Sat 16 Feb 2019
Stories I’m Reading, by David Vineyard: DAVID GOODIS “The Blue Sweetheart.”
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[6] Comments
DAVID GOODIS “The Blue Sweetheart.†Novelette. First published in Manhunt, April 1953. Published as a Kindle eBook by Peril Press, November 2013.
The setting may be different, but the milieu and the predicament of the hapless hero of this novelette from the legendary digest Manhunt, is pure David Goodis, the poet of the down and out, the hopeless, and the lost. You may know him best from his novels or the films made from them (Dark Passage, Nightfall, The Burglar, The Burglars …), but chances you know him as the author of grim down to the bone tales that could give Cornell Woolrich a run for their doomed kismet haunted protagonists.
What you may not know is Goodis also had a good run in the pulps, particularly in the aviation pulps. Aside from his fatalistic novels he also wrote tales of adventure and intrigue, and this novelette from Manhunt is much closer to those works than his better known novels, though hints of those works can’t help but slip in.
Not that Clayton, the protagonist of this tale, would feel out of place beside the doomed heroes of most of Goodis novels. As the story opens he is in a very shady bar in a foreign port knowing simply leaving will likely cost him his life, and the back story is no prettier about Russ Hagen, a brutal power that be in Colombo who stole Clayton’s woman and fortune in gems and booted him out of Ceylon a year earlier.
Now Clayton is back, his fate seemingly sealed, all because of Alma who had laughed with Hagen as Clayton lay beaten and bleeding at Hagen’s feet, and because of a large sapphire, the “blue sweetheart†of the title which is Clayton’s hope for redemption and revenge.
Cast this one in the movie of your mind as you will, Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, and George Macready (Gilda) or Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Brad Dexter (Macao), this is the familiar adventure tale of countless pulp stories filtered through a film noir lens and peppered with a certain shabby hopeless elegance unique to Goodis voice and gift for painting unforgettable word images:
“Of course there were witnesses, they flocked like angry hyenas. Then I showed them the gun.â€
He was broken and bleeding at Hagen’s feet. And Alma was in Hagen’s arms, looking down at him as if he were mud.
The knocking was a parade of glimmering blue spheres bouncing in blackness.
He was swept outward and away from the boundaries of reality, and yet somehow he knew this wasn’t a dream, it was something he had waited for and hungered for …
And this little exchange when he sees Alma again for the first time in a revealing dress standing in his bedroom and it all comes back to him:
“Strictly.â€
“If that’s a business outfit you’re wearing, I got a few dollars ain’t busy.â€
She didn’t even flinch. She was a clever boxer neatly slipping a right-hand smash to the jaw. “I’ll do the buying,†she said very softly.
It’s hard not to see that one in cinematic terms.
“The Blue Sweetheart†is no classic, and it reads with an easy familiarity, but it also hits all the right notes, a perfect jazz rift played with ultimate skill from a well worn Fake Book by a master whose fingers almost autonomously caress the keys with grace and style.
Muted horns playing, gradual fade …
February 16th, 2019 at 2:23 pm
I read the April 1953 MANHUNT back in May 2011 and I did not particularly like it. My notes say “Crime adventure in Ceylon. Not believable.” Later on I complain, “Ok but nothing special”.
Hoping that Peter Enfantino liked it more I dug up my copy of THE DIGEST ENTHUSIAST, Book six, June 2017. He gives it only two stars and says:
“Warmed-up Casablanca. Hard to believe this came from the pen that wrote SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER and STREET OF NO RETURN.”
But thanks for the review David. I always like to read other opinions.
February 16th, 2019 at 5:55 pm
Goodis is not one of my favorite writers, so I’m no expert, but a question for those of you who’ve read a lot more of his work than I have. The story line sounds as though it was written for the pulps, but when the pulp market went down the tubes, Goodis stuck the story in a drawer and didn’t pull it out until the folks at MANHUNT came looking around for stories to print. Possible?
Whether so or not, the lines David supplied us with show us (or me, anyway) that even with a story that doesn’t knock everyone’s socks off, Goodis had a way with words that not every writer was capable of.
February 16th, 2019 at 10:43 pm
“Familiar adventure tale,” and “no classic” is what it is, but the words are still music in places. It certainly isn’t Goodis at his best, and I don’t disagree with Steve that plot wise it sounds like it might have been an old pulp story, save that there is a slight Spillane touch that certainly suggests it was updated, probably for MANHUNT in particular.
“Warmed up CASABLANCA” and “OK, but nothing special,” are fair assessments of the story, but the language and telling strike me as above that level. At best it’s a side of Goodis reprints of his classic novels doesn’t show, the Goodis who spun yarns for the aviation and crime pulps before hitting it big with DARK PASSAGE and the obsessions that mark his best novels.
Whatever else can be said about this routine tale it shows some of that “word savagery” that once marked the best of BLACK MASK and the hard-boiled pulps even though it is at best minor Goodis, and even here in this familiar territory there are hints of the darkness and hopelessness that are brought to fruition in Goodis novels beneath the standard tough guy dialogue and goings on.
Plus, some credit for doing this smoothly and professionally with hints here and there of the kind of memorable lines the better noir films engender, “I’ll do the buying …”
Reading and reviewing this one so close on the review of Chandler’s “Guns at Cyranos” I was reminded again of the close relationship between the hard-boiled and noir worlds and jazz — which is why I used that metaphor again — because I can’t read this stuff without hearing that music in the words and the characters who speak them. Some are New York, some Kansas City or St. Louis, many New Orleans, and a few a steamy little club in Dallas Deep Ellum district, but the music implied in the words is distinctive to the genre.
February 17th, 2019 at 3:04 pm
I agree that BLACK MASK and related pulps sometimes published tales rich in word use and literary style. And that this is a delightful Good Thing at all levels.
And also that other branches of mystery fiction (and science fiction) also had splendid literary style. People like Helen Reilly or HC Bailey, little read today, are verbally magnificent.
Even people like Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, not usually thought of as “stylists”, had their own stylistic individuality and gift for word use.
February 17th, 2019 at 6:06 pm
Mike Grost, no argument, several genres have distinctive voices from the ones you mention to the almost poetic side of the Buchan style thriller to the “g” dropping drawls of Philo Vance and Lord Peter and the duMaurier influenced Gothic style.
In SF the Campbell school relied on a voice not far removed from the hard-boiled school in many cases, certainly one divorced from the melodrama of some early SF writers.
Only the hard-boiled voice became so ingrained in the American psyche that it became ‘the’ American literary voice, one that might be out of Twain and London by way of Hemingway, but is equally owed to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett and their followers.
February 18th, 2019 at 7:50 am
David, I was a fan of David Goodis before he became fashionable, and I’ve read a lot of and about his work, but never seen anything nearly as evocative as your fine review.