Moon in the Gutter"
609 - "Street of No Return"
793 - Chronology
800 - Note on the texts
820 - Notes
The book comes in a white slipcase and a gold ribbon
001 - "Dark Passage"
193 - "Nightfall"
335 - "The Burglar"
477 - "The Moon in the Gutter"
609 - "Street of No Return"
793 - Chronology
800 - Note on the texts
820 - Notes
The book comes in a white slipcase and a gold ribbon
October 21, 2012
The collection of 5 David Goodis novels from the 1940's and 50's serves well as an introduction into noir as it should be done by one of the best who ever did it. Goodis captures the essence of the down trodden man with little or nothing who views life out of the bottom of a beer bottle or whisky glass.
Collecting 'Dark Passage', 'Nightfall', 'The Burglar', 'The Moon In The Gutter', and 'The Street Of No Return', this Library of America edition has a few hits and misses. 'The Burglar' and 'The Street Of No Return' are easily the best with 'Dark Passage' a great way to kick off the collection.
I reviewed each novel independently - the review links are below. While I didn't give any of the novels a 5 star rating, the collection as a whole is fantastic. It's diverse and holistic, and also contains a chronology of Goodis' life. Essential reading for any fan of the genre.
Dark Passage: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Nightfall: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
The Burglar: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
The Moon In The Gutter: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Street Of No Return: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Collecting 'Dark Passage', 'Nightfall', 'The Burglar', 'The Moon In The Gutter', and 'The Street Of No Return', this Library of America edition has a few hits and misses. 'The Burglar' and 'The Street Of No Return' are easily the best with 'Dark Passage' a great way to kick off the collection.
I reviewed each novel independently - the review links are below. While I didn't give any of the novels a 5 star rating, the collection as a whole is fantastic. It's diverse and holistic, and also contains a chronology of Goodis' life. Essential reading for any fan of the genre.
Dark Passage: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Nightfall: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
The Burglar: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
The Moon In The Gutter: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
Street Of No Return: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
December 29, 2015
Goodis prose reads like a straight shot punch to the gut, and then some. Hard hitting from the very first line. Every story is filled with down and out creatures leading down and out lives in a seamy, distressing manner, which I found hard to keep reading, yet couldn't put down!
The characters are straight out of Goodis's dark side...hardboiled, hard headed, and hard to forget!
A must read for all noir fans!
The moon in the gutter was my fave!
The characters are straight out of Goodis's dark side...hardboiled, hard headed, and hard to forget!
A must read for all noir fans!
The moon in the gutter was my fave!
June 21, 2020
290916: first review of Dark Passage, only one first read here: read this yesterday in one sitting. so easy read. implausible plot perhaps, but this does an excellent job of chronicling the life and times, then paranoia, of man on the run. ordinary man, set up, convicted, then escapes and meets just the right people to keep going, but something compels him to find who actually did/does the killings he is blamed for. i can see why hollywood adapted it. i can see bogart in the main role...
Nightfall: second reading: bought a goodis anthology, only not read is 'dark passage', decided to read the others again. good idea. plot already known so i concentrate on style: again concise, concrete, compelling. having now read so many noir (146) i am no longer surprised by the artless-art of his 'expressionist' pulp writing. good reread...
first review: this has an interesting narrative, split between cop and presumed criminal. this has the whole wrong-man, trust, fear, helplessness, good or bad woman, home vs flight, intuition vs evidence. very short novel, not a word in excess...
The Burglar: second review: i just read it again: realized this is perhaps my favourite goodis- probably for the doomed romance plot. here the plot is clear, is simple, is plausible even when at first glance seems absurd. there is a reason for everything. the protagonist is a professional, a honourable burglar, a man who thinks, who plans and practices, who never wants to hurt anyone, who wants to forever keep his promises. the burglary goes like clockwork. he talks his way out of trouble, he runs his surrogate family smooth and thoughtful. he focuses on what to do, how to do, when and where- but buries all thought of why until it is too late. goodis captures best the real moments just when this character and this other character react emotionally and reveal it is not the money, not the pleasure of stealing, but in the end- love. he loves her as she has grown up to love him. even the dangerous cop realizes it is love of a girl he has always wanted... but he never had 'class' like our doomed burglar, who only comes to understand love when it is too late, when all you can do is lose...
i read that the philosopher Wittgenstein once in dismissing work of fellow academics, pointed to such roman noir and claimed there was more philosophy in them than their professional works. even if i am not necessarily a fan of his, i would say this is not a joke but sometimes true, as in this work: almost existentialist, always up against he world he has made, always trying to be true, always doomed in love. fatalist, determinist, inescapable, melancholy. there is no other way this can end, the way i could only remember in affect and not detail... i was waiting for it. i up the rating up to a five...
first review: something to be said for a story that goes exactly where you expect, direct and concise, does not bore or distract from plot. the first goodis i have read, though i have seen truffaut’s film shoot the piano player. lean, direct, from ’53. i see the overwhelming style of hemingway in dialog and short, punchy, description of emotional stoicism. and kerouac in workmanlike prose, cool, rootless, losers. sharp. simple plot. embedded morality. have they made a film out of this- yes but have not seen it, or found it...
The Moon in the Gutter: second review: for me this is a lesser goodis. set in port slums our protagonist is a brute, tough, inarticulate, working-class stevedore, who gets involved and twisted by love for a rich girl, and the crime/detective plot serves only incidentally, however much he obsesses over the sister who was too good for their part of town.... i can see how it might appeal but despite some great poetic renderings of place, for me there is too much leaning on class as some explanatory theory...
note: the title recalls to me an Oscar Wilde quote: we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars...
first review: also an 80s film by Jean Jacques Beneix with Gerard Depardieu...
Street of No Return: second review: this is the last of five novels of the goodis anthology, here republished by library of America, again i up the rating, for this one seems almost like his particular template- fast, lean, pathetic, poetic. or maybe just the archetype for him, all the usual suspects: sensitive artist type, thin frail blonde, criminals, cops, and then same plot: artist blindsided by love, girl held back by criminals, ruined and debased world vs transcendent purity of love, lost, lost, lost... maybe i was mistaken in calling it 'nihilistic' because, though he loses out, there are values, there is tragedy, there are ideals, there is love... but yes, this is a bleak book, this is a vision of the 1950s far not only in era from the comfortable uptown suburbs i grew up in and always already thought the whole world...
first review: sad, sad, sad. walk with the destitute, the indigent, the loser locked into a spiral of self-destruction, all- of course- triggered by love of a woman. short, bleak, existential. possibly most nihilistic of the roman noir i have read..
Nightfall: second reading: bought a goodis anthology, only not read is 'dark passage', decided to read the others again. good idea. plot already known so i concentrate on style: again concise, concrete, compelling. having now read so many noir (146) i am no longer surprised by the artless-art of his 'expressionist' pulp writing. good reread...
first review: this has an interesting narrative, split between cop and presumed criminal. this has the whole wrong-man, trust, fear, helplessness, good or bad woman, home vs flight, intuition vs evidence. very short novel, not a word in excess...
