Friday's Forgotten Books, November 6, 2009

Keith Rawson reading.












Lou Boxer is a member of the International Crime Writers Association and chairman of the 2009 Dashiell Hammett Prize Committee. He also is co-creator (with Deen Kogan) of GoodisCon (dedicated to David Goodis) and NoirCon. NoirCon in the purest sense of the word is a forum for all those who appreciate noir can come together to debate, plot, boast, or simply party with like-minded individuals. It is a four-day journey into that abyss (usually in Philadelphia, the birthplace of David Goodis) that offers everyone involved an opportunity to have a helluva good time looking into the bottomless, downward void that is noir! NoirCon 2010 is scheduled for November 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th – 2010! Visit us at http://www.noircon.info/ and http://www.noircon.com/. For more information about David Goodis, visit http://www.thewriterinthegutter.com/



"Years down the pike, the boast will be: NoirCon. I was there." Ken Bruen

David Goodis’s BLACK FRIDAY (Lion, 1954) is “as deliberately fruitless a story as an existentialist novel, it’s written with striking economy, skill and conviction” (Anthony Boucher, New York Times, November 21, 1954).

Despite its lean 160 pages, BLACK FRIDAY delivers volumes in two ways. First, it maps the criminal, homicidal and fratricidal tale of Al Hart’s descent into the chilling darkness of Philadelphia, circa January 1950. Second, it is an autobiographical fantasy of David Goodis’s life. Philadelphia is the anathema of David Goodis.

Al Hart is on the lame from the authorities for the murder of his brother, Haskell Hart. Arriving in wintery Philadelphia with only his chocolate-brown flannel suit on his back and ninety-three cents in his pocket, Hart is forced to steal a “genuine, bright-green, Lapama fleece jacket”. Wanted for the shooting death of his brother in New Orleans, he is now guilty of shoplifting. Hart literally goes to ground in one of Philadelphia’s “quieter” neighborhoods – Germantown.

“He wondered if there was a lot of crime in Germantown. If things hadn’t changed there wouldn’t be much police activity up there, because long ago when he was at the University [of Pennsylvania] he saw Germantown as a collection of dignity, just a bit smug and perhaps unconsciously snobbish against the historical background and the colonial flavor.” Chapter 1.

But he soon finds out that he is not the only one on the run and there is no dignity or quiet in the city of brotherly love. Walking along Tulpehocken Street in Germantown, Hart becomes the only witness to the violent shooting death of a man on the run. The victim/gang member, Fred Renner, leaves Hart with a wallet filled with eleven one-thousand dollar bills. Naturally, as the gunmen and leader of a professional gang of burglars, Charley, is interested in getting his money without any witnesses. Using his fists and debonair personality, Hart is able to ingratiate himself into to this tumultuous criminal organization of men (Charley, Paul, Rizzio, Mattone) and women (Frieda, a big platinum blonde and Myrna, an anemic, dark haired waif). Posing as a cold, professional, killer, Hart is forced to travel deeper into the unchartered, savage darkness that will eventually claim him.

(The Death of the Wounded Stag (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie, Besançon) by Gustave Courbet).

“Hold the legs tight,” Charley said. “Hold them tight.”
Hart took hold of the legs and closed his eyes. The sounds of the hack-saw and the knife were great big bunches of dreadful gooey stuff hitting him and going into him and he was getting sick and he tried to get his mind on something else, and he came to painting and started to concentrate on landscapes of Corot, then got away from Corot although remaining in the same period as he thought of Courbert, then knowing Courbert was an exponent of realism and trying to get away from Courbert, unable to get away because he was thinking of the way Gustave Courbert showed Cato tearing out his own entrails and showed “Quarry,” in which the stag under the tree was getting torn to bits by yowling hounds, and he tried to come back to Corot, past Corot to the gentle English school of laced garments and graceful posture and the delicacy and all that, and Courbert dragged him back. And Charley said, “Hold him higher up.”

