JASON HALF : writer
  • Home
  • Full-length Plays
    • The Community Play
    • Kate and Comet
    • Sundial
    • Tulip Brothers
  • Short Plays
    • Among the Oats
    • Holly and Mr. Ivy
    • Locked Room Misery
  • Screenplays
    • The Ballad of Faith Divine
    • My Advice
    • Finders
  • Fiction
  • Blog

Book Review: STREET OF NO RETURN (1954) by David Goodis

11/13/2021

0 Comments

 
Recently I watched the 1994 biopic of New York’s Algonquin Round Table founding member Dorothy Parker, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. After that, I revisited some of the acerbic writer’s poems and short stories, many featuring characters sporting wit worn as armor and wrestling with world-weary fatigue, just as the author had done. Despite a relatively meager and thematically limited literary output, Parker’s place as an important American writer is not in question: her work is anthologized and contextualized, celebrated and studied. 
Picture
But it also made me think about a writer whom literary history has largely chosen to ignore. In Street of No Return, pulp writer David Goodis delivers an astonishing odyssey of a loner continually, quixotically seeking out the worst situations and the most Hellish landscapes, flirting with self-destruction while following a stubborn, almost suicidal personal code. It is a novel that expertly employs all of the tricks of a great novelist – tactics of structure, of sensory description, of enigmatic characters and against-the-odds stakes – to deliver a story and mood that stay with you for days after finishing it. In clichéd terms, Goodis transcends his genre; just as Waiting for Godot isn’t merely about travelers trapped on the road, Street of No Return is about so much more than a bum from Skid Row looking for trouble.
 
At start, Whitey (nicknamed for his snow-white hair) shares an alley with two boozers who stare longingly at an empty bottle, chiding each other in a Beckettian rhythm about needing to get a full one but making no effort to move. It is Whitey who moves, following a man wearing “a bright green cap and a black-and-purple plaid lumber jacket” from the relative safety of Skid Row three blocks south into the Hellhole, where a race war between Americans (read: whites) and Puerto Ricans has been violently blazing for five weeks. In true pulp noir fashion, Whitey loses the man he was following but comes across a dying police officer in an alley and is quickly arrested for the crime.
 
What follows is an absorbing and atmospheric nightmare of a tale, with danger and violence swirling around the protagonist and The Fates (or are they Furies?) determined to give Whitey a finish to his quest that ends with his obliteration. And as he moves from one perilous situation to another – with the Hellhole, it is almost literally a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire – this reader became psychologically and emotionally invested in Whitey’s survival to an unusual degree. Like any effective work of literature, that bond with the story’s hero builds cumulatively. I want to know not only how he is going to escape his current high-pressure trap, but also what scenarios lie in store for him around the corner.
 
And Goodis ratchets the suspense like a master, as Whitey must navigate a world with very few allies and many deadly enemies. Through it all, Whitey is never afraid and certainly never surprised at his circumstances or at the cruelty of men and women; this is just the way the world operates and it would be foolish to expect otherwise. The colorfully dressed man who lures Whitey into the inferno is a fragment of Whitey’s past life: at one time, the Skid Row resident was a Sinatra-like crooner on the rise. But an obsession with a gangster’s girl and a refusal to exit the picture brought about the end of his career and pretty much the end of his life. Now he thinks the man might lead him back to Celia…
 
The author makes clear that Whitey is standing alone, caring nothing about taking sides in the race war or fighting out of some clouded ethnic ideology. Only one character offers a temporary oasis for the restless loner: Jones Jarvis is an elderly African-American who makes moonshine using scrupulous standards and offers Whitey his shed to recover in after a beating. Like Whitey, Jones is an independent man with his own quiet philosophy, and someone who has found a way to survive despite the violence and corruption all around. As he explains to a recovering Whitey by way of introduction:

