Wed 1 May 2019
Mike Nevins on Crime Fiction Writer DAVID GOODIS.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns[13] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
For reasons which will become clear about halfway through this column, my subject this month is David Goodis. Most of you who are reading this probably know a little about the man, but for the benefit of those who need their recollections refreshed, I’ll begin with a brief sketch of Goodis and his world.
He was born in Philadelphia on March 2, 1917 and, except for a few years in Hollywood, spent most of his life there. Soon after graduating from Temple University he broke into print with RETREAT FROM OBLIVION (1939), a mainstream novel that made zero impact at the time and hasn’t been reprinted since.
Rejected for military service in World War II, he spent the war years cranking out an estimated five and a half million words for Battle Birds and a slew of other pulp magazines, mainly tales of air combat with titles like “Death Flies the Coffins of Hitler,†“Death Rides My Cockpit†and “Guns of the Sea Raiders.â€
Almost none of this material has been reprinted either, and probably never will be. His greatest commercial success was his second novel, DARK PASSAGE (1946), a noir thriller about an innocent man convicted of his wife’s murder who escapes from San Quentin, has plastic surgery performed on his face and begins a hunt for the real killer.
The Saturday Evening Post paid Goodis a huge sum for the right to serialize the book before its hardcover release, which inspired rave reviews including one from Anthony Boucher in the San Francisco Chronicle (October 20, 1946): “[H]ere is the most notable talent to emerge in the field in a long time. Mr. Goodis has an originality of naturalism, a precise feeling for petty lives, a creatively compelling vividness of detail….This is the goods.â€
Very little time passed before Warner Bros. paid Goodis another huge sum of money for the movie rights. DARK PASSAGE (1947) was an excellent film noir directed by Delmer Daves and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Warners offered Goodis a screenwriting contract, but the results were disappointing from both his and the studio’s point of view. In 1950 he returned to Philadelphia and his parents’ house and reinvented himself as a writer of paperback originals.
The style of DARK PASSAGE and his other novels of the late Forties evoked the naturalism of authors like Hemingway, but his initial impact on suspense fiction approximated that of Cornell Woolrich. Stylistically his paperbacks resembled his hardcovers except that a vital element had been discarded. What makes Woolrich the Hitchcock of the written word is his uncanny genius for making us feel the terror and uncertainty of his menaced protagonists. But we can’t experience true terror or uncertainty unless the outcome is genuinely in doubt, and in fact we can’t tell until the climax of a Woolrich novel or story whether it’s allègre or noir, whether the characters whose nightmares we share will be saved or destroyed.
In Goodis’s paperbacks, however, there is no basis for even a moment’s hope and thus no real suspense. His people are born losers and victims who try to cheat their fate by living as zombies, shunning all involvement with others and the world, sustained by booze, cigarettes and mechanical sex. What they learn is that there’s no way out of the trap they’re in. Whatever they do or don’t do, life is going to get them.
Character types, settings and motifs recur in his paperbacks with ritualistic frequency. A run-down old house in a seedy district of Philadelphia. A loud corner tavern, filled at all hours of the night with smoke and sweat, gin fumes and derelicts beyond hope. The docks, with at least one graphically described fistfight every time Goodis takes us there. A frightened, friendless, lonely man, living in the night. A fat sadistic woman, oozing grotesque sexuality. A brilliant creative person defeated by the world so badly that he’s reduced to a passive drunken wisp, muttering mournfully of meaninglessness. Bizarre little philosophic conversations between total strangers. Beaten protagonists dully resuming zombie lives as the novels end.
It’s typical of Goodis’ world that in THE MOON IN THE GUTTER (Gold Medal pb #348, 1953) the viewpoint character Kerrigan lets go free the parolee whom his wife hired to beat him to death, gives up hunting for the man who raped his sister and caused her suicide, and goes back to live with his vicious wife.
Or take that gem of noir BLACK FRIDAY (Lion pb #224, 1954). “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him.†The chilly hell that envelops Goodis’s luckless man-on-the-run from this first sentence only becomes more hellish as he stumbles upon a man shot to death in the street, gets away with a wallet containing $12,000 and winds up in a house on the northwest edge of Philadelphia and with, as in Sartre’s play, no exit.
For housemates he has a beautiful young woman, a fat blonde whore (who has counterparts in other Goodis novels) and four psychotic criminals. When the novel ends, the poor schmuck in whose shoes Goodis has made us live is unspeakably worse off than when it began. “He had no idea where he was going and didn’t care.â€
Soon after the death of his parents with whom he’d lived since his return from Hollywood, Goodis himself died, on January 7, 1967, less than two months before his 50th birthday.
Goodis, like Poe and Hitchcock and many others, owes a great deal of his recognition as a major figure to the French. The only biography of him to date is GOODIS: LA VIE EN NOIR ET BLANC (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984) by Philippe Garnier, who took great pains to interview everyone he could find who knew that haunted man.
Although I and many others tried unsuccessfully for years to find a U.S. publisher for this book, it was no thanks to me that almost thirty years after its original publication some brave soul made the commitment. GOODIS: A LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE (Black Pool Productions, 2013) is required reading for anyone who loves Goodis but is not at home in French.
