From the author of Dark Passage and Shoot the Piano Player, a thriller about the dark ethics of crime, and the man unlucky enough to violate them.

With its chilling portrait of a doomed man sorting his way among the perverse loyalties of a criminal "family," Black Friday has all the earmarks of David Goodis's classics, Dark Passage and Shoot the Piano Player. It is a haunting and often devastating foray into a world where no one has anything left to lose and survival itself is an act of malice.



A dreamlike masterpiece of crime, honor, and perverse loyalty by the legendary author of Shoot the Piano Player.

Nat Harbin is a family man. His family happens to be a gang of burglars. Now Nat has met a woman so hypnotically seductive that he will leave his partners and his trade to possess her. But you don't get away from family that easily.

The Burglar has the hallmarks that made David Goodis one of the great practitioners of the hard-boiled crime novel: a haunting identification with life's losers, and a hero who finds out who he is only by betraying everything he believes in.



They say that a man needs a woman to go to hell with. Cassidy had two. One was Mildred, the wife who kept him chained with ties of fear and jealousy and paralyzing sexual need. The other was Doris, a frail angel with a 100-proof halo and a bottle instead of a harp. With those two, Cassidy found that the ride to hell could be twice as fast.

Cassidy's Girl has all the traits that made its author a virtuoso of the hard-boiled: a fiercely compelling ploy; characters who self-destruct in spectacularly unpredictable ways; and an insider's knowledge of all the routes to the bottom.



Popular Detective, September 1947
THE COP ON THE CORNER
by David Goodis
When racketeer Jimmie Renzelli was found bumped off in an alley, the murder wasn't as simple to solve as it looked!
5600 Words



Dark Passage (1946) is a novel by David Goodis which was the basis for the 1947 film noir Dark Passage.

Plot

Vincent Parry, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, escapes from prison and is taken in by Irene Jansen, an artist with an interest in his case. Helped by a friendly cabbie, Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon, thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real killer. He has difficulty staying hidden, in part because Madge Rapf, the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, and who has an unhealthy interest in Irene, keeps stopping by.



Originally published in The Lone Eagle in February of 1941, those familiar only with the introspective, minimalist narratives of Black Friday or The Blonde on the Street Corner are in for an eye-opening surprise. "Killer Ace" is chock full of action on every page - whizzing planes, streams of bullets, and broken jaws. Written ten months before Pearl Harbor, the story concerns an American student named Dane Kern studying physics at Oxford who enlisted in the British military because of his interest in aviation. As the story opens, he is the sole survivor of a disastrous mission in which the German pilot Von Krim killed everyone else in Kern's squadron. Nor is this the first time Von Krim and his crew have defeated the British pilots. Kern is convinced that someone must be giving the Germans advance information about their plans, and he thinks he has an idea who is behind it all...

Here are a few examples of Goodis' pen in action, including the sizzling first line:

"The German plane came hurtling out of the sky like a pain-crazed eagle. Trigger fingers jabbed death-filled lead through the air four thousand feet up. Von Krim's mouth twisted in a devilish grin. He looked like Satan himself as he dove for the Englishman's tail, raced a pattern of dots up the fuselage, and then shrieked in eerie delight as that death-line reached the cockpit. The English pilot slumped down in his seat, his brain riddled by bullets."

"They were fighting like madmen. The tears in their eyes were not tears of fright or horror. They were tears of sorrow, tears of rage, tears of vengeance. But the English flyers needed more than sobs to combat the ruthless von Krim and his squadron of devils."

"They went down like tall grass before a scythe, those Nazis."

Liven up your Sunday morning with "Killer Ace" by David Goodis, courtesy of PulpGen.



They gave him back his badge--and sent him down into the brutal throbbing heart of the slums.

From Publishers Weekly

Crooked ex-cop Corey Bradford turns out to be an ideal candidate for an underground police unit known as the Night Squad. This hard-boiled novel was first published by Fawcett in 1961.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"David Goodis has an originality of naturalism, a creatively compelling vividness of detail." --San Francisco Chronicle

"David Goodis is the mystery man of hard-boiled fiction." --Geoffrey O'Brien

From the Trade Paperback edition.