“Once when I had a phone they’d get it wrong in the book and list me under Jones. Did that year after year and finally I got tired telling them to change it. Got rid of the phone. Man has a right to have his name printed correct. It’s Jones first and then Jarvis. The name is Jones Jarvis.”
The dialogue in Street is evocative and captures the souls of its speakers well, but it is David Goodis’s use of description and scene building here that shape a demi-monde of dreams and nightmares. Strutting and squirming against these settings, the book’s most memorable characters take on an almost mythic quality. Take Bertha, for example, a 300-pound force of nature who lives to inflict pain as a bone-breaking minion for the soft-spoken criminal Sharkey. Or Carlos and Luis, two memorably sketched Puerto Rican hoods who lead prisoner Whitey into a tenement teeming with cockroaches, rats, and hungover addicts. 
Picture
It is a character named Kinnard, the beleaguered captain of the Hellhole’s precinct, who makes the most visceral impression. A bruiser who is rapidly losing control, Captain Kinnard is a powerhouse of almost expressionistic proportions, dealing blows to anyone in his path with no regard to legal protocol. Taming this roiling whale is essential for Whitey on his path to redemption, and two lieutenants – one or both of which may be crooked – are accompanying sharks just waiting for blood to stain the waters.
 
The conclusion of Street of No Return is elliptical and fitting, and it feels truthful to the stylized odyssey that has run its course. It is a story whose details are often punishing and grim: no one in crime fiction takes a more palpable pulp beating than a Goodis protagonist. Teeth are lost, eyes are swollen shut, and vulnerable parts of the body are crushed, literally and metaphorically. There is also little to reassure about the human race and its often dark motives. But David Goodis deserves to be recognized for his writing, a deceptively unadorned prose that comes nearer to delivering a kind of gutter-life poetry. He might not have been a celebrated member of New York’s literary set, but the Philadelphia crime writer undeniably had chops of his own.
 
Street of No Return is available in a 2007 reprint from Millipede Press. 

0 Comments

Book Review: CASSIDY'S GIRL (1951) by David Goodis

8/18/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​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. 

Picture
​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. 

Picture
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.

0 Comments

Book Review: NIGHTFALL (1947) by David Goodis

8/11/2019

3 Comments

 
Picture
While the average pop culture consumer might view the American crime genres of hard-boiled detective fiction and noir as one and the same, the differences are worth noting. True, there are many elemental overlaps, including an often urban setting, an emphasis on action and violence (or the threat of it), and a thematic view that sees the world in a shadowy, cynical light. But the plot of noir is usually concerned with an innocent or honest character – notably not a detective, as in the hard-boiled genre – who gets caught in a web of criminal temptation or fateful destruction. In film, noir stories were a staple of American cinema in the 1940s and into the '50s, often adapted from novels within the genre (see Double Indemnity [1944] and The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946], both adapted from James M. Cain books).

Nightfall, first published in 1947, is an excellent example of noir fiction from a respected writer in the genre. David Goodis was an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter who the previous year had received success with his moody second novel Dark Passage; he would see this book adapted by director Delmer Daves into a film featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But Goodis stayed busy with his own fiction and script projects, and in 2018 Stark House released a collection of three of his noir stories, each from a different decade: Nightfall is paired with Cassidy's Girl (1951) and the late-period Night Squad from 1961.

What's curious about Nightfall is its bucking of genre conventions even as it stays firmly anchored in a noir world. Certainly the overall plotline aligns perfectly with genre expectations: Jim Vanning is living a life of concealment in New York City, on the run from something in his past. A suave but dangerous criminal is looking for him, and a police detective named Fraser already has Vanning under surveillance.  Soon the reader learns of a three-man bank robbery a few months ago in Seattle and a missing suitcase filled with cash, and we start to see why Jim Vanning might be the reluctant center of attention.

With this archetypal noir situation in place, Goodis pushes his characters and prose to go beyond the predictable. One effective example is that the author spends just as much time crafting detective Fraser's personality and worldview as he does the hunted criminal's. This is an atypical and very successful choice, as it simultaneously humanizes the conventional cop character and raises the stakes for all involved: Fraser feels like something is not right with the picture, and wants to give Vanning the chance to acquit himself if somehow he is innocent. But doing so places pressure on the detective, whose superiors are expecting a swift arrest and tidy resolution.