Until quite recently there was no book exploring the Goodis world, not even in French, but now we have Jay A. Gertzman’s PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS (Down & Out Books, 2018). Gertzman, a retired professor of literature who knows Philadelphia very well indeed, doesn’t take us through the Goodis novels chronologically and developmentally — mainly, I suppose, because there are so many family resemblances among them — but opts to cover the history and sociology of the rundown Philly communities that Goodis before him knew just as well, and stresses his connections with literary and cultural icons like Hemingway, Faulkner, Freud and, first and foremost, Kafka. (The title of one of his chapters is “The Pulp Kafka of Philadelphia.â€)
Other approaches are possible, and I hope I live to see at least a few of them, but to Gertzman belongs the honor that with respect to Woolrich is mine. He was there first.
May 1st, 2019 at 8:06 pm
What are the best reference works on the books of the hard boiled novelists? Something useful for folk searching out old paperbacks?
May 1st, 2019 at 8:59 pm
Off the top of my head, books that may cover what you’re looking for in general, not dedicated to single authors:
Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, by Lee Server
Over My Dead Body, also by Lee Server
Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks And The Masters Of Noir , by Geoffrey O’Brien
Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold Warm by Woody Haut
Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, also by Woody Haut
Paperbacks, U.S.A. : a graphic history, 1939-1959, by Piet Schreuders
Probably lots of others, that aren’t coming to mind.
May 1st, 2019 at 9:37 pm
Enlightening as always, Prof. Nevins.
May 1st, 2019 at 10:32 pm
A few years ago I reviewed the Library of America collection of five David Goodis novels. The link is https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=17042
It’s amusing to note that on a dvd covering Goodis’ fiction his wife admits that one of the reasons that she left him was because of his habit of constantly writing for the aviation pulps.
May 1st, 2019 at 10:54 pm
I remember that review and the significant number of comments made.
May 2nd, 2019 at 8:34 am
Fine job — as usual for you.
I highly recommend the DVD DAVID GOODIS… To a Pulp (2010) by Larry Withers.
What strikes me about Goodis’ paperback originals is how often the hero ostensibly wins out — finds the missing heiress,clears his name of a murder charge, thwarts a crime or deposes a local tyrant — only to find that he has made no progress in personal terms. Like Randolph Scott at the end of COMANCHE STATION, he returns to a hostile and increasingly meaningless world .
May 2nd, 2019 at 7:12 pm
Woolrich often used the term “line of suspense” to describe his work, in Goodis paperbacks it’s more a line of doom. Woolrich heroes are haunted by fate, in a Goodis novel they are flattened by it, even at the start of the novel they have no hope.
Some of Goodis pulp work can be found in Archive Internet editions of some of the aviation pulps, but I do doubt it will ever be reprinted. Not much of the material from the aviation pulps gets reprinted in any case, and then mostly series stories.
May 2nd, 2019 at 10:35 pm
I’ve collected just about every type of fiction magazine over the years, pulps, slicks, literary magazines, but the aviation pulps I found to be just about completely unreadable. Even G-8 was hopeless with the inane dialog and silly behavior of Nippy and Bull.
Back in the twenties, thirties, even the forties, fiction about airplanes was sort of new and different but eventually the formula killed the aviation magazines. Collectors still are interested in the genre but I find only the covers to be of interest. The G-8 cover art is really crazy and almost worth collecting the magazine for the art alone.
Pulp dealer Jack Deveny once told me that G-8 was responsible for his career as an airline pilot. As a kid he really loved the aviation titles. I asked him what his favorite G-8 story was and he mentioned a couple but then admitted that he couldn’t read them as an adult. He collected them for nostalgic reasons only.
For many years I thought the David Goodis in the the aviation pulps was some other writer and different from the David Goodis of the crime novels. Silly, I know but it took awhile for me to realize that the writer of the aviation stories and the writer of the crime novels were the same man.
May 2nd, 2019 at 10:41 pm
You weren’t the only one who thought they were two different authors, Walker. I did too, but it was also in the back of my mind that David Goodis is hardly a common name. Father and son, maybe, I wondered, but not so. The two authors were one and the same.
May 2nd, 2019 at 10:44 pm
Battle Birds, January 1941. Cover story: David Goodis “Red Wings for the Damned.”
May 3rd, 2019 at 11:29 pm
When he wrote pulp adventure, sports, and air war stories, Goodis sometimes wrote under at least four house names: Logan Claybourn, Ray Shotwell, David Crewe, and Lance Kermit. He shared these monikers with other writers, so one has to decide by style or theme whether or not a particular story might have been by Goodis. He was most prolific in writing about Brits or Yank aviators. I think he also wrote letters in the magazine correspondence columns–both a “reader’s” comments on one of his stories, and the “editor’s” response, telling the writer that Goodis will do better next issue.
May 3rd, 2019 at 11:33 pm
Thanks, Jay. Lots of things in your comment I didn’t know before. I hope the book is selling well!
May 4th, 2019 at 2:13 pm
“In Goodis’s paperbacks, however, there is no basis for even a moment’s hope and thus no real suspense.”
. . . which is why I don’t visit Goodis nearly as often as I do Woolrich. Goodis’s paperback noir can’t even be compared to a pass through a Halloween horror house because, while you’re in there, you know that eventually you’ll emerge unscathed. Goodis, on the other hand, locks the doors after you go in and won’t let you out. It might be stretching a point, but a typical Goodis protagonist (somehow even that word seems inappropriate) does serve the positive function, however, of making you think “There but for the grace of God . . .”