“An almost perfect book, spare, balanced, and inexplicably moving.”—Geoffrey O’Brien

Jim Vanning has an identity crisis. Is he an innocent artist who just happens to have some very dangerous people interested in him? Or is he a killer on the lam from his last murder—with a satchel worth over $300,000 in tow?

Relentlessly focused, Nightfall may be David Goodis’ most accomplished novel. It is a fiendishly constructed maze, filled with unpredictable pitfalls and human predators whose authenticity only makes them more terrifying.

David Goodis (1917–1967), a former pulp, radio, and Hollywood script writer, is now recognized as a leading author of crime fiction. Besides sojourns in New York City and Hollywood, he lived primarily in Philadelphia.



If there’s anything better than a David Goodis book title, it’s a David Goodis first line. And the opening to his 1952 novel Of Tender Sin (Gold Medal #226) is certainly among his best:

“It began with a shattered dream.”

Subtly despondent, it perfectly sets the tenor for the story to come, in which reality drifts in and out of focus, and the past and present are merged in a nightmare of psychological trauma. Characteristic of Goodis, the novel is largely introspective, and we readers share in the protagonist’s melancholy and sorrow. Tension derives not from action, but from emotion. It is the possibility for crime – the specter of murder, malice, and infidelity, that lies dormant in every gesture – rather than its execution, that drives the plot. This unique approach to plotting is what separates Goodis from most other writers, and also what makes summarizing his novels so difficult.

Alvin Darby has a secure job as an insurance salesman. He has a beautiful wife of six years who loves him. He doesn’t drink (unlike most other Goodis protagonists, who are alcoholics like the writer himself). His only vice seems to be that he smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, but that doesn’t worry him too much. So why does he suddenly awake in the middle of the night, thinking he heard a burglar? Well, he’s not sure. Maybe he did. And maybe he didn’t. So he looks at his wife, asleep. They love each other. But he hasn’t slept with her in weeks, and has no desire to. And then there is the matter of that burglar. Maybe he should get up and look around the house. Something seems to be beckoning him away from his wife, and out into the darkness, deeper into the unknown, further into the recesses of his subconscious. Somewhere, something is troubling him. But he can’t admit to himself what it is.

And then he overhears his wife on the phone with another man and is convinced she is cheating on him. So begins his spiral of paranoia and self-destruction as Alvin begins stalking the streets of snowy Philadelphia at night, pursuing old flames, experimenting with drugs, and recalling foggy, guilt-laden memories of his sister. Her platinum blonde hair haunts him like a strobing beacon in the fog: every woman’s hair he sees changes to that immutable hue, like some reoccurring dream. It’s yet another piece of Alvin’s psychological puzzle that he can’t quite put together.

Of Tender Sin is among the most reticently devastating of Goodis’ novels. Like Samuel Barber’s elegiac Adagio, the novel’s pacing is like a funeral parade yet it never loses its tension. Goodis describes in empathetic detail the slow dissolve of Alvin’s morals, emotions, and psychology, until he is barely a recognizable human from the inside. And this is what is so great about Goodis’ writing – his ability to put us right inside the character’s mind, to feel his every emotion, to share in his every memory. There is a poetic lucidity, a surreal clarity, to Goodis that is totally singular. The horror is not in the violence of the crimes, but the startling realism of the characters’ mindsets. Reading his novels, we can easily imagine ourselves in the same situations, making the same decisions, suffering the same fears.

Misery certainly loves company, and I’ve never come across any better company than David Goodis. But with him, it’s not so much just wallowing in another’s despair, but in finding a voice for our own quiet desperation. International conspiracies and mafia bosses never figure into his novels. Instead, Goodis’ characters are troubled by bad relationships, mundane jobs, loss of will, uncertainty of purpose, uncontrollable feelings of helplessness, and the terror of having nowhere to escape to. These anxieties are not so far from our everyday life, and ultimately this is what makes Goodis’ books so affecting and so unsettling to read.

