Take a look at the cover art for Cassidy’s Girl, a short gut-punch of a pulp novel by David Goodis. It seems to check most of the boxes for noir fiction: a slow seduction by a sleek and dangerous woman, whisky bottle nearby to blur good judgment, and a fall guy who is wary and resisting for now, but who won’t need much convincing to do whatever the femme fatale ultimately wants. Tonally, this is far removed from the emotional world of the Harlequin romance covers, and the reader knows (or should know) that the story won’t end happily.
What’s interesting is that the scene is simultaneously a fair and a false indicator of the story that follows. Indeed, the plot involves a brawny bus driver, Jim Cassidy, who can’t seem to escape the lure of his fleshy wife, Mildred, despite the fact that their relationship has curdled to the point of hateful and abusive rage. But Jim and Mildred are far away from any living space with curtains, a cushioned settee, and a bright vase of flowers. Instead, the author traps his characters inside a seedy apartment and a broken-down saloon.
These people are not living inside a liquor ad; Jim, Mildred, and almost every other character in Cassidy’s Girl is a lost and incapacitated alcoholic. These are people who drink quarts of rye just to push through the day, and their home is really Lundy’s Tavern, where they can continue drinking in the cracked-plaster private rooms upstairs when the 2 am liquor curfew threatens their lifestyle. And Jim is constantly picking fights and under attack: in an early chapter, he loses three teeth in a bar fight, a detail you also don’t see on the alluring book cover.
What’s interesting is that the scene is simultaneously a fair and a false indicator of the story that follows. Indeed, the plot involves a brawny bus driver, Jim Cassidy, who can’t seem to escape the lure of his fleshy wife, Mildred, despite the fact that their relationship has curdled to the point of hateful and abusive rage. But Jim and Mildred are far away from any living space with curtains, a cushioned settee, and a bright vase of flowers. Instead, the author traps his characters inside a seedy apartment and a broken-down saloon.
These people are not living inside a liquor ad; Jim, Mildred, and almost every other character in Cassidy’s Girl is a lost and incapacitated alcoholic. These are people who drink quarts of rye just to push through the day, and their home is really Lundy’s Tavern, where they can continue drinking in the cracked-plaster private rooms upstairs when the 2 am liquor curfew threatens their lifestyle. And Jim is constantly picking fights and under attack: in an early chapter, he loses three teeth in a bar fight, a detail you also don’t see on the alluring book cover.
An atypical pulp writer, David Goodis seems to be genuinely interested in dissecting the lives and choices of his end-of-the-line characters. I was reminded throughout of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh (which premiered in 1946), another story with career alcoholics who have trouble leaving the bar. Goodis delivers a pulp plotline up to a point, but he takes the time to explore the painful psychology of his trapped protagonist. Jim Cassidy knows he’s hitting bottom and looks for a reason to rise up again, leaving behind the bottle and his abusive marriage. He thinks he finds it with a woman named Doris, a nondescript and passive being who is drinking herself to death to numb the pain of her past. Jim believes that he can divorce his wife, save Doris and himself and start over, but Mildred and her amoral boyfriend Haney Kenrick want to see Jim destroyed out of spite.
Cassidy’s Girl delivers two intense story turns in its compact narrative. The first, a gruesome event that makes Jim once again guilty of the deaths of innocent people, aligns with the book’s grim, fatalistic tone. (Years earlier, Cassidy had been an airline pilot who everyone blamed for a deadly runway crash, even though it was due to a co-pilot’s suicidal breakdown. This started his self-loathing downward spiral.) The second turn – essentially the book’s final chapter – goes against the noir mythos and rather unconvincingly presents a complete turn in Mildred’s personality as she becomes savior to the man she has spent the book trying to destroy.
It is only Chapter Fifteen that feels like a cop-out, a rushed resolution that doesn’t square with the tough, trapped reality of the rest of the novel. I would really like to know whether Goodis was acting from an editor’s notes, some outsider who wanted him to deliver a more upbeat ending with an eye on copy sales. The author has spent so much time building the reality and psychology of characters who are determined to stay numb at the bottom, it is truly hard to believe, for example, that they would all pour onto the floor the contents of a full whisky bottle just on someone’s liberating command, as happens here.
Cassidy’s Girl delivers two intense story turns in its compact narrative. The first, a gruesome event that makes Jim once again guilty of the deaths of innocent people, aligns with the book’s grim, fatalistic tone. (Years earlier, Cassidy had been an airline pilot who everyone blamed for a deadly runway crash, even though it was due to a co-pilot’s suicidal breakdown. This started his self-loathing downward spiral.) The second turn – essentially the book’s final chapter – goes against the noir mythos and rather unconvincingly presents a complete turn in Mildred’s personality as she becomes savior to the man she has spent the book trying to destroy.
It is only Chapter Fifteen that feels like a cop-out, a rushed resolution that doesn’t square with the tough, trapped reality of the rest of the novel. I would really like to know whether Goodis was acting from an editor’s notes, some outsider who wanted him to deliver a more upbeat ending with an eye on copy sales. The author has spent so much time building the reality and psychology of characters who are determined to stay numb at the bottom, it is truly hard to believe, for example, that they would all pour onto the floor the contents of a full whisky bottle just on someone’s liberating command, as happens here.
One more observation: for most of the book (until that unconvincing final chapter), the title is neatly ambiguous. Cassidy’s current girl is Mildred, yet their toxic and physically/verbally abusive relationship is at an end. Mildred revels in cuckolding her husband with the fat, cowardly, and cruel Haney Kenrick. But Cassidy’s other girl, the blank slate Doris, is only an object of affection because Jim declares her to be. David Goodis cannily refuses to give Doris any empathetic attributes; she is passive and shows no interest in Jim or the world around her past her glass of booze. So while Jim believes his life will be better with Doris when the two sober up and start a new life, the reader is much more wary. Doris gives no indication that she wants to find sobriety, and there is also little evidence that she cares whether she continues to live or quietly drinks herself to death.
Much more of an unvarnished character study than a typical thrills-and-action pulp drama, Cassidy’s Girl is well worth reading, both for Goodis’ blunt noir poetry and its unflinching depiction of people trapped between bottle and bottom. Stark House Press reprinted this story along with Nightfall and Night Squad in a 2018 anthology.
Much more of an unvarnished character study than a typical thrills-and-action pulp drama, Cassidy’s Girl is well worth reading, both for Goodis’ blunt noir poetry and its unflinching depiction of people trapped between bottle and bottom. Stark House Press reprinted this story along with Nightfall and Night Squad in a 2018 anthology.
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