Mon 12 Jul 2010
DAVID GOODIS – Of Tender Sin. Gold Medal #226, paperback original; 1st printing, 1952; Gold Medal 616, 2nd printing, 1956.
David Goodis is one of those bleak, lost figures of pulp literature, legendary now but neglected in his day, who churned out millions of words in his youth for the pulps, and in the 50s and 60s produced some unforgettable classics in paperback.
Of Tender Sin features some of Goodis’s best writing and lousiest plotting, starting for no apparent reason as hero Alan Darby, a middle-class office worker with a house and wife in the suburbs, suddenly becomes “unstuck from himself” and begins wandering the seedy streets of Philadelphia’s tenderloin in the middle of a harsh winter.
It ends for the same no-reason, apparently when Goodis got tired of writing it. But along the way, we get drugs, kinky sex, beatings, incest, robbery and murder, all put across with some of the most incredibly vivid prose I’ve ever read.
Goodis conveys Philly like Camus did Algiers in The Stranger: when he writes, you feel the cold snow seep into your boots, taste the cheap, satisfying greasy-spoon chow, feel the impact of a sudden punch, this is writing for its own sake, and to find it between the covers of a two-bit paperback is one of the delights that come only to collectors like us.
July 12th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Considering he had some early success with DARK PASSAGE and a few highlights along the way, Goodis just seemed doomed to end up a car wreck of a writer.
Luckily for us his miserable life produced some fine novels as dark and bleak as anything by Woolrich or Thompson.
July 13th, 2010 at 6:52 am
Goodis was craftsman extraordinaire. From his RETREAT FROM OBLIVION until his final SOMEBODY DONE FOR, he truly was devoted to his art. His life was truly a circumstance of unintentional fallacy.
July 13th, 2010 at 11:13 am
I wish I could say that I’ve read OF TENDER SIN, but I amazed myself yesterday in discovering that I don’t even own a copy, not even of the second printing.
It’ll take shelling out an amount in the mid-two figures to obtain one in nice condition ($40 to $50 or so), which isn’t too bad. I could still be collecting comic books from the same era.
In any case, Goodis is another of those authors I’ll have to start re-reading. I read most of them when they first came out, and in all honesty, I wasn’t all that impressed. I much preferred Richard Prather and Shell Scott at the time, Gold Medal-wise.
— Steve
July 13th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Steve
You probably want to read one Goodis, and then something else. He’s much too bleak to sit down and go through is output one after another.
My tastes have matured over the years — not always improved, but matured. In some moods I would still rather read Prather, but I at least know Goodis is more important — if not more worthy.
One of the blessings of maturity is that I no longer undervalue those writers who ‘merely’ entertain me and provide escape. In fact I think I treasure them now more than I did then — though not as uncritically as I once did.
July 16th, 2010 at 8:07 am
Goodis specialized in writing about the Dark Side. If you don’t want to shell out for the original paperbacks, several publishers including HARD CASE and STARK HOUSE have reprinted some of Goodis’ books.
July 16th, 2010 at 10:40 am
My, isn’t the woman on the cover a prim little thing.
Goodis is a little too dark-boiled for my taste, or at least the one I read was. Like Steve I prefer the Scott.