Perhaps those of you who haven’t read Goodis are wondering why I want to read something that sounds so depressing? Those of you who have read Goodis know the answer. When I tell my friends about Goodis they are bewildered as to how bleak his books sound. All I can say is this: his writing is immaculate and evocative, and so full of feeling as few books are. If you haven’t read him yet, please go to your local independent bookstore and pick up anything they have of his.

And now for my favorite quotes…I’ll try to refrain from quoting the entire book. Really, I thought about it… For those wanting more, they can head over to Hard Case Crime to read the first chapter of The Wounded and The Slain, another excellent read.

“He stared past her, at the door window, and saw the white fury of the snowstorm. As it raged, it seemed to beckon…”

“A cat came out of an alley, took a look at all the snow, and went back in. Farther on up the street a fat man, aproned and puffing, emerged from a restaurant and whiffed the cold air and gazed yearningly at the sky. As though even the dreams were up there, much too far away.”

“His mind was vacant now, and the only thing he knew was that he didn’t care. He walked through the pitch-black chasm of somewhere past five in the morning, his coat unbuttoned, the muffler missing, the snow inside his shoes and melting there, but no awareness of it, no feeling.”

“An hour later the pencil remained untouched and the yellow paper was a platter made of yellow glass. Beneath the glass a fleet of little white boats had gone down under the guns of an unseen armada, and there they were, quiet on the bottom of the placid lake.”

“Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.”

“It was very fast, that first time. They were on the couch, and then they were off the couch and it was all over. It was like jumping out the window and landing on the street. A quick ride, just like that.”

“Then all the nights continuing in a timeless path where there was only the green flame, the silver-yellow of her hair dripping over the edge of the couch, dangling over the dark floor that didn’t seem to be a floor at all, just a dark emptiness.”

“His head was bent low over the desktop and his eyes were closed. There was no feeling of being in any special place, and he might have been kneeling in an unlit cave, or seated in a smoky room where there were no faces, just a lot of eyes that looked at him. Or merely drifting on a slab of ice in a quiet region of white emptiness.”

“But still he ran, begging the street to show him a police car, or a policeman, or anyone to whom he could shout for aid. But all the street showed him was a mongrel under a corner lamp, unsteady on four shivering legs, trying to make up its mind between three garbage cans.”



Once upon a time Eddie played conert piano to reverent audiences at Carnegie Hall. Now he bangs out honky-tonk for drunks in a dive in Philadelphia. But then two people walk into Eddie's life--the first promising Eddie a future, the other dragging him back into a treacherous past.

Shoot the Piano Player is a bittersweet and nerve-racking exploration of different kinds of loyalty: the kind a man owes his family, no matter how bad that family is; the kind a man owes a woman; and, ultimately, the loyalty he owes himself. The result is a moody thriller that, like the best hard-boiled fiction, carries a moral depth charge.



“David Goodis is the mystery man of hardboiled fiction.”—Geoffrey O’Brien

In Street of No Return, we meet the pathetic figure of Whitey. Once upon a time Whitey was a crooner with a million-dollar voice and a standing invitation from any woman who heard him use it. Until he had the bad luck to fall for Celia. And then nothing would ever be the same.

In Street of No Return, David Goodis works the magic that made him one of the most distinctive voices in hard-boiled fiction, creating a claustrophobic universe in which wounded men and women collide with cataclysmic force.



THEIR VACATION IN PARADISE BECAME A DESCENT INTO HELL

Their marriage on the rocks, James and Cora Bevan flew to Jamaica for a last chance at patching things up. But in the slums of Kingston James found himself fighting for his life – while Cora found her own path to destruction, in the arms of another man.

Available for the first time in more than 50 years, this lost novel by legendary pulp author David Goodis is a stunning, shocking tale of cruelty, danger, desperation…and the possibility of redemption.