DAVID GOODIS – Street of No Return. Gold Medal #428, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. Cover art: Barye Phillips.

   Street of No Return has strong similarities of plot to Down There (reviewed here), but is a much stronger book.

   Whitey, an alky once known as Edward Linden, the best singer of his generation, got involved with the wrong woman. The woman’s hoodlum friends try to persuade Whitey to forget her by smashing his vocal cords, and Whitey winds up with the rest of the winos on the street of no return.

   One day, with a race riot in progress in the Hellhole a few blocks away from skid row, Whitey sees some familiar faces and follows them into the Hellhole, where he tries to help a dying cop. As a result, he is accused of murder, and much of the first part of the book deals with his attempts to evade the police. just as much of the first part of Down There deals with Eddie’s attempts to evade the gangsters.

   Eventually the book comes to a predictable end: Whitey finds the killer and brings the riots to a stop. But as one would expect in a Goodis book, Whitey does not find the girl and live with her happily ever after. Instead, he goes back to his bottle and his friends on the street.

   What sets this book apart from Down There, as well as a number of other Goodis novels, is the writing. The writing is not slowed down. as it often is in Goodis’s works, by lengthy passages of introspection; thus the story moves along with the reader being shown. not told. and the narration is more effective than usual. One wonders why this book has never been filmed in place of other, lesser Goodis novels.

   Those with a taste for Goodis’s philosophy should try Street of the Lost (1953) and The Moon in the Gutter (1954). The titles tell the story. A recent movie version of the latter was a conspicuous flop.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.