The Burglar: second review: i just read it again: realized this is perhaps my favourite goodis- probably for the doomed romance plot. here the plot is clear, is simple, is plausible even when at first glance seems absurd. there is a reason for everything. the protagonist is a professional, a honourable burglar, a man who thinks, who plans and practices, who never wants to hurt anyone, who wants to forever keep his promises. the burglary goes like clockwork. he talks his way out of trouble, he runs his surrogate family smooth and thoughtful. he focuses on what to do, how to do, when and where- but buries all thought of why until it is too late. goodis captures best the real moments just when this character and this other character react emotionally and reveal it is not the money, not the pleasure of stealing, but in the end- love. he loves her as she has grown up to love him. even the dangerous cop realizes it is love of a girl he has always wanted... but he never had 'class' like our doomed burglar, who only comes to understand love when it is too late, when all you can do is lose...
i read that the philosopher Wittgenstein once in dismissing work of fellow academics, pointed to such roman noir and claimed there was more philosophy in them than their professional works. even if i am not necessarily a fan of his, i would say this is not a joke but sometimes true, as in this work: almost existentialist, always up against he world he has made, always trying to be true, always doomed in love. fatalist, determinist, inescapable, melancholy. there is no other way this can end, the way i could only remember in affect and not detail... i was waiting for it. i up the rating up to a five...
first review: something to be said for a story that goes exactly where you expect, direct and concise, does not bore or distract from plot. the first goodis i have read, though i have seen truffaut’s film shoot the piano player. lean, direct, from ’53. i see the overwhelming style of hemingway in dialog and short, punchy, description of emotional stoicism. and kerouac in workmanlike prose, cool, rootless, losers. sharp. simple plot. embedded morality. have they made a film out of this- yes but have not seen it, or found it...
The Moon in the Gutter: second review: for me this is a lesser goodis. set in port slums our protagonist is a brute, tough, inarticulate, working-class stevedore, who gets involved and twisted by love for a rich girl, and the crime/detective plot serves only incidentally, however much he obsesses over the sister who was too good for their part of town.... i can see how it might appeal but despite some great poetic renderings of place, for me there is too much leaning on class as some explanatory theory...
note: the title recalls to me an Oscar Wilde quote: we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars...
first review: also an 80s film by Jean Jacques Beneix with Gerard Depardieu...
Street of No Return: second review: this is the last of five novels of the goodis anthology, here republished by library of America, again i up the rating, for this one seems almost like his particular template- fast, lean, pathetic, poetic. or maybe just the archetype for him, all the usual suspects: sensitive artist type, thin frail blonde, criminals, cops, and then same plot: artist blindsided by love, girl held back by criminals, ruined and debased world vs transcendent purity of love, lost, lost, lost... maybe i was mistaken in calling it 'nihilistic' because, though he loses out, there are values, there is tragedy, there are ideals, there is love... but yes, this is a bleak book, this is a vision of the 1950s far not only in era from the comfortable uptown suburbs i grew up in and always already thought the whole world...
first review: sad, sad, sad. walk with the destitute, the indigent, the loser locked into a spiral of self-destruction, all- of course- triggered by love of a woman. short, bleak, existential. possibly most nihilistic of the roman noir i have read..
February 11, 2016
I imbibed in this Goodis collection of noir crime fiction in small doses, and only at night. These novels are dark and none of them end very well, but that's really not the point as they are really well written and excellent examples of this genre. Goodis was recommended to me by a friend and I'm so glad to have read him and to experience another American author that I had known absolutely nothing about prior to reading his work. My favorites of the bunch was probably Dark Passage and The Burglar. These two novellas had me going from the get-go. Goodis is good stuff, folks!
This collection gets 4 of 5 stars from me.
This collection gets 4 of 5 stars from me.
April 14, 2013
Is It In His Face? Oh No, That's Just His Charms.
It's not always the same city, or always a city, but it's pretty much always overwhelmingly, claustrophobically, surrounded by The City. And no kind of town for amateurs. In the world of David Goodis, it's never time to reflect, to rest, or to let down your guard, because you know that even at your best, the odds are against you. Open your eyes in the morning and it's already a bad bet, a sucker's game.
And that's another thing-- it's never morning, unless you're talking about four or five in the morning. Or dropping to sleep at dawn, after an unbelievably brutal night. Either way, it's always Night in Goodis, and no safe place to be.
"... everything faded, except the things in front of his eyes, the rutted street and the gutter and the sagging doorsteps of decaying houses. It struck him full force, the unavoidable knowledge that he was riding through life on a fourth-class ticket..."
In His Warm Embrace? Oh No, That's Just His Arms.
Limited self-esteem, hard breaks, a tough background and a tough outlook for what's ahead. A man is always a man, eyeing the world for how he can get over, how he could beat the system. And a woman is there to get right in the way. Or if luck is rolling with her, to take him for a fool for awhile, maybe for the kicks, or maybe for a bigger payoff.
If You Wanna Know-- If He Loves You So...
It's not just a tough road, but the deadliest stretch known in the literature : no compass, no signposts either, but if there were, they would read: Dangerous Curves Ahead. Once the guy meets the one broad that knocks him for a loop, he's done, no matter how long he tries to extend or control the tailspin.
It's In His Kiss.
Like all of Noir, there is buried hope. There is the unreachable obsession with Redemption, coursing through the characters, always at odds with the situation, never likely and always a surprise when it appears... for that glimmering moment before the fall. And redemption looks best tall and thin, in a pale skirt.
"...She pushed the car at medium speed, sat there behind the wheel with a relaxed smile on her face as she listened to the music. Without looking at Harbin, she was communicating with him, and once she reached out and let her fingers go into the hair at the back of his head. She gave his hair a little pull.
He poked around in his brain and wondered if it was possible to figure her out. He thought of her kisses. In his lifetime he had been kissed by enough women, and had experienced a sufficient variety of kisses, to know when there was a real meaning in a kiss. Her kisses had the real meaning, and not only the fire, but the genuine material beyond the fire. If it hadn't been genuine he would have sensed it when it happened. This woman had immense feeling for him and he knew clearly it was far above ordinary craving and it was something that couldn't be put on like a mask is put on. It was pure in itself, and it was entirely devoid of pretense or embroidery.
It was the true feeling that made the entire business a quaking paradox, because the one side of Della was drawn to him, melted into him, and the other side of Della was out to louse him up."
Oh, Oh-- It's In His Kiss. That's Where It Is.
Basically there is one, fleetingly brief moment in Goodis' novels where life's combination-lock is dialed in correctly, where the tumblers fall into their elusive destinations and a man can feel relief. And then the reach for the lever that opens the strongbox and ... then the earth falls out of its orbit.
It's always the dame that does this trick, but she's never straight, she's never front-to-back clear in her own noggin about what's going on, and what he's willing to put on the line. For the man, well, he knows he's got a losing hand, betting against the house, and the house is dealing from the bottom of the deck tonight.
There is no shortage of side characters in Goodis' world, partners in crime, well-intentioned strangers and vicious bastards, sweet girls and horrendous hags; all are fitted with the kind of traits that make them instantly memorable. Against the black oppressiveness of that city of night, the characters stand out against the urban steam and heat like visions. Oh, did I mention that it's always a grotesque summer heatwave ? It just so happens that it is. That's because the world of Goodis is hell; and it's the same as everywhere, so what's the big deal ? Just keep moving, pal.
