David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America)

by David Goodis

  1939

  First novel Retreat from Oblivion is published by Dutton. Goodis moves to New York City, where he lives in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side. Starts to write for pulp magazines, including Wings, Battle Birds, Fighting Aces, The Lone Eagle, Gangland Detective Stories, True Gangster Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, 10 Story Western, Air War, New Detective Magazine, Double-Action Detective, Popular Sports Magazine, Sinister Stories, Thrilling Western, Dime Western, Captain Combat, G-Men Detective, and Dime Detective, among others. His stories appear under his own name (or rarely as Dave Goodis) and probably also under various pseudonyms, including Lance Kermit, Logan C. Claybourne, Ray. P. Shotwell, and David Crewe. (In keeping with standard pulp publishing practices, these pseudonyms likely served additionally as recurrent “house pseudonyms” for other writers in the magazines where Goodis’s stories frequently appeared, the pseudonyms in some cases pre-dating his own initial appearances, making a thorough accounting of his magazine writing impossible. Goodis will continue to publish in pulp magazines at least into 1947, and perhaps through the early-to-mid-1950s. Goodis maintained that he published writing under seven names, and estimated that in the early 1940s he wrote over five million words in five years.)

  1940–45

  In New York Goodis also writes for radio programs including “House of Mystery,” “Superman,” and “Hop Harrigan,” for the latter of which he is ultimately Script Editor and an associate producer. When in Philadelphia, Goodis maintains an association with the Neighborhood Players, where he works alongside actress Grayson Hall (Shirley Grossman), who will remain his close friend for many years. Philadelphia and New Jersey friends include Paul Garabedian, Frank Ford (also known as Ed Felbin), Jane Melgin (later Jane Fried), Irving “Bud” Fried, Joe Schor, Monroe Schwartz, Leonard Cobrin, Dick Levy, Stanton Cooper, Ruth Burnat (later Ruth Norkin and Ruth Wendkos), Dick Levy, Phyllis Schulman, Marvin and Omi Yollin, and Herb Gross.

  1942

  During a short stay in Los Angeles, Goodis works on treatment, “Destination Unknown,” for Universal. Visits Mexico, and is particularly enamored by the bullfights in Tijuana.

  1943

  On October 17, Goodis marries Elaine Astor (1917–1986), formerly of Philadelphia, at the Ohev Shalom Congregation, in Los Angeles.

  1945

  In December Warner Brothers acquires film rights to his novel Dark Passage for $25,000. Elaine Astor Goodis files for divorce in Philadelphia.

  1946

  Following serialization in The Saturday Evening Post, Dark Passage is published by Julian Messner. Warner Brothers signs Goodis to a term contract for an initial year plus five options for renewal. His starting salary is $750.00 a week, with 5 step-increases that ultimately would raise his salary to $2,000 a week. Contract specifies a six-month annual working period at Warner Brothers, with six months off to write fiction, and Goodis will spend part of each year in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Publishes story, “Caravan to Tarim,” in Colliers (October 26). Goodis and wife divorce.

  1947

  Release of Warner Brothers film of Dark Passage, directed and written by Delmer Daves, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Publication of novels Nightfall (Julian Messner) and Behold This Woman (Appleton). With James Gunn, writes screenplay for Warner Brothers film The Unfaithful, based on W. Somerset Maugham story “The Letter,” directed by Vincent Sherman. At Warner Brothers Goodis also works on story treatments and scripts, “Within These Gates,” “Somewhere in the City,” “The Fall of Valor,” “The Persian Cat,” and “Up Till Now.” Comments on “Black Dahlia” murder case for Los Angeles Evening Herald Express (February 6). In early April, visits Boston with Delmer Daves, producer Jerry Wald, and art director Leo Kuter, scouting locations at historic sites for “Up Till Now,” supposedly completing the film treatment on the train from Hollywood to Boston. (“Up Till Now,” Daves remarks, “is aimed at giving people a look at themselves and their heritage. We want to show people what the Founding Fathers gave us to live up to and we want to analyze the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in terms of personal problems today.” The film will not be made, but Goodis will recast elements of the work for his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner.) Goodis directs “amateur theatricals” in Los Angeles for the Vermont Players of the Sinai Young Peoples’ League, including productions of Noel Coward’s Fumed Oak and Walter MacQuade’s Exclusive Model at the Sinai Temple at West 4th Street and New Hampshire. During his periods in Hollywood, Goodis variously sleeps on the sofas of friends (including lawyer Allan Norkin, to whom he pays $4.00 a week), resides at the rundown Oban Hotel, or rents an apartment at the elegant Hollywood Tower Apartments. Norkin recalled Goodis receiving phone calls from Ann Sheridan, Lizabeth Scott, and Lauren Bacall. Goodis becomes friendly with screenwriter Samuel Fuller, who many years later will adapt and direct a film based on his 1954 novel Street of No Return. When in Philadelphia, Goodis lives with his parents and brother. In Hollywood, Goodis develops a reputation for personal eccentricity and practical jokes.

