It’s no wonder that when the Philadelphia pulp writer David Goodis died in 1967, none of his 17 novels were in print in this country but 12 were still in circulation in France. To the French, Goodis was–and still is–a dearly loved hard-boiled, hard-drinking pop existentialist, unrecognized for his literary genius and snubbed by the fame he pursued ever since the publication of his first book in 1938.
While Goodis’s return to print hasn’t sparked the cultish enthusiasm the recent Jim Thompson revival triggered, his books outdo Thompson’s for their tangled plots, brooding characters, and–atypical for the genre–singular women. Like Thompson, he featured social outcasts caught in downward spirals of crime and debauchery. But while Thompson created seedy amoralists set in insidious, irreversible action, Goodis created characters full of moral confusion–they’re often disgraced professionals or falsely accused criminals cornered into wrongdoing, they shoulder burdensome loyalties to friends, and they lose themselves in doomed but fervent love affairs. Some of Goodis’s best dialogue, layered with subtext, is exchanged between kamikaze lovers negotiating free-falls into infatuation.
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Goodis’s overambitious first novel, Retreat From Oblivion (1938), was published the summer after he finished his BA in journalism at Philadelphia’s Temple University. The novel’s soupy blend of historical fiction and psychological melodrama didn’t sell, so Goodis quickly shifted to pulp magazines, where he made a reasonable living cranking out World War I adventure and aviation stories. In 1946 he published his second novel, Dark Passage, a psychological thriller that would become his best-known book. Warner Brothers bought the movie rights that year, cast Bogart and Bacall, and hired Goodis as a screenwriter–at a salary of a thousand dollars a week. The 30-year-old author had hit pay dirt.
Goodis’s leading men were similarly adaptable. One of his best novels, Nightfall (1947), stars a well-educated graphic artist named Vanning who gets framed by a pair of thieves running from a bank heist. Hiding out in New York, Vanning is hounded by the heisters–in search of the misplaced loot–and trailed by a police detective named Fraser, who delays the arrest on a hunch that Vanning is innocent. Vanning falls in love with the comely stool pigeon the thieves recruit to snare him, but he survives by thinking like a criminal and triumphs in one of Goodis’s few happy endings.
Like naughty kids surrendering to inevitable spankings, Goodis’s protagonists brave hard luck and brutal violence with a fatalistic attitude. According to Garnier, Goodis shared his characters’ masochistic streak. “He had a kink about enormously fat black women–he loved to be abused and humiliated by them; it was the only way he could get his rocks off. I think it all stems from his brief marriage in the 40s to a redheaded model named Elaine, whom I was never able to locate. She was a Jewish American princess and he was an oddball; they were totally incompatible. He called their marriage a nightmare, and she later came to represent a type of woman he despised.”
By contrast, his villainous women are every bit as tough as the men, and they often prove it with their fists. Night Squad (1961), another minor venture with a tediously alveolate plot, includes a female bouncer who knocks down “a hairy-chested, bulky-shouldered construction worker” in a single swipe. “She weighed a good two-forty, compressed into five feet six inches,” Goodis writes. “There was no loose fat; it was all solid beef. It amounted to a living missile, braced and aimed, ready for any man who figured he could tamper with her and get away with it.”
