Hard-boiled noir fiction has produced more than its share of cult writers, but pulp novelist and periodically successful Hollywood screenwriter David Goodis is in a league of his own. His status, first nurtured in France through Gallimard's Série Noire imprint, has grown steadily since Francois Truffaut;s film
Tirez fur le pianiste, based on Goodis's novel
Down There (1956), was released in 1960. That book would be reprinted in the United States a few years later by Grove Press, retitled, to capitalize on the film,
Shoot the Piano Player (1962). What success the latter garnered no doubt had less to do with Goodis's name and reputation than with Truffaut's, though Henry Miller's blurb gracing its cover might have given the reprint added heft. Yet even before
Down There's initial publication as a Gold Medal paperback in 1956, Goodis had some 14 novels under his belt, including classics like
Dark Passage (1946), adapted for the screen by Delmer Daves in 1947;
Nightfall (1947), adapted by Stirling Silliphant for Jacques Tourneur in 1957; and
The Burglar (1953), filmed by Paul Wendkos in 1957 from a screenplay- his most accomplished- by Goodis himself.
The publication of Philippe Garnier's groundbreaking
Goodis, la vie en noir et blanc in France in 1984 went some way toward confirming Goodis's status as a cult writer. Nine years later, James Sallis's
Difficult Lives (1993) placed Goodis in a select pantheon alongside two other cult noir writers, Jim Thompson and Chester Himes. Goodis would also feature heavily in two of my own books,
Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (1995) and
Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood (2002). The last three volumes all owe a debt to Garnier's investigative work, which turned up a number of people who had been close to Goodis throughout his truly troubled life.
(You can click
here to read the review in its entirety on the L.A. Review of Books website.)
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