  1948

  Works on story treatment “Of Missing Persons” for Warner Brothers, which grants him rights to publish the work as a novel. His Warner Brothers activities conclude in June.

  1949–50

  Goodis is hired by producer Monte Proser to adapt Jon Edgar Webb’s prison novel, Four Steps to the Wall, for a film, and in writing the screenplay he apparently retains only the original names of characters, creating his own story. While working on the script, Goodis lives at the Crown Hill Hotel, a Los Angeles flophouse, although he apparently is earning $1,000 a week from Proser. Disappointed by Goodis’s reshaping of his novel, Webb takes over adaptation of Four Steps to the Wall. Goodis stops dividing his year between Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and returns to Philadelphia to reside with his parents and brother, now living (since the early 1940s) at 6305 North 11th Street in the East Oak Lane neighborhood. Gallimard publishes first French translation of Goodis, Cauchemar (Dark Passage), in the Série Blême. (His writing will attract growing interest among European aficionados of crime fiction.) Philadelphia haunts over the coming years will include Club Harlem, the Blue Note, the Blue Horizon (for boxing matches), and Superior Billiards. Because of Dark Passage and his stint in Hollywood, Goodis would remain something of a Philadelphia semi-celebrity, and the occasional subject of newspaper gossip columns (“David Goodis, author of “Dark Passage,” out funning Club Harlem-way, squiring fine-framed and ‘tractive sepia misses.”)

  1950

  Publishes novel Of Missing Persons. Broadcast of Sure As Fate (CBS), television production of Nightfall, directed by Yul Brynner.

  1951

  Gold Medal publishes novel Cassidy’s Girl; it is a paperback original, like all of his subsequent novels. Broadcast of Studio One (CBS) television production of Nightfall, directed by John Peyser. Around this time Goodis starts relationship with artist Selma Hortense Burke, which will last until 1956.

  1952

  Publishes novels Street of the Lost (Gold Medal) and Of Tender Sin (Gold Medal). Broadcast of Lux Video Theater (CBS) episode, “Ceylon Treasure,” based on forthcoming Goodis story “The Blue Sweetheart,” directed by Buzz Kulik, with Ronald Long, Audrey Meadows, and Edmond O’Brien.

  1953

  Publishes novels The Moon in the Gutter (Gold Medal) and The Burglar (Lion). Publishes stories in Manhunt, “The Blue Sweetheart” (April), “Professional Man” (October), and “Black Pudding” (December).

  1954

  Publishes novels The Blonde on the Street Corner (Lion), Black Friday (Lion), and Street of No Return (Gold Medal).

  1955

  Publishes novel The Wounded and the Slain (Gold Medal), the Jamaican setting reflecting Goodis’s trip there. Writes screenplay for film version of The Burglar, directed by Paul Wendkos and featuring Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield, Martha Vickers, Stewart Bradley, Peter Capell, and Mickey Shaughnessy; the film is shot on location in Philadelphia during the summer,
but release is delayed. Release of Seccion Desparecidos or Section des disparus, Argentinian/French film based on Of Missing Persons, directed by Pierre Chenal.

  1956

  Publishes novel Down There (Gold Medal). Broadcast of Lux Video Theater episode, “The Unfaithful,” based on 1947 Warner Brothers film written by Goodis and James Gunn, directed by Earl Eby, with Jan Sterling.

  1957

  Publishes novel Fire in the Flesh (Gold Medal). Release of Nightfall, film directed by Jacques Tourneur, with Aldo Ray, Brian Keith, Anne Bancroft, Jocelyn Brando, Frank Albertson, and Rudy Bond; and of The Burglar, following Jayne Mansfield’s success in The Girl Can’t Help It and The Wayward Bus.