Al Hart (AH) is David Goodis (DG). He is well-educated [(AH): studied fine art at the University of Pennsylvania; (DG) studied journalism at Temple University, both in Philadelphia]; he is knowledgeable about the finer things in life[(AH): is well versed in the art works of Corot, Courbert; the Indianapolis 500 (Chapter 11); Schopenhauer (chapter 15); Yachts and a blue Bugatti (Chapter 16);(DG) is a student of jazz, classical music, Luis Buñel, boxing (Kid Gavilan (Chapter 6), wealthy Philadelphians and Hollywood royalty]; he is chivalrous, sensitive and compassionate [(AH): the euthanasia of his brother, Haskell ravaged by multiple sclerosis, his defense of Myrna at the hands of Mattone; (DG): loyal to his family (William, Molly and Herbert Goodis) .

Circumstances arise that place Al Hart and David Goodis on a downward spiral from which there is no escape. There are women, men, cruelty, exploitation, criminality and quixotic dreams that are discarded in a decomposing heap in the gutter of Philadelphia.

David Goodis was thirty-seven years old when BLACK FRIDAY was published. His first novel (RETREAT FROM OBLIVION) was published in 1939 at the age of twenty-two and his second book (DARK PASSAGE) was serialized by The Saturday Evening Post in 1944. Goodis began his ascent to fame and fortune when he was selected by Jack Warner and Delmer Daves to come to Hollywood to be a screenwriter. He was married in Los Angeles (October 7, 1943) only to be divorced in Philadelphia some two-and-half years later (January 18, 1946). This meteoric upward trajectory would only be eclipsed by his rapid, downward descent back to Philadelphia, his family, his friends and his paperback original novels.

“It’s Black Friday and for certain people it’s a day that never ends. They carry it with them all the time. Like typhoid carriers. So no matter where they go or what they do, they bring bad luck.” Chapter 19.

Thirteen years after the publication of BLACK FRIDAY, David Goodis would be dead of a cerebral vascular accident at the tender age of forty-nine on a cold, wintery Philadelphia night in January. He was walking very slowly, not feeling the bite of the cold wind, not feeling anything. And later, turning the street corners, he didn’t bother to look at the street signs. He had no idea where he was going and he didn’t care. Chapter 19.

Despite the parsimonious use of words and action in BLACK FRIDAY, it remains clear that everything begins and ends in Philadelphia in the winter and usually for the worse.


Patti Abbott

PRIVATE DEMONS, THE LIFE OF SHIRLEY JACKSON, Judy Oppenheimer

I read this book in December, 1987, being a big fan of Shirley Jackson all my life. I once had a nice fat collection of Jackson's work, which was damaged by ice that broke through our ceiling, soaking everything beneath. I have never replaced most of it unfortunately. But I think I've probably read most of the collected pieces of fiction she wrote and all of the novels, enjoying the domestic stories as much as the very dark ones. Her bifurcated writing interests seem like two sides of a very familiar coin.

This book, and there may be a newer one by now, tries and succeeds in explaining much about Jackson's life. Raised by an abusive mother, married to a man (esteemed literary critic, Stanley Hyman) who recognized her brilliance but didn't let that interfere with his affairs, Jackson managed to write some of the most original stories of her era. She feared anonymity after death; feared the public would not understand the meaning of her stories. Jackson's accounts of family life (RAISING DEMONS, LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES) are as much fun to read as her darker novels and stories. Oppenheimer is very skilled at tying incidents in Jackson's life to stories she wrote at the time. She uses interviews and anecdotes to great effect. If you want to understand where stories like THE LOTTERY came from, this book will help.

Joyce Carol Oates is currently editing a collection of her work.