There are five novels here. "Dark Passage" is beautifully done, five stars all the way. The next two, "Nightfall" and "The Burglar" are superb, singular noirs better than most, if not quite on the level of the first one. The final two are Goodis lost at the pulp fairgrounds; biographical details suggest that by the time he got to "Moon In The Gutter" and "Street Of No Return" he had gone around the bend. Maybe with alcohol, maybe with mental issues, but certainly the novels are grim, extreme, hallucinatory at this stage.
My impression, and I'm nowhere near the end of reading all of Goodis, is that he is a kind of American Sartre, a two-fisted Dante being backed into a solid wall of desperation and doubt. Thinking all the while, transcendentally, nursing the idea, about this one ... kiss.
December 12, 2012
I read the first two books in this collection, Dark Passage and Nightfall, and was very impressed with the way Goodis translates traumatic experience into visual hallucination/memory that recalls the paintings of Max Beckmann and other Expressionists, Thomas Hart Benton being the American that springs to mind. Peripeties are abundant in these books, and every sentence advances the action and simultaneously deepens the characters. You can see why the French were the first to catch on to how good these books are, as they tend to focus on form first rather than surface "content."
November 3, 2012
David Goodis established himself as the successor to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler with the publication of his first book Retreat from Oblivion in 1939. The year before he had graduated from Temple University, so Retreat boded well for a young author. Unfortunately, his career began at a time that many consider the twilight of the Hardboiled era in fiction. Additionally, the world was on the cusp of yet another Great War.
During the 1940s, having moved to New York City, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal’s Destination Unknown. His next novel wouldn’t come until 1946 when Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast.
Now, The Library Of America who in ‘97 issued the books, Crime Novels: American Noir gathered, in two volumes, eleven classic works of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s––among them David Goodis’s
moody and intensely lyrical masterpiece Down There. Now, they have teamed with editor Robert Polito to gather five of Goodis’ seminal works of the genre that became known as Noir. Goodis, along with James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, are today considered the ‘godfathers’ of Noir and for good reason. They wrote of ‘the mean streets’ but the people that populated their novels were doomed. They had very few redeeming qualities and the lines were often blurred between right and wrong, good and evil, and hero and villain.
This volume opens with Dark Passage, considered by some as his masterpiece, but regardless, it was his first big break through in 1946, and later on, it made history in a copyright lawsuit. More on that in a minute. The story centers on Vince Parry, who is in prison, convicted of killing his wife. Parry was a decent sort of guy, quiet, never bothered anybody, not too ambitious and worked as a clerk in an investment house bringing home $35 a week. He’d only been married for sixteen months when his wife was found by a neighbor, in her house with her head bashed in. But, before the wife died she supposedly whispered to the neighbor that Parry had hit her with a heavy glass ash tray. The police found the wife's' blood on the ash tray and Parry’s fingerprints on it. To make matters worse, as they are wont to do in noir novels, it came out at trial that Parry hadn’t been getting along with his wife and was seeing other women, the fact that the wife had been seeing other men didn’t make much of a difference to the jury. With no alibi, Parry is sentenced to San Quentin.
He plots an escape, and after carrying out the careful plan, he makes his way out of the prison in a very harrowing and realistic way. But, after the escape, while attempting to hitch a ride, he ends up killing a man. Finally picked up by a woman, Irene Jansen, he hitches back into the Bay area and Irene confesses that she suspected who he was, having followed his case in the papers, and then, hearing on the radio, of his prison break had gone looking for him, guessing his route. Irene agrees to hide him in her apartment and provide him with the means to go looking for the real killer.
The tension, and psychological suspense that Goodis paints during these scenes would become a trade mark. Parry is divided between being grateful for the help Irene provides him and the fear of leaving behind a witness who could provide the police with clues as to his activities. Finally, having difficulties staying hidden at Irene’s apartment because of Madge Rapf, the spiteful and melodramatic woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, keeps stopping by. It seems that Irene has been simultaneously carrying on a friendship with Madge and an affair with Madge’s husband. Irene gives Parry money, and he leaves her apartment, where he starts his quest for the real killers. Along the way he meets a helpful cabbie, who gives him a tip on a plastic surgeon who can inexpensively change his appearance to help him elude the cops.
The novel, with a boost from the Bogart/Bacall movie the very next year, put Goodis on the map as a serious novelist of noir. One interesting aside is that the novel became the set piece in a legal battle between Goodis estate and United Artists Television. The Goodis estate claimed that the UA series The Fugitive constituted copyright infringement. United Artists claimed that the work had fallen into the public domain under the terms of the Copyright Act of 1909 because it had been first published as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post, and that Goodis never obtained a separate copyright on the book. The court found in the estates favor and stated that the law only defined the standing of a work, and should not operate to completely deprive a claimant of his copyright.
In 1947s Nightfall, Goodis would continue to expand his reputation as a master of the genre. Continuing with the man on the run from the law themes of Dark Passage, Nightfall also adds the element of the protagonist on the run from some bad guys. Artist Jim Vanning is on the run in New York City, working as a commercial artist. Three gangster hoods are after him, thinking he has a suitcase full of $300,000 of their money. Vanning doesn’t have the money, but this fact won’t deter the hoods as Vanning did have it, but lost it. From there, the plot get complicated. A detective Fraser is on to Vanning, and though he suspects that Vanning may have stolen the money, he doesn’t picture him as the killer of the man who had the money. Naturally, there’s a dame involved. There always is a femme fatale in these great stories and Vanning has to decide whether the alluring Martha is with the crooks or if she is just a dupe for the crooks and being used for bait. The prose are taut and well crafted as you would expect from an author who achieved cult status. It’s packed with action and scenes that would become standard fare for the authors after Goodis that worked in the noir genre.
The other works chosen here are The Moon in the Gutter (1953), which tells the story of a street hardened man whose sister commits suicide after being raped. With his marriage on the rocks and questions to be answered in his quest for the man that drove his sister to despair, he meets a rich woman. The beautiful Loretta provides him with an escape route out of the mean streets of “Filth-adelphia” , but he learns you can take the tough guy out of the alley, but you can’t take the alley out of the tough guy. The dialogue is perhaps some of Goodis’ most hardboiled. The Burglar (1953) is the story of Nat Harbin, the scion of a family of Burglars who upon finding love looks for a way to leave his ‘family’ and past behind. As Ed Gorman wrote in The Big Book Of Noir, Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes. At heart the novel has themes of crime, honor, loyalty and a futile search for redemption. And finally, 1954s Street of No Return tells the story of Whitey, a singer with a million dollar voice. With that voice, women came under his spell and would sacrifice their body and their soul. He could have been another Sinatra until he met a woman who would prove to be his downfall. The story is told as a tale of Whitey’s past to his wino buddy's in the present and we follow Whitey from that once glorious future through a nightmare descent into oblivion. Whitey now has no future, and only wants the next drink. Along the way Goodis paints the times with hard boiled pictures of Philadelphia and life on the streets and uses historical events such as Puerto Rican race riots as a back drop.
Upon Goodis return from New York in 1950, he lived with his parents in Philadelphia along with his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. He died in January 1967 a week after suffering a beating in a robbery attempt. He died at the age of forty-nine, one month after winning the “Fugitive” lawsuit. But during his life, The Pulp Poet of the Lost and The Prince Of The Losers made a mark on the world of fiction that many noir authors of the present day readily acknowledge.
Library Of America is dedicated to preserving the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's best and most significant writing in authoritative editions.