  1958

  Publishes story “The Plunge” in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (October).

  1960

  Release of Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player), film directed by François Truffaut based on Down There, with Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, and Nicole Berger. Goodis meets Truffaut in New York. Grove Press reissues the novel under the title Shoot the Piano Player, with an enthusiastic blurb by Henry Miller: “Truffaut’s film was so good I had doubts the book could equal it. I have just read the novel and I think it is even better than the film.” Broadcast of episode of Bourbon Street Beat (ABC), “False Identity,” based on Of Missing Persons, directed by William J. Hole, Jr. Dick Carroll, Goodis’s editor at Gold Medal, dies, and Carroll’s successor, Knox Burger, is less hospitable to his fiction.

  1961

  Publishes novel Night Squad (Gold Medal), the last book to be published during Goodis’s lifetime.

  1963

  Writes teleplay, “An Out for Oscar,” based on a novel by Henry Kane, for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Goodis’s father dies. Herbert Goodis is confined to Norristown State Hospital for severe psychiatric problems.

  1965

  Publishes story, “The Sweet Taste,” in Manhunt (January). Goodis initiates lawsuit against United Artists Television, Inc. and ABC claiming that the television show “The Fugitive” (1963–1967) infringed on copyright of his novel Dark Passage.

  1966

  Goodis’s mother dies, and he is briefly hospitalized at the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center (later known as the Belmont Center for Comprehensive Treatment). According to his friend Monroe Schwartz, Goodis is mugged leaving Linton’s Restaurant on North Broad Street, and hit on the head when he refuses to surrender his wallet, the episode leaving him weak, frail, and with a chronically bloodshot right eye. Goodis also informs members of his family that he has a “coronary condition.” Between illnesses he gives two depositions in New York for lawsuit involving “The Fugitive” and Dark Passage. (In 1970 Federal District Court will dismiss complaint about “The Fugitive” against United Artists Television, Inc. on grounds that since Goodis had published installments of Dark Passage in The Saturday Evening Post without a copyright notice appearing in the magazine, the work was in the public domain. Goodis Estate appeals, and Court of Appeals reverses lower court decision, remanding case for trial. In 1972 Goodis Estate accepts $12,000 in full settlement of lawsuit against United Artists Television.) Jean-Luc Godard includes character named David Goodis (played by Yves Afonso) in Made in U.S.A.

  1967

  David Goodis dies at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia on January 7. Death certificate lists “cerebral vascular accident” as cause of death. Funeral on January 10, at Rosenberg’s Raphael-Sacks Funeral Home, and burial in Roosevelt Memorial Park. Goodis wills his personal effects and the bulk of his $220,000 estate in trust for his brother Herbert, along with $30,000 to “our faithful family employee” Camelia Edmonds. Novel Somebody’s Done For published posthumously by Banner.

  Note on the Texts

  This volume contains five novels by David Goodis: Dark Passage (1946), Nightfall (1947), The Burglar (1953), The Moon in the Gutter (1953), and Street of No Return (1954).

  Goodis’s second novel, Dark Passage, was published eight years after his first, Retreat from Oblivion (1939). In the interim he had devoted himself to writing prolifically for pulp magazines and radio. Dark Passage was originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (July 20–September 7, 1946); Warner Brothers purchased movie rights even before the novel was serialized. Dark Passage was published in hardcover by Julian Messner (New York, 1946). A second edition, tied to the 1947 release of the film version starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, was published in the same year by World (Cleveland). A hardcover edition appeared in England from Heinemann (London, 1947). In 1948 an American paperback was published by Dell (New York) in their “map-back” series devoted chiefly to crime novels. The text published here is that of the 1946 Julian Messner edition.

  Nightfall was also published by Julian Messner, in 1947, and in England by Heinemann in 1948. It was reprinted in paperback by Lion Books (New York) under the title The Dark Chase in 1953; Lion issued the book again in 1956 under the restored title Nightfall to coincide with the release of the Columbia film version. The text published here is that of the 1947 Julian Messner edition.

  Starting with Cassidy’s Girl in 1951, all of Goodis’s novels were published as paperback originals. The Burglar was published in February 1953 by Lion Books, whose editor-in-chief was Arnold Hano. The text published here is that of the 1953 Lion edition.

  Gold Medal, a paperback imprint of Fawcett, published The Moon in the Gutter in November 1953, the fourth Goodis novel to appear from the house under the editorship of Richard Carroll. The text published here is that of the 1953 Gold Medal edition.

