Black Friday And Selected Stories by
David Goodis
pbk out March 06
(Serpent's Tail)
at £8.99
Crime fiction publishing event of the year, I'd say. And here's why.
It was not until 1968, in an obituary in film magazine Sight and Sound (and a
year after the death of David Goodis in Philadelphia just short of his fiftieth
birthday) that I became aware that he had written short stories. Like many
general readers of my generation, I had known him first as the source novelist
for Francois Truffaut's exhilarating second film Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960),
based upon Down There, Goodis's 1956 novel. Later, in the flea-pit cinemas
of suburban Nottingham, I would track down such movies as Delmer Daves's
Dark Passage, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall and Paul
Wendkos's The Burglar, all based on novels of the same name by Goodis.
Quite a few of the novels have resurfaced since then, but very few of the short
stories. Notable exceptions include the bleakly romantic Black Pudding (in
Jack Adrian's and Bill Pronzini's Hard-Boiled anthology, 1995) and the
Sahara noir of Caravan to Tarim (in Maxim Jakubowski's Mammoth Book
of Pulp Action, 2001). Both appear again in this groundbreaking volume
which also collects another ten stories dating from 1942 to 1958, along with
Black Friday, a novel reprinted from 1954. Black Friday is classic Goodis , the pre-eminent noir novelist in my view, and
features many of his tics and obsessions. Set in a bleak Philadelphia winter,
Hart is a typical Goodis character: a loner, down-on-his-luck ("once he had
owned a yacht"), reduced to stealing a $40 overcoat to ward off the cold.
Picked up (via a series of impeccably noir events) by a gang of professional
crooks planning their next big job, Hart aims to pass himself off as a fellow-
professional, take his slice and move on. But he has reckoned without the
internal tensions of the group, inflamed by his arrival. Anyone who doubts
Goodis's credentials as a writer should read chapters 6 to 9 of Black Friday
as he unfussily yet unerringly pinpoints the developing three-way relationship
between Hart, the voluptuous Frieda, and Charley, the leader of the gang.
The stories too are eye-opening. Arranged in chronological order and
concentrating on the crime stories, long-term Goodis fan
Adrian Wootton's selection ranges from 1942 to 1958, and features six stories
under Goodis's own name, and six more under three of the six pseudonyms
Goodis claimed as his own.
The stories vary considerably in content, if not always in tone. There are the
baroque excesses of what might otherwise be two conventional detective
stories, featuring the far from conventional police detective Ricco Pasquale
Maguire ("his mother's genealogy went back...to a rake-hell prince of the
Borgias. He could write a limerick in Sanskrit – or talk East Side Brooklyn...").
There is the tortured romanticism of The Blue Sweetheart in the unlikely
setting of Colombo, Ceylon, the chilling irony of Never Too Old to Burn, and
more. All are most certainly worth reading, sometimes because of the
frequent over-writing. Best of all are the three Goodis stories that close the
book: Professional Man, Black Pudding and The Plunge – spare, hard-bitten,
fatalistic, the essence of Goodis.
In addition, you lucky people, the book features probably the most
comprehensive listing of Goodis short stories in existence. Mike Ashley and
others including Wootton himself have identified 250 stories which, they
believe, can be attributed to Goodis, under either his own name or under the
other pen-names that he used. Also listed are 38 stories by Ray P. Shotwell, a
publisher's 'house' name, believed to include contributions from Goodis. It's
an unbeatable package that will be irresistible to both fans of Goodis and
those wanting to know what the fuss is all about
Perhaps now Serpent's Tail can be persuaded to buy (and translate) Phillipe
Garnier's 1984 biography, still unavailable in English after all these years.
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Black Friday And Selected Stories by
David Goodis