Robert Polito, the editor is a poet, biographer, and critic whose Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School.
The Dirty Lowdown
During the 1940s, having moved to New York City, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal’s Destination Unknown. His next novel wouldn’t come until 1946 when Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast.
Now, The Library Of America who in ‘97 issued the books, Crime Novels: American Noir gathered, in two volumes, eleven classic works of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s––among them David Goodis’s
moody and intensely lyrical masterpiece Down There. Now, they have teamed with editor Robert Polito to gather five of Goodis’ seminal works of the genre that became known as Noir. Goodis, along with James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, are today considered the ‘godfathers’ of Noir and for good reason. They wrote of ‘the mean streets’ but the people that populated their novels were doomed. They had very few redeeming qualities and the lines were often blurred between right and wrong, good and evil, and hero and villain.
This volume opens with Dark Passage, considered by some as his masterpiece, but regardless, it was his first big break through in 1946, and later on, it made history in a copyright lawsuit. More on that in a minute. The story centers on Vince Parry, who is in prison, convicted of killing his wife. Parry was a decent sort of guy, quiet, never bothered anybody, not too ambitious and worked as a clerk in an investment house bringing home $35 a week. He’d only been married for sixteen months when his wife was found by a neighbor, in her house with her head bashed in. But, before the wife died she supposedly whispered to the neighbor that Parry had hit her with a heavy glass ash tray. The police found the wife's' blood on the ash tray and Parry’s fingerprints on it. To make matters worse, as they are wont to do in noir novels, it came out at trial that Parry hadn’t been getting along with his wife and was seeing other women, the fact that the wife had been seeing other men didn’t make much of a difference to the jury. With no alibi, Parry is sentenced to San Quentin.
He plots an escape, and after carrying out the careful plan, he makes his way out of the prison in a very harrowing and realistic way. But, after the escape, while attempting to hitch a ride, he ends up killing a man. Finally picked up by a woman, Irene Jansen, he hitches back into the Bay area and Irene confesses that she suspected who he was, having followed his case in the papers, and then, hearing on the radio, of his prison break had gone looking for him, guessing his route. Irene agrees to hide him in her apartment and provide him with the means to go looking for the real killer.
The tension, and psychological suspense that Goodis paints during these scenes would become a trade mark. Parry is divided between being grateful for the help Irene provides him and the fear of leaving behind a witness who could provide the police with clues as to his activities. Finally, having difficulties staying hidden at Irene’s apartment because of Madge Rapf, the spiteful and melodramatic woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, keeps stopping by. It seems that Irene has been simultaneously carrying on a friendship with Madge and an affair with Madge’s husband. Irene gives Parry money, and he leaves her apartment, where he starts his quest for the real killers. Along the way he meets a helpful cabbie, who gives him a tip on a plastic surgeon who can inexpensively change his appearance to help him elude the cops.
The novel, with a boost from the Bogart/Bacall movie the very next year, put Goodis on the map as a serious novelist of noir. One interesting aside is that the novel became the set piece in a legal battle between Goodis estate and United Artists Television. The Goodis estate claimed that the UA series The Fugitive constituted copyright infringement. United Artists claimed that the work had fallen into the public domain under the terms of the Copyright Act of 1909 because it had been first published as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post, and that Goodis never obtained a separate copyright on the book. The court found in the estates favor and stated that the law only defined the standing of a work, and should not operate to completely deprive a claimant of his copyright.
In 1947s Nightfall, Goodis would continue to expand his reputation as a master of the genre. Continuing with the man on the run from the law themes of Dark Passage, Nightfall also adds the element of the protagonist on the run from some bad guys. Artist Jim Vanning is on the run in New York City, working as a commercial artist. Three gangster hoods are after him, thinking he has a suitcase full of $300,000 of their money. Vanning doesn’t have the money, but this fact won’t deter the hoods as Vanning did have it, but lost it. From there, the plot get complicated. A detective Fraser is on to Vanning, and though he suspects that Vanning may have stolen the money, he doesn’t picture him as the killer of the man who had the money. Naturally, there’s a dame involved. There always is a femme fatale in these great stories and Vanning has to decide whether the alluring Martha is with the crooks or if she is just a dupe for the crooks and being used for bait. The prose are taut and well crafted as you would expect from an author who achieved cult status. It’s packed with action and scenes that would become standard fare for the authors after Goodis that worked in the noir genre.
The other works chosen here are The Moon in the Gutter (1953), which tells the story of a street hardened man whose sister commits suicide after being raped. With his marriage on the rocks and questions to be answered in his quest for the man that drove his sister to despair, he meets a rich woman. The beautiful Loretta provides him with an escape route out of the mean streets of “Filth-adelphia” , but he learns you can take the tough guy out of the alley, but you can’t take the alley out of the tough guy. The dialogue is perhaps some of Goodis’ most hardboiled. The Burglar (1953) is the story of Nat Harbin, the scion of a family of Burglars who upon finding love looks for a way to leave his ‘family’ and past behind. As Ed Gorman wrote in The Big Book Of Noir, Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes. At heart the novel has themes of crime, honor, loyalty and a futile search for redemption. And finally, 1954s Street of No Return tells the story of Whitey, a singer with a million dollar voice. With that voice, women came under his spell and would sacrifice their body and their soul. He could have been another Sinatra until he met a woman who would prove to be his downfall. The story is told as a tale of Whitey’s past to his wino buddy's in the present and we follow Whitey from that once glorious future through a nightmare descent into oblivion. Whitey now has no future, and only wants the next drink. Along the way Goodis paints the times with hard boiled pictures of Philadelphia and life on the streets and uses historical events such as Puerto Rican race riots as a back drop.
Upon Goodis return from New York in 1950, he lived with his parents in Philadelphia along with his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. He died in January 1967 a week after suffering a beating in a robbery attempt. He died at the age of forty-nine, one month after winning the “Fugitive” lawsuit. But during his life, The Pulp Poet of the Lost and The Prince Of The Losers made a mark on the world of fiction that many noir authors of the present day readily acknowledge.
Library Of America is dedicated to preserving the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's best and most significant writing in authoritative editions.
Robert Polito, the editor is a poet, biographer, and critic whose Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School.
The Dirty Lowdown
October 20, 2021
A collection of five crime novels written by the little-known David Goodis. All five were made into movies (as was his novel Down There, filmed as Shoot the Piano Player (1960), not included here). Goodis is not as well known as similar writers and contemporaries such as Patricia Highsmith or Jim Thompson, but at his best his work is equally good. His novels concern the down and out with little left to lose, put into desperate situations testing that little they have left. His characters are generally introverted, withdrawn, descending into the emotions, fears, and traumas that have brought them to their low point. Sometimes the emotional and psychological turmoil is sufficient to form the story (as with Nightfall (1947) or The Moon in the Gutter (1953), but Goodis can also spin a yarn that will startle and astonish (see The Burglar (1953) or 1954's Street of No Return). The most famous piece here is Dark Passage (1946), as it was made into a film with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in 1947. Several of these novels were (somehow appropriately) paperback originals. Unusually, some are set in Philadelphia, which doesn't get the hype that other American cities do. Since books by David Goodis can be difficult to find, the wonderful Library of America has done crime fans a favor by gathering these five journeys into the tortured minds of the lost and hopeless, which may include their author.