  Street of No Return, another Gold Medal title, appeared in September 1954. A second Gold Medal edition, textually identical but with a different cover appeared in 1961. The text published here is that of the 1954 Gold Medal edition.

  This volume presents the texts of the original printings and typescripts chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce nontextual features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features and are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 4.7, tary; 30.15, patched her; 36.32, wrapping; 55.28, beside; 65.6, street; 87.23, Maybe; 122.26, Amercan; 147.13, Parry‘s; 153.30, State Park; 206.34, a extremely; 211.2, worth while; 215.10, that,’; 227.35, slipt; 242.2, hand.; 270.19, windup; 276.27, me?’; 283.33, more.; 288.31, Vanning; 289.19, right.; 290.21, approximeately; 290.37, button beside; 313.29, said.¶; 316.1, Isn’t is,; 320.29, cigarete; 324.20, smile “I’m; 330.7, of a; 330.19, shoved; 333.1, frabric; 334.12, youself; 362.10, three forty; 362.18, gray; 394.23–24, of quaking; 403.25, Ciy look; 405.28, though Baylock; 443.24, with gun.; 451.25, Charlie; 458.10–11, pitch black; 485.4, solemly.; 489.27, tonight?”; 497.21, Ukranians; 499.11, safe,; 503.4, poor; 510.13, door step; 515.29, internationally minded; 516.1, asked; 516.10, this his; 540.11, said “I; 543.15, newpaper.; 543.29, same from; 550.8, was “Of; 560.20, “what; 569.10, said.; 570.37, told me; 571.25, tall bony; 574.20, Street the; 575.3, Channing the; 588.6, it.”; 590.2, matter of fact; 596.22, anwer; 608.19, he heard; 612.17, it.; 615.22, watcha; 642.9, Scotch grain; 651.10–11, Of maybe; 679.35, his eyes.; 680.24, no no; 687.4, shrugged,; 689.17, Its; 693.18–19, saying.; 696.34, have here; 716.17, “All right.”; 718.15, hesistated; 750.10, is was; 753.40, made it; 754.9, “Goddam; 786.19, Whitney.

  Notes

  In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the present volume; the line count includes titles and headings but not blank lines. No note is made for material found in standard reference works. For additional information and references to other studies, see Philippe Garnier, Goodis: La Vie en Noir et Blanc (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984); David Goodis, Black Friday & Selected Stories, ed. with introduction by Adrian Wooton (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006); David Goodis, Street of No Return, introduction by Robert Polito (Lakewood,
Colorado: Millipede Press, 2007); Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995); Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (2nd edition, New York: Da Capo, 1997); James Sallis, Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson—David Goodis—Chester Himes (New York: Gryphon Books, 1993); and David Goodis: To a Pulp, written and directed by Larry Withers (On Air Video, 2010). A range of material relating to Goodis can be found at www.davidgoodis.com. The editor would like to thank the Philadelphia Historical Society, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and especially Lou Boxer for his generosity and insight.

  DARK PASSAGE

  29.25–27 Every Tub . . . Out the Window] Recordings by the Count Basie Orchestra; all were released on the Decca label, 1937–38, with the exception of “Lester Leaps In” (featuring Lester Young), which was released by Columbia in 1939.

  35.18 Shorty George] Recorded by Count Basie for Decca in November 1938.

  36.18 Buck Clayton] Wilbur “Buck” Clayton (1911–1991), trumpet player for the Count Basie Orchestra, 1937–43.

  45.14 Holiday for Strings] Instrumental hit (1944) by David Rose and His Orchestra.

  49.17–18 Is your trip really necessary?] Variations of the phrase were used by the American and British governments as slogans during World War II.

  104.35 Sent for You Yesterday And Here You Come Today] Count Basie recording, featuring Jimmy Rushing as vocalist, recorded in February 1938.

  176.2 Kasserine Pass] Site of a battle fought in Tunisia in February 1943, in which American troops were routed by German forces commanded by Erwin Rommel.

  NIGHTFALL

  199.19 Jimmy Kelly’s] Cabaret, formerly a speakeasy, at 181 Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village, billed as “The Montmartre of New York.”

  202.9 The Book of Knowledge] Multivolume series originally published in England in 1908 as The Children’s Encyclopedia, and in the United States as The Book of Knowledge from 1912.