Picture
Vanning is given a noir-esque love interest, an empathetic ally named Martha, and Goodis keeps the reader (and the protagonist) guessing over whether the woman can be trusted; some disturbing evidence hints at collusion with John, the Seattle gunman. (It's interesting that the characters we are given the greatest access to, Vanning and Fraser, are referred throughout by their surnames while those whose inner thoughts remain concealed from the reader are allowed first-name familiarity.) Perhaps the most surprising against-the-genre choice Goodis employs in Nightfall is its potential for a comparatively "happy" ending; noir rarely lets its ensnared heroes wriggle out of Fate's trap intact.

Nightfall is far from perfect. There's a critical moment where the bad guys leave Vanning alone in a room with a revolver and the suitcase full of cash whose logic is never satisfactorily explained. Even if it's a set-up, why would the stage need to be set in that way? And there's some lovely sentences Goodis forms from commercial designer Vanning's attention to colors – so unusual for a genre world literally defined in scale tones of black and white – but the thread doesn't really tie to a larger cloth. One sample:
"There were considerable things that made life worth living. Luxurious things, rich, colorful things… There was deep rose against a background of rich tan. There was shining gold. There was blue, a good, definite blue, not bright, not at all watery, but deeply blue. And then the tan again. Healthy tan. And all that added up, and it became Martha."
Picture
Still, the prose throughout the short novel shows thought and craft, and Goodis elevates his story from that presumably disposable genre of pulp fiction into something more resonant in terms of literary merit. According to the biographical introduction to the Stark House edition provided by Rick Ollerman, David Goodis himself was a misfit and a restless soul; his tales of misunderstood, luckless loners are well worth finding and exploring.

Nightfall was reprinted in 1953 as The Dark Chase and again in 1954 as Convicted.


3 Comments

    BLOG

    Lots of book reviews and discussion of classic and contemporary mystery fiction. I welcome comments and continuing conversation.

    Subscribe below to receive updates!

    Subscribe

    Categories

    All
    19th Century Novels
    Andrew Garve
    Anne Morice
    Anthologies
    Anthony Boucher
    Appalachian Authors
    Bill James
    Book Review
    Catherine Dilts
    C. Daly King
    Craig Rice
    David Goodis
    E.C.R. Lorac / Carol Carnac
    Erle Stanley Gardner
    E.R. Punshon
    Freeman Wills Crofts
    French Authors
    George Bellairs
    George Milner
    Gladys Mitchell
    Golden Age Mystery
    Gregory McDonald
    Hardboiled Detectives
    Helen McCloy
    Helen Simpson
    Henry Wade
    Herbert Adams
    Hugh Austin
    James Corbett
    J. Jefferson Farjeon
    John Bude
    John Rhode/Miles Burton
    Leo Bruce
    Maj Sjowall / Per Wahloo
    Margery Allingham
    Martin Edwards
    Michael Gilbert
    Michael Innes
    Mignon G. Eberhart
    Milward Kennedy
    Mitchell Mystery Reading Group
    New Fiction
    New Mystery
    Nicholas Blake
    Nicolas Freeling
    Noir
    Philip MacDonald
    Play Review
    Q. Patrick / Patrick Quentin
    Rex Stout
    Richard Hull
    Ross MacDonald
    Russian Authors
    Science Fiction
    Vernon Loder
    Vladimir Nabokov
    William L. DeAndrea
    Winifred Blazey
    Writing

    Mystery Fiction Sites
    -- all recommended ! --
    Ahsweetmysteryblog
    The Art of Words
    Beneath the Stains of Time
    Bitter Tea and Mystery
    Catherine Dilts - author
    Countdown John's Christie Journal
    Classic Mysteries
    Clothes in Books
    ​A Crime is Afoot
    Crossexaminingcrime
    Gladys Mitchell Tribute
    Grandest Game in the World
    Happiness Is a Book
    In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
    The Invisible Event
    Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog
    Murder at the Manse
    Mysteries Ahoy!
    Noirish
    The Passing Tramp
    Past Offences
    Pretty Sinister Books
    Tipping My Fedora
    To the Manor Born
    Witness to the Crime
    

    Archives

    December 2024
    November 2024
    September 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    January 2024
    August 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed

Unless otherwise stated, all text content on this site is
​copyright Jason Half, 2024.