December 23, 2024
Man, you can seriously see how writing has gotten better over time. I'm sure in the 40s this was fantastic writing. Nowadays, this was jilted and almost ridiculous at times lol. The Dark Passage "Did you do a U turn?" exchange was like 2 pages of ridiculousness lol Doesn't hold up great, but it made a great film.
July 8, 2020
The title of The Library of America edition of five novels by David Goodis—esteemed crime writer best known for the spate of sixteen remarkable novels he published between 1946 and 1961—wastes no time in getting around to the imposition of a curious frame-up as concerns genre. Noir. Five noir novels. The term “noir” is one we would tend to associate with a particular cycle of variably bleak Hollywood films of the immediate postwar period, generally urban tales made on a budget and reflecting a general air of ennui tinged with fatalism; more often than not the stories are oriented around crime, punishment, and pitiless destiny. Though the term came to be applied to a school of Hollywood films, it originates in postwar France in the context of the sudden hyper-prevalence of American crime novels (and European novels inspired by hardboiled Americana), the bulk of this material provided to the eager public by way of the publishing imprint Série noire. One could make the case that David Goodis is especially well placed to be assessed as a “noir” novelist if only on account of the period when he was active, these being the years following the first wave of hardboiled lit, contemporaneous with the not-yet-named Hollywoodland genre or sub-genre then in full flower. The Library of America edition contains the novels DARK PASSAGE (1946), NIGHTFALL (1947), THE BURGLAR (1953), MOON IN THE GUTTER (1953), and STREET OF NO RETURN (1954). Each of these novels has been adapted to the screen at least once, the first three during the years of film noir. We might also wish to note that 1954, when the collection’s final novel was published, is a significant year in the production and distribution of Hollywood movies, this being when the major studios began to put a lot of muscle behind widescreen formats like CinemaScope and three-strip colour processes like Technicolor in an effort to combat the barbarian incursion of television. I have seen the adaptations of DARK PASSAGE (Delmer Daves, 1947) and MOON IN THE GUTTER (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983), though I’ve not seen either for some time. I saw Jacques Tourneur’s 1956 adaptation of NIGHTFALL for the first time last year and have seen Sam Fuller’s 1989 adaptation of STREET OF NO RETURN multiple times, revisiting it again as recently as this past November. I've never seen either adaptation of THE BURGLAR, making that especially wonderful novel something of a standout here (at least as concerns my particular POV). Jim Thompson-biographer Robert Polito has edited this collection, just as he did previous Library of America “noir novel” compilations, notably CRIME NOVELS: AMERICAN NOIR OF THE 1950s, which contained the 1956 Goodis novel DOWN THERE, famously adapted to the screen by Francois Truffaut as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER four years subsequent to its original publication. DOWN THERE is actually the only Goodis novel I have ever read previous to the collection currently under consideration, and naturally Truffaut’s film had much to do with that. I am hardly alone in loving the picture; it is a Bonafide Grade A Classic. Much has been written about the influence of German Expressionism on film noir, a fact which has much to do with historical contingencies, many a technician and film artist having fled Germany, Austria, and other parts of an increasingly compromised Europe in the lead-up to the Second World War. Much of the discourse around expressionism and its influence on Hollywood films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, focuses on the prevalence of chiaroscuro lighting and the use of shadow to create a hyper-stylized and unnaturally oppressive visual atmosphere (especially as pertains to noir). These tendencies trace back to German films of the silent era and German visual art of the Weimar era more generally, though of course it also traces back to Edvard Munch and the fin de siècle. Expressionism as a principle is meant above all to indicate the primacy of the representation or the arousal of mental states over the naturalistic or realistic depiction of things as they supposedly are. All this turns out to be very much a propos insofar as concerns the novels of David Goodis. They are about as expressionistic as crime fiction gets, and increasingly so as time goes on if the novels collected here are any indicator. That being said: it is hardly merely a matter of chiaroscuro and oppressive shadows. The novels of David Goodis present a febrile literature of “lavender mountains” (THE BURGLAR) and “the vermillion glory of the evening sun, the vast magnificence of an opal sky…” (THE MOON IN THE GUTTER). In NIGHTFALL we are treated to “a sky of melted asphalt,” and a later passage in the same book describes a character reemerging into consciousness: “The faces flowed down from the ceiling and became stabilized, attached to torsos that stood on legs.” In both DARK PASSAGE and THE BURGLAR hammers or mallets are said to be clanging against the brains of men in trouble. In STREET OF NO RETURN, the alcoholic derelict Whitey, who used to be a magnificently gifted singer, his star ascendant, until he lost his head and his heart to the wrong bewitching siren, wants very much not to remember the man he once was, and Goodis has him pressing a hand hard into his eyes, “trying to deepen the blackness of the dark screen that ought to be very black because it was only his closed eyelids, but something was projected on it and he was forced to look and see.” Dizzy simile suddenly overlaps with the cinematograph itself as Whitey is presented waxing internally perplexed as regards the horrible clarity of the unwanted images on the screen in his head: “Now, that’s queer, it oughta be foggy. After all, it’s an old-time film, it’s seven years old.” In making my way through these five David Goodis novels, it didn’t take me very long at all to realize that the more faithful film adaptations are probably the more baroque neon surrealities of the 1980s, namely the Beineix and the proudly deranged Fuller. I have always believed Fuller’s STREET OF NO RETURN brave and fascinating, but now I think I truly understand the full extent of its fidelity to the vision of Goodis, Fuller's actual real life pal. This is expressionism that will tend to spin off into virtuosic abstraction, such that we must think of visual art outside not only the world of popular cinema but outside of considerations of coherent figuration. Think Jackson Pollock, the extremities of pop art, or the labyrinthine chaotic train-set-type networks in the paintings of Manny Farber. Surely we can also see what the primary colour and bricolage enthusiast Jean-Luc Godard saw in this particular author. Some of Goodis’s paragraphs are masterpieces in and of themselves, perfectly illustrative of what I am trying to articulate. Though they are on the long side, I would like to quote two of them. Firstly, from NIGHTFALL, a dazzling encapsulation, utter perfection: “There was a pale blue automobile, a convertible. That was a logical color, that pale blue, logical for the start of it, because it had started out in a pale, quiet way, the pale blue convertible cruising along peacefully, the Colorado mountainside so calm and pretty, the sky so contented, all of this scene pale blue in a nice even sort of style. And then red came into it, glaring red, the hood and fenders of the smashed station wagon, the hard gray of the boulder against which the wrecked car was resting, the hard gray turning into black, the black of the revolver, the black remaining as more colors moved in. The green of the hotel room, the orange carpet, or maybe it wasn't orange—it could have been purple, a lot of colors could have been other colors—but the one color about which there was no mistake was black. Because black was the color of a gun, a dull black, a complete black, and through a whirl of all the colors coming together in a pool gone wild, the black gun came into his hand and he held it there for a time impossible to measure, and then he pointed the black gun and he pulled the trigger and he killed a man.” It’s a staggering passage. Who could conceive of a better demonstration of pulp fiction as high art? A swirl of colours produces the gun and the murder independent of any human agency. This business with colour is crucial. Colour is everywhere, not only in NIGHTFALL, a novel whose besieged protagonist is a freelance commercial artist (and unwitting man from underground). Look also to both THE BURGLAR and STREET OF NO SHAME in each of which a woman’s hair colour begins as otherworldly only to become more uncanny yet. In the later STREET OF NO SHAME it is Celia, whose hair is called bronze. In THE BURGLAR we have Della, she of the tan hair, and being a desirable woman in a Goodis, our protagonist Nathaniel Harbin is drawn to the tan-haired woman and terrified of her for precisely that very reason, his being a man in trouble in a David Goodis novel. At one point we have Della coming up behind Harbin and he, in a whirl of synaesthesia, smelling her perfume before he sees her, noting with terror that “the color of this perfume was tan.” It's her, his tan demise. The other complimentary paragraph of some length that I wanted to quote comes a little earlier in that same novel. “Harbin saw the pale green glow coming down a little and making a wide pale green ribbon across her forehead. Now her yellow hair was a zig-zag of yellow and black, her eyes under the ribbon a distinct and bright yellow, her face dark but getting lighter as the ribbon lowered, and Harbin saw the whiteness of her teeth as she smiled again. He returned the smile, not knowing why. And then, not knowing why, he said, ‘You want to dance?’” The passage is strikingly similar to the dazzler I excerpted from NIGHTFALL, this time the whirl of coulour producing instead of the gun and the fateful murder the injunction to dance, as if from on high, and the imminence of the fateful amorous embrace. The woman Harbin is asking to dance (in spite of himself) in not Della, but rather Gladden, a younger woman who for many years has been something like the burglar’s de facto goddaughter, his charge, though matters are becoming more complicated, implicitly sexualized. The hammer that is clanging against Harbin’s brain is Gladden herself. “It was as though he could see the hammer, its metal shining against the darkness of the room, the force of it swinging toward him, coming hard, coming into him. And it was as though he was tied there hand and foot and there was no getting away. The thing was planted. It was set. There was no getting away from Gladden.” Later Gladden will tell Harbin that “This isn’t your fault. It isn’t mine, either. It’s just a miserable state of affairs.” Such is destiny in the world of noir. Things are not necessarily as simple as all that, or not always. In the first two novels, DARK PASSAGE and NIGHTFALL, though the man fears the woman he desires, she will turn out to be something close to the best thing that has ever happened to him, the irony here pointed. In DARK PASSAGE the wrongly jailed escapee Vincent Parry will be saved by a woman named Irene, who has for some time been his advocate without his knowing it. He will do everything he can to escape her. He feels for her, desires her, and does not want to draw her into his eddy. Like all of Goodis’s male protagonists, Parry spends much of the novel thinking extemporaneously on his feet and consequently misreading the terrain. Dramatic irony plays a fascinating roll in the denouement, such that the last section of the novel involves Parry realizing at the final moment that Irene has been his saviour and that he loves her and wants to be with her even while he has ultimately failed to realize that one of the novel’s principle characters, now dead at Parry’s hands, is the person we know him to be. In NIGHTFALL there is much ado about the apprehension of “the ghastly truth” that one has fallen in love, but here too our protagonist, James Vanning, is fighting against the feelings and desires that serve in the realization of his ultimate (if provisional) salvation. The novels do become progressively more fatalistic. THE BURGLAR is in fact practically surrealist-symphonic in its tragic culmination. In both THE MOON IN THE GUTTER and STREET OF NO RETURN the principal male character ends where he began, the possibility of an anchor or of salvation squashed by socioeconomic determinations and personal hangups. The characters ubiquitously see it coming. STREET OF NO RETURN features a lengthy flashback to seven years before the narrative proper takes place, when Whitey the homeless drunk was the rising star Eugene Lindell, courting the otherworldly Celia, moll to a malevolent heavy. Both Eugene and Celia are clearly aware that their mutual feelings for one another are a disaster in motion. On a cab ride to nowhere in particular, postponing the ultimate consummation of their relationship, Celia puts it in no uncertain terms: “You can’t stop it and I can’t stop it and it’s really awful now.” The novels become more unremittingly grim (if also outlandishly baroque) in the 1950s just as they are becoming more frank about sex relations (the Hollywood production code was simultaneously starting to grow increasingly lax). Eugene and Celia will make love. “In bed with her it was dark but somehow blazing like the core of a shooting star. It was going ’way out past all space and all time.” The world is oblitaerated and then so is Whitey, descending into the literal Hellhole, “the cobblestone battlefield where the combat was on an all-out basis. They were fighting with the white-hot fury that men display when they forget that they are men. In the Hellhole, these nights, they were having race riots.” The noir phenomenon is explicitly a postwar phenomenon. The spectre of war looms. In DARK PASSAGE, part of the character evidence used against Vincent Parry in the trial that originally sends him to San Quentin involves the false intimation that he was a draft dodger. In NIGHTFALL, James Vanning betrays his experiences in the South Pacific (“specifically Saipan and Okinawa”) in his very physiognomy. Many of the characters in these novels, generally in their thirties, have hair that has gone prematurely grey or white, this culminating in Whitey, a destroyed man named for the aberration. Though the noir novels of David Goodis eschew anything like a steady black and white Manichean polarity, tending toward swirling colours, abstraction, and vertiginous dissolution, they are, like the namesake film genre, generally works in which the cosmos and the society predetermine dark fate and tragic impotence. If this is darkness in vivid colour, it is no less dark for that. Consider three characteristic sentences from DARK PASSAGE: “Hate walked in and floated at the side of fear”; “There were a lot of maybes and none of them went anywhere”; “And under flashing sunlight the road remained dark.”
February 22, 2020
Dark Passage
“There were a lot of maybes and none of them went anywhere”
Clipped dry Hemingway sentences, dream sequences, inner monologues of doubt, cigarettes, night fog and one-liners, and a fantastic scene of ‘40s mundanity in a drugstore. With a jazzy Beat like energy..rhythmic repetition..and the confused half-dreams of night stumble through the most improbable of plots. But it works, like a brand new silver pistol.
Nightfall
“It had started on a day when it simply hadn’t been his turn to draw good cards”
A series of wholly unlikely coincidences, detectives and late bars, the action moves unstoppable & dark, like a mile long coal train. The film version switches New York for LA, with genuine war hero Aldo Ray and the sultry and beautiful Anne Bancroft stealing every heart she sees.
The Burglar
“The liquid of her lips poured into his veins”
Expressionist, monochrome, an abandoned child, a jewel thief in the night, a bent cop, and a twisted crime family saga drowning in dark grey Atlantic City loneliness.
The Moon In The Gutter
“It struck him full force, the unavoidable knowledge that he was riding through life on a fourth-class ticket”
Opening with the stage direction of an alley cat’s paw prints in the dried blood of a dead girl. A failed artist living in the slums. A midnight marriage with a two-cent ring. The strangely comforting sound of routine domestic violence. The darkness of lost dreams and the sound of heartbreak at midnight.
‘Street of No Return’
“Every man has an axe to grind. Whether he knows it or not”
A brutal tale of a singer’s downfall, doomed from the moment he first saw Celia. Then the beatings, the lost bets and the one way ticket on a boozed up downbound train.
Stunning, gripping work, with a power that holds you like dirty handcuffs. The violence savage, the dialogue cute and the nights hot and long.
We’re all going down. One step at a time.
“There were a lot of maybes and none of them went anywhere”
Clipped dry Hemingway sentences, dream sequences, inner monologues of doubt, cigarettes, night fog and one-liners, and a fantastic scene of ‘40s mundanity in a drugstore. With a jazzy Beat like energy..rhythmic repetition..and the confused half-dreams of night stumble through the most improbable of plots. But it works, like a brand new silver pistol.
Nightfall
“It had started on a day when it simply hadn’t been his turn to draw good cards”
A series of wholly unlikely coincidences, detectives and late bars, the action moves unstoppable & dark, like a mile long coal train. The film version switches New York for LA, with genuine war hero Aldo Ray and the sultry and beautiful Anne Bancroft stealing every heart she sees.
The Burglar
“The liquid of her lips poured into his veins”
Expressionist, monochrome, an abandoned child, a jewel thief in the night, a bent cop, and a twisted crime family saga drowning in dark grey Atlantic City loneliness.
The Moon In The Gutter
“It struck him full force, the unavoidable knowledge that he was riding through life on a fourth-class ticket”
Opening with the stage direction of an alley cat’s paw prints in the dried blood of a dead girl. A failed artist living in the slums. A midnight marriage with a two-cent ring. The strangely comforting sound of routine domestic violence. The darkness of lost dreams and the sound of heartbreak at midnight.
‘Street of No Return’
“Every man has an axe to grind. Whether he knows it or not”
A brutal tale of a singer’s downfall, doomed from the moment he first saw Celia. Then the beatings, the lost bets and the one way ticket on a boozed up downbound train.
Stunning, gripping work, with a power that holds you like dirty handcuffs. The violence savage, the dialogue cute and the nights hot and long.
We’re all going down. One step at a time.
June 9, 2024
Undeniably powerful, emotional, and bleak pulp fiction that tackles themes of violence, rape, amnesia, alcoholism, drug abuse, labor strife, racism, police brutality, poverty, and revenge in San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia in the Forties and Fifties.
Here are the five novels in this collection:
Dark Passage (1946) - Goodis's breakout novel was originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. It's probably the most entertaining work in this anthology. It’s a classic noir plot about a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife, later inspiring the hit TV show and Harrison Ford movie The Fugitive. Vincent Parry breaks out of San Quentin and returns to San Francisco to seek justice for the killer of his wife. The spare prose disguises some clever and atmospheric writing. The 1947 Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall movie adapted from the book, which was written and directed by Delmer Daves, is an overlooked gem.
Nightfall (1947) - A gimmicky crime novel set in New York about a commercial artist on the run from a three-man crew of bank robbers and a mysterious detective who's following him. It's a serviceable noir with some expertly rendered flashback sequences, but it's not nearly as entertaining as Dark Passage. The 1956 B-movie starring Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft, directed by Jacques Tournier, and written by Stirling Silliphant, is very good. The movie was shot in Los Angeles and Wyoming, and it seems oddly similar to Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).
The Burglar (1953) - A tragic crime novel, set in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, about a four-person crew of thieves that robs a mansion and makes off with a suitcase filled with emeralds. It's a straightforward crime novel that perhaps influenced later gritty crime writers such as Donald E. Westlake. However, the downbeat, fatalistic ending is something most commercially-minded writers would have avoided. Goodis wrote the screenplay to the 1957 movie directed by Paul Wendkos and starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield; the flamboyant movie, which has a rousing climax at Atlantic City's Steel Pier, is superior to the novel.
The Moon in the Gutter (1953) - If Dark Passage is the most entertaining novel in the anthology, this is by far the most effective. This skid row novel is an agonizing wail of despair. It’s about a 35-year-old longshoreman seeking to avenge the rape and subsequent suicide of his younger sister. The writing is so raw and powerful that the book hit me like a ton of bricks, and I can't stop thinking about it. French director Jean-Jacques Beineix adapted the book into a visually stylish but critically panned movie starring Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski.
Street of No Return (1954) - A skid row novel about a drunk named Whitey who gets mixed up in a race war in Philadelphia. Bleak but forgettable, easily the weakest novel in this collection.
Critics seem to favor the later Goodis skid row novels, which were written in the Fifties after he'd moved from Hollywood back to Philadelphia to help care for his aging parents and his schizophrenic brother. The two earliest novels in this collection have more commercial appeal, but Goodis obviously had other aims in his fiction. Lonely losers and brutal femme fatales dominate these novels, similar to books by Jim Thompson, another writer who churned out pulp fiction for Lion Books in the Fifties.
Goodis spent most of his careeer slumming for pulp American publishers, only later to be discovered by French intellectuals. This is an excellent collection featuring some of his best novels. Since these books were each only about 150 pages long in their original paperback format it's too bad that The Library of America didn't squeeze in a few more, such as Cassidy's Girl, Black Friday, or Down There (aka Shoot the Piano Player). Also, is it too much to expect an introduction?
Here are the five novels in this collection:
Dark Passage (1946) - Goodis's breakout novel was originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. It's probably the most entertaining work in this anthology. It’s a classic noir plot about a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife, later inspiring the hit TV show and Harrison Ford movie The Fugitive. Vincent Parry breaks out of San Quentin and returns to San Francisco to seek justice for the killer of his wife. The spare prose disguises some clever and atmospheric writing. The 1947 Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall movie adapted from the book, which was written and directed by Delmer Daves, is an overlooked gem.
Nightfall (1947) - A gimmicky crime novel set in New York about a commercial artist on the run from a three-man crew of bank robbers and a mysterious detective who's following him. It's a serviceable noir with some expertly rendered flashback sequences, but it's not nearly as entertaining as Dark Passage. The 1956 B-movie starring Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft, directed by Jacques Tournier, and written by Stirling Silliphant, is very good. The movie was shot in Los Angeles and Wyoming, and it seems oddly similar to Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959).
The Burglar (1953) - A tragic crime novel, set in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, about a four-person crew of thieves that robs a mansion and makes off with a suitcase filled with emeralds. It's a straightforward crime novel that perhaps influenced later gritty crime writers such as Donald E. Westlake. However, the downbeat, fatalistic ending is something most commercially-minded writers would have avoided. Goodis wrote the screenplay to the 1957 movie directed by Paul Wendkos and starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield; the flamboyant movie, which has a rousing climax at Atlantic City's Steel Pier, is superior to the novel.
The Moon in the Gutter (1953) - If Dark Passage is the most entertaining novel in the anthology, this is by far the most effective. This skid row novel is an agonizing wail of despair. It’s about a 35-year-old longshoreman seeking to avenge the rape and subsequent suicide of his younger sister. The writing is so raw and powerful that the book hit me like a ton of bricks, and I can't stop thinking about it. French director Jean-Jacques Beineix adapted the book into a visually stylish but critically panned movie starring Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski.
Street of No Return (1954) - A skid row novel about a drunk named Whitey who gets mixed up in a race war in Philadelphia. Bleak but forgettable, easily the weakest novel in this collection.
Critics seem to favor the later Goodis skid row novels, which were written in the Fifties after he'd moved from Hollywood back to Philadelphia to help care for his aging parents and his schizophrenic brother. The two earliest novels in this collection have more commercial appeal, but Goodis obviously had other aims in his fiction. Lonely losers and brutal femme fatales dominate these novels, similar to books by Jim Thompson, another writer who churned out pulp fiction for Lion Books in the Fifties.