Ed Gorman is the author of THE MIDNIGHT ROOM, SLEEPING DOGS and the anthology BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT. You can find him here

Danse Macbre by Stephen King

Forgotten? Nothing by Stephen King is forgotten. I imagine that virtually, if not literally everything, he's published is in print. That said, even some readers of his horror novels may have passed this one by. Not everybody is inclined to read a long overview of the horror field but they should because this is one of the most articulate, occasionally eloquent overviews of an entire genre I've ever read. And lest you think it might be a bit on the dry side, it's a hell of a lot of fun and far more revealing about the Stephen King of the early 80s than most of the interviews he gave back then.

What gives the book its gravitas is the fact that in discussing horror as an expression of the human condition, King demonstrates how dark fiction and dark movies fit into the sociology of various eras. One of his most interesting points, early on, is how fiction is fed by fact. He talks about the assassination of John Kennedy, how horror brought us together. "That moment of knowledge and three day spasm of stunned grief which followed it is perhaps the closest any people in history has ever come to a total period of mass consciousness and mass empathy and--in retrospect--mass memory." Where were you when JFK was killed? Most of us of a certain age can tell you exactly.

Kennedy's murder inspired a sub-category of horror, I think, the paranoid thriller. My favorites here would be John Huston's almost viciously disdained Winter Kills and (surprise) Larry Cohen's Best Seller, Winter Kills because of its vast conspiracy, Best Seller because its smaller but more cunning conspiracy. But horror fiction of all kinds was effected by Kennedy's murder because we as a people underwent a transformation that remains with us today. The cynicism, the anger, the madness that came from that day in Dallas could be felt in all popular art but most especially in what was being done with horror, mostly notably in Europe.

This is only one example in a book filled with commentary on just about every aspect of our lives and how it touches on the creation of horror fiction. King is riffing here like a great jazz musician, telling stories about his drive-in movie days on the one hand, referencing Thornton Wilder on the other. There are long looks at movies, at fiction, at publishing, at movie making, at the usefulness of crowds to distinguish between a critics' darling and something worth seeing. He plays the whole orchestra here.

I didn't really understand this book the first two times I read it back in the eighties and nineties. But this time I saw it for what it is. Ostensibly it's about horror but not really. It's about a couple of different eras and a couple of different generations and what happened in those times and to those people. There's no equivalent now for the many teenage delights King talks about. We're in a rougher age. Nor are many of the writers he recommends read much any more. They don't fit in with Twitter or even e-mail. And I'm not sure that a gentle soul like Fritz Leiber would have much time for reality TV--though he'd likely write a hilariously poisonous story about it.

But that's the beauty of this book and it is a beautiful book. It's a true honest generally unsentimental piece of Americana and a savvy look at how pop culture intersects with everyday life.

Kent Morgan writes a sports column for a paper in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but spends most of his time puzzling over what to do with all the books piled on his furniture and floor and stored in his garage. More bookcases are not the answer as he has no room for them.

Squeeze Play - Paul Benjamin - Avon 1984

Five years ago third baseman George Chapman had an Alex Rodriguez-type season as the New York Americans won the World Series. Unlike Rodriguez, he seemed to be the perfect hero at a time New York City was dealing with strikes and political scandals. The following February his career came to an end when he lost his left leg following a car accident in upstate New York. He disappeared from sight for awhile, but then returned to the limelight as an advocate for the handicapped. Now a possible candidate for a US senate seat, Chapman contacts PI Max Klein as he has received a letter threatening blackmail and possible death. The pair played college baseball against each other and after graduation from Columbia, Klein worked as a lawyer in the D.A.'s office before switching to his career as a gumshoe. Klein's law school friend Chip Contini, the son of east coast mob head Victor Contini, recommended Klein to Chapman. Chapman claims he has no idea what he has done that could lead to blackmail or why anyone would want to kill him. Squeeze Play turns out to be a pretty routine PI novel with Klein getting beat up several times by thugs who he believes work for the older Contini. Chapman is found dead early in the book and soon his attractive widow, who had a rocky relationship with her husband, is making a play for Klein.

The author actually is Paul Benjamin Auster, who went on to write several novels loved by the critics including the New York