DAVID GOODIS ‑ POET OF THE LOSERS by Dave Moore
According to the anonymous blurb, "David Goodis was one of the most
brilliant and original post‑war writers in the mould of Chandler, Hammett
and Cain," but I think there's more to it than that. Comparison with these masters of crime‑writing
may be a good marketing ploy, but it disregards Goodis's own unique
contribution to the genre.
Geoffrey O'Brien was closer to the mark: "David Goodis is the
mystery man of hardboiled fiction. ... He wrote of winos and barroom piano
players and small‑time thieves in a vein of tortured lyricism all his
own. ... He was a poet of the losers. ... If Jack Kerouac had written crime
novels, they might have sounded a bit like this." He's right, there is something of the soul
of Kerouac in Goodis's writing. Not
altogether surprising, since they had similar life‑styles and both
experienced the alcoholic downside of life, and, although this killed them at a
relatively early age, they both lived long enough to write about it.
David Loeb Goodis was born in 1917 to a respectable Jewish family in
Philadelphia. He has two younger
brothers, one of whom dies of meningitis, aged three. An avid story‑teller during his youth, Goodis attends high
school in Philadelphia and then moves to Indiana University for a year before
returning to Temple University in his home town, where he graduates in 1938
with a degree in journalism. He is then
employed by an advertising agency and begins work on his first book, a novel in
the Hemingway style called RETREAT FROM OBLIVION. This is published by Dutton
in 1939, and Goodis moves to New York to embark on a writer's career. There he finds plenty of work in the
flourishing pulp industry and is soon turning out as many as 10,000 words a
day, under a variety of pseudonyms, for many different publications, such as
HORROR STORIES, TERROR TALES, WESTERN TALES and DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE. This work continues throughout the war
years, with Goodis contributing stories to aviation war magazines such as
BATTLE BIRDS and DARE‑DEVIL ACES.
It is claimed that during this period he wrote some five million words
in five and a half years for the pulps, a prodigious achievement, and also
provided scripts for many radio serials, including Hap Harrigan, House of
Mystery, and Superman. Goodis attempted
more novels at this time, but they were all rejected until, in 1946, DARK
PASSAGE was serialised by the Saturday Evening Post, published in book form,
and bought by Warner Brothers for film treatment.
Goodis is on his way. He signs a
six‑year contract with Warners and moves to Hollywood, where he had been
briefly in 1942, scripting DESTINATION UNKNOWN for Universal, and meeting and
marrying the mysterious Elaine, who leaves him the following year on their
return to New York but who is to mentally scar Goodis and form the basis of the
female character in many of his later novels.
For Warners he writes the script for THE UNFAITHFUL, a loose remake of
Somerset Maugham's famous THE LETTER in 1947, and that same year DARK PASSAGE
is released, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, although Goodis is
unhappy about the changed ending forced upon that film. He becomes disenchanted with the movie
industry. Many of the scripts he works
on, including an early draft OF MISSING PERSONS and an adaptation of Chandler's
THE LADY IN THE LAKE, remain unproduced.
His novels fared better. NIGHTFALL and BEHOLD THIS WOMAN were published
in hardback in 1947, and OF MISSING PERSONS, seemingly influenced by Jack
"Dragnet" Webb's police‑procedural radio series, followed in
1950.
That year, 1950, Goodis retreats back to Philadelphia, living the life
of a recluse with his parents and younger brother Herbert. At night he breaks away and begins visiting
the black heartland of ghetto bars and nightclubs, drinking with obese black
women who seem to satisfy his cravings.
At that time paperbacks were replacing the pulps, and it was to this
market that Goodis turned, writing a dozen or so paperback originals for Gold
Medal and Lion throughout the 1950s. In these novels Goodis drew from his
experiences of low‑life in the ghettoes of Philadelphia and wrote about
losers, drunks, outcasts and derelicts.
Many of the books were about previously respected characters, now
disgraced and down on their luck ‑ a crooner in STREET OF NO RETURN, a
concert pianist in DOWN THERE, an airline pilot in CASSIDY'S GIRL, an artist in
BLACK FRIDAY, and a policeman in NIGHT SQUAD ‑ and could all reflect
Goodis's own perceived status at that time.
Other novels, such as STREET OF THE LOST and THE MOON IN THE GUTTER,
concern eternal Skid Row no‑hopers condemned to live and die in the lower
depths. These novels attract the attention of French readers, who doubtless find
in them some of the stark qualities of their own existential writers. In 1956 director Jacques Tourneur films
NIGHTFALL, and that same year a movie version of THE BURGLAR is released, with
a screenplay by Goodis, and starring Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield. (An inferior film of the book, called THE
BURGLARS, set in Greece and starring Jean‑Paul Belmondo and Omar Sharif,
is released in 1972.) French director
François Truffaut makes an acclaimed film version of DOWN THERE (which he calls
SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER) in 1960, starring Charles Aznavour as the pianist,
Eddie. Goodis's final Gold Medal book, NIGHT SQUAD, appears in 1961. He continues living at home, with his
schizophrenic brother Herbert, caring for his father until his death in 1963,
when he becomes the sole supporter of his mother. In 1965 he brings legal action against the producers of the
famous TV series THE FUGITIVE, convinced that they have stolen the idea from
his DARK PASSAGE. His mother's death in 1966 hits him hard, and he admits
himself into a psychiatric hospital. He
dies, aged 49, on 7 January 1967 at the Albert Einstein Medical Center. That same year his final novel SOMEBODY'S
DONE FOR is published by Avon in its Banner imprint. It's a well‑crafted work with a suspenseful plot, and seems
likely to have come from the earlier period of his writing. Following his death, nothing by Goodis is available in print in the USA
for twenty years. His books continue to
sell in France, in Gallimard's Série Noir, and a couple also appear in the UK,
from Priory Books, in the 1970s. Some
16 years after his death, in 1983, four of his best novels are reprinted in the
UK, in a Black Box Thrillers collection by Zomba. That same year, THE MOON IN THE GUTTER is filmed, with Nastassia
Kinski and Gérard Depardieu. It isn't
until 1987 that Goodis is republished in his own country, by the Black Lizard
Press of Barry Gifford (he of WILD AT HEART fame), and these editions continue
to be made available today by Random House's Vintage Crime imprint. David Goodis is remembered as a skilled writer, famous for literary
devices (known in the trade as "thing language", according to Mike
Wallington): "The empty room looked back at him," and "quiet
came in and sat down." In CASSIDY'S
GIRL, his unformed thoughts "stood on a little invisible shelf, looking
down at him." In NIGHT SQUAD Corey
Bradford's metal police badge talks to him, and in DARK PASSAGE there's the celebrated dialogue
sequence between Parry and his dead friend Fellsinger. Colour pervades several of the novels ‑
the green of NIGHT SQUAD, orange/yellow of DARK PASSAGE, and tan of THE
BURGLAR. Goodis was a unique and gifted
craftsman whose work deserves not to be forgotten. It is pleasing that many of his books are easily available once
more and that he is at last receiving some of the recognition he deserves. © 1995, Dave Moore