Goodis spent most of his careeer slumming for pulp American publishers, only later to be discovered by French intellectuals. This is an excellent collection featuring some of his best novels. Since these books were each only about 150 pages long in their original paperback format it's too bad that The Library of America didn't squeeze in a few more, such as Cassidy's Girl, Black Friday, or Down There (aka Shoot the Piano Player). Also, is it too much to expect an introduction?
January 9, 2023
I picked this up because I like the movie "Dark Passage."
The novel "Dark Passage" didn't appeal to me at all. It started out okay, and then there are long, LONG, paragraphs in which the narrator obsesses over the past or what might be happening outside the building, and this just struck me as rambling.
I know this marks me as a pariah, but I started "Nightfall" and almost at once its protagonist gets into a long conversation with an utter stranger that basically goes nowhere that I could tell, and so I decided to put this book, and Goodis, aside.
Cornell Woolrich, to my mind, does a far better job of hooking the reading and moving him from point A to point B. Likewise, I loved the Ross Macdonald Library of America collections. Goodis was just too easy to put down and not come back to.
The novel "Dark Passage" didn't appeal to me at all. It started out okay, and then there are long, LONG, paragraphs in which the narrator obsesses over the past or what might be happening outside the building, and this just struck me as rambling.
I know this marks me as a pariah, but I started "Nightfall" and almost at once its protagonist gets into a long conversation with an utter stranger that basically goes nowhere that I could tell, and so I decided to put this book, and Goodis, aside.
Cornell Woolrich, to my mind, does a far better job of hooking the reading and moving him from point A to point B. Likewise, I loved the Ross Macdonald Library of America collections. Goodis was just too easy to put down and not come back to.
January 27, 2018
Goodis seems an overlooked writer, or underappreciated. I loved all these novels. They were all "simple" in one sense, but because of that, they worked into my unconscious with a lot of energy. They all felt written on a typewriter! If that makes any sense. I mean word by word thought out and placed in the right place. I like that kind of writing a lot. It's not earthshaking themes, but rather a small focus done exceedingly well. Five stars for the genre. Low four in the context of the world's great literature. An essential read for all aspiring writers, I'd say, and for that reason, the extra star overall. Great films made from these, too. Perhaps an early example of film influencing novel writing.
August 18, 2019
The five Goodis novels I read and reviewed were all actually in this one book. But I wanted to separate out the five books for review purposes. Still, I would be doing a disservice if I didn't praise this one book that assembles the five books together. A very nice introduction to Goodis and his writings.
I've seen other people say Goodis is no Dashiell Hammett, no Raymond Chandler. People who say that are snobs. Goodis is more like a Mickey Spillane with a soul. Goodis likes losers, and that feels like the real flavour of noir. These books are very readable and fun, while also being dark and somewhat miserable.
You're doomed too. You may as well enjoy yourself.
I've seen other people say Goodis is no Dashiell Hammett, no Raymond Chandler. People who say that are snobs. Goodis is more like a Mickey Spillane with a soul. Goodis likes losers, and that feels like the real flavour of noir. These books are very readable and fun, while also being dark and somewhat miserable.
You're doomed too. You may as well enjoy yourself.
October 28, 2021
While I haven't read all five novels anthologized in this volume, I find that David Goodis is top notch noir/hardboiled writing. It's difficult to understand why he is not mentioned in the pantheon (some might say 'spamtheon' (I don't) of mystery writers. Perhaps it was because he wasn't from NY or LA or Florida, but rather from Philadelphia. Goodis does what few of his cohorts were able to do: complement desperate, depraved behavior with believable and original interiority. Far better than the better known Jim Thompson, I recommend these narratives; but be forewarned. This ain't Marilynne Robinson.
December 2, 2021
I finally read this, after years of breathless advocacy from others, mostly on here. I can only say, not for me. I read the first three, but by then was wondering if the better ones were at the back. They weren’t. I skimmed the fourth and abandoned the fifth.
Sometimes, for me, he just tried too hard, trying to whip up some interest with this word wizardry. I found the prose repetitive, belabored, and the plots unable to support the prose.
I get that others are dazzled. To each, your own.
Sometimes, for me, he just tried too hard, trying to whip up some interest with this word wizardry. I found the prose repetitive, belabored, and the plots unable to support the prose.
I get that others are dazzled. To each, your own.
December 12, 2022
Good enough for a purchase, but not great. His book Down There is certainly his best and is included in one of the two earlier volumes of this Library of America noir collection. Those volumes are two of my all-time favorite books. But branching off from that "Best of" to focus on Goodis is kind of like branching off a great British films collection that includes The Third Man to focus on Carol Reed. It can't help but disappoint a bit.
January 2, 2022
Dark Passage 5/5
Nightfall 2.5/5
The Burglar 3/5
The Moon in the Gutter 2.5/5
Street of No Return 2/5
Starts out really strong with "Dark Passage", then it goes down in quality pretty steeply. The twist in the plot of "Street of No Return" in particular put a bad taste in my mouth, and the writing of the Puerto Ricans accented dialogue was pretty painful.
Nightfall 2.5/5
The Burglar 3/5
The Moon in the Gutter 2.5/5
Street of No Return 2/5
Starts out really strong with "Dark Passage", then it goes down in quality pretty steeply. The twist in the plot of "Street of No Return" in particular put a bad taste in my mouth, and the writing of the Puerto Ricans accented dialogue was pretty painful.
July 12, 2019
Magnificent! Goodis takes you down every dark alley,into every sloppy drunk gin mill and the night ends in frustration with a hangover and a few missing teeth. The sun never shines in these novels but you will be immersed in another world. Pure genius in all it's glorious misery.
Read
September 15, 2020It took me forever to get through these 5 novels. I read numerous other books between each of these. They are noir classics that influenced many of the contemporary authors I enjoy, but the settings and characters are depression era and I just didn't relate to them.
December 14, 2016
Dark indeed. More pulp crime fiction than the better noir. The little guy, innocent, gets caught up in crime and does the right thing every time. Unique approach to the genre.
September 2, 2017
wonderful playful rich and juicy noir
June 9, 2018
This book as a whole was wonderful. Despite never having a happy ending, Goodis always strived to deliver a realistic one. Even if it meant kicking his readers in the gut a few times.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2020
totally in my wheelhouse, but definitely not for everyone. the last one was the best of the collection
August 24, 2021
In general, you're better off seeing the Hollywood film then reading the Goodis Novels. He has flat characters, and provides little atmosphere, wit, or memorable dialogue. He's Hammett without the great prose style.
Moon in the Gutter Solid, meat-and-potatoes crime novel. Gets you from A to B, with concise prose and lots of violence. Nothing more and nothing less.
Nightfall The best of the lot. Seems to have better dialogue and characterization than usual. The interesting hook is that protagonist, suffering from Amnesia, is being followed by a detective, and can't figure it all out.
The Burglar and Street of No Return Forgotten for good reason.
Moon in the Gutter Solid, meat-and-potatoes crime novel. Gets you from A to B, with concise prose and lots of violence. Nothing more and nothing less.
Nightfall The best of the lot. Seems to have better dialogue and characterization than usual. The interesting hook is that protagonist, suffering from Amnesia, is being followed by a detective, and can't figure it all out.
The Burglar and Street of No Return Forgotten for good reason.
November 30, 2021
fantastic collection of Goodis' best
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