Pulp Poem of the Week

She said,
“I didn’t ask you
to wait for me.”

“I wasn’t waiting,”
he said.
“I just had
no place to go,
that’s all.”

     David Goodis
     Down There
     1956

Pulp Poem of the Week

fifteen dollars for a broken jaw,
thirty for a fractured pelvis, and a
hundred for the complete job

     David Goodis
     “Professional Man”
     1953 

Pulp Poem of the Week

You want it all for free,
don’t you?
But the thing is,
you can’t get it for free.
You wanna learn about a person,
it costs you.
And the more you learn,
the more it costs.
Like digging a well,
the deeper you go,
the more expenses you got.
And sometimes it's a helluva lot more
than you can afford.
   
     David Goodis
     Down There
     1956

Pulp Poem of the Week

a stream of

pleasant sound

that seemed

to be saying,

Nothing matters.

          David Goodis

          Down There

          1956

Book Review: David Goodis, Down There [a.k.a. Shoot the Piano Player] (1956)

Why do so many readers rank David Goodis so highly in the pantheon of noir? My theory goes like this: His best books, including Down There, are remarkable primarily for their restraint. Goodis does his best writing when he doesn’t overtax his talent by trying to do too much. Thus, good Goodis gives you no complicated criminal plots, no overwrought sexual hijinks. He’s simple and he’s bleak, and therefore he gets credit for a kind of noir purity and for a corresponding artistic ambition. But in this realm, art happens only when character happens, and Down There’s characters are thin. The most notably thin is protagonist Eddie Lynn, who is more husk than human. In fact, Eddie has cultivated his huskness as a psychic defense against his painful past. His response to most everything that goes on around him is an empty smile. Eventually, of course, Eddie is forced into substantially more action than this, but, as is typically the case with Goodis, as the action accelerates, the artistry deteriorates. One of Goodis’ great strengths, however, is righting himself on the final page and ending on a perfect note. Grade: B+

Pulp Poem of the Week

The men

with dirty faces

and calloused hands

said nothing.

David Goodis

The Blonde on the Street Corner

1954

Book Review: David Goodis, The Blonde on the Street Corner (1954)

Not much happens in The Blonde on the Street Corner, which, I suppose, is part of the point. Empty characters with empty lives. Sometimes they strive for something better, but most of the time it's not worth the trouble. After all, it won't ever amount to much. Goodis does his job by staying out of the way. Prone to overwriting himself into a mess, he keeps it simple this time. Grade: B

Pulp Poem of the Week

As he took his woman,

the fire was solely his own fire

and there was the sordid and dismal feeling,

and finally the downright horrible feeling,

of being alone in the bed.

David Goodis

Cassidy's Girl

1951

Book Review: David Goodis, Cassidy's Girl (1951)

David Goodis continues to disappoint me. Cassidy's Girl is the best of the three Goodis novels I have read this year. Indeed, it could have been the noir masterpiece that it strives to be (as could have The Moon in the Gutter), but in my reading Goodis simply does not have the writerly chops to pull it off.

Of course, one should not expect polished prose from any writer of paperback originals--writers like Goodis cranked out novels and stories as fast as they could roll blank sheets into their typewriters, and readers should accept that their writing will not always be deathless. But Goodis is less deathless than most, and the problems with his sometimes fumbling prose are brought into sharp relief by the modesty of his plots. To his credit, Goodis strives to build his books around nuanced characters, but to do this successfully requires a precision that he cannot muster. In Cassidy's Girl, he is more or less in control of his material until the final chapter, and then the wheels fly off. His halting attempts to describe moments of epiphanic discovery result in such nightmarish sentences as this:

The next thing in his mind was the start of another discovery, but before he could concentrate on it, his attention was drawn to Haney Kenrick.

Egad. And I would argue that the novel's plotting collapses in its final chapter as well, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will keep that rant to myself.

In the end, Goodis' failures might be seen as the result of unusually high ambition in an author of noir PBOs. Few authors of paperback originals attempted to portray their characters with the same emotional depth. By comparison, Jim Thompson is also not much of a prose stylist, but the wild depravity of his plots hardly gives readers a chance to notice. Goodis, however, in attempting more subtle effects, leaves his writing too naked for observation. Grade: C+

Pulp Poem of the Week

He tried to hate them because

they were enjoying themselves.

He collected some hate,

aimed it, and tossed it,

then knew right away

it was just a boomerang.

There was no one to hate

but himself.

David Goodis

The Wounded and the Slain

1955

Book Review: David Goodis, The Wounded and the Slain (1955)

Bad things happen after a Yale graduate marries a hopelessly frigid woman. Thus, depending on your point of view, The Wounded and the Slain is a cautionary tale about either premarital abstinence or Ivy League schools (or maybe both). Grade: C

Book Review: David Goodis, The Moon in the Gutter (1953)

David Goodis is commonly ranked in the top tier of noir novelists, and The Moon in the Gutter is commonly ranked among his best work. One recent example: in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007), Barry Forshaw cites The Moon in the Gutter as his representative Goodis text in arguing that, of all the noir novelists, "Goodis comes the closest to the existential angst of Camus and Sartre." I wish I could see it, but I can't. The main thing I see in The Moon in the Gutter is bad writing. The lesser problem is that Goodis' prose is often painful to read--he strings together limp, cliché-ridden sentences as if he does not remember what his previous sentence was or have any idea what his next sentence will be. The greater problem is that his characters seem to behave as they do because they are in a noir novel and not for other discernible reasons. To Goodis' credit, he does take a valiant stab at noir profundity in the novel's last chapter, but the rest of the book is not there to back it up. In sum, a major disappointment. Grade: D+