Pulp Pages spotlights the best of hardboiled and noir fiction of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.
“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler
“David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes,” mystery writer Ed Gorman once wrote. "He was a sad, suffering guy and he was able to get that sadness and suffering down on paper."
It was almost as if he couldn’t wait for early ambition to dissipate so he could take up pen and pine. Born in Philadelphia in 1917, he graduated from Temple University and published his first novel, a literary work entitled Retreat From Oblivion, when he was 21. Embarking on a more pragmatic and profitable route after its commercial underperformance, Goodis started to turn in prodigious amounts of stories to the pulp magazines, taking up writing novels once again in 1946 with Dark Passage. Made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Dark Passage became Goodis’ dark passage, in effect, to Los Angeles as a scriptwriter and uncharacteristic Hollywood hobnobber. That is, until, homesick and nursing some wounds from an earlier brief and soured marriage, he retreated in 1950 back into ostensible oblivion to the family home in Philadelphia, where he lived with his parents.
Making a living now meant turning to the paperback publishers, including Fawcett Gold Medal, which had just started publishing paperback originals rather than hardcover reprints. As one of the reliable "Gold Medal boys" that included John D. MacDonald and Bruno Fischer, Goodis wrote such forbidding works as Cassidy’s Girl and Of Tender Sin, and for Lion Books such noirish novels as The Burglar and Blonde on the Street Corner, in addition to 1954’s Black Friday. The ever-prolific Goodis imbued these books with his own inherent melancholy and despair; the downtown street life seediness he was drawn to; and such autobiographical details as his relationship with his schizophrenic brother, the after-effects of his divorce, and love of jazz and boxing.
“Paperbackdom’s bard of Skid Row, poet laureate of the American Failure Story” — as writer Lee Server portrays Goodis in Over My Dead Body — died at the age of 49 in 1967. And if his despondent succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver had indeed rendered his distressing but self-deprecating writings as prolonging-the-agony “suicide notes” of sorts, Black Friday’s tense, tortured and ultimately tragic storyline is signaled in and sustained from the start, from the very first line: “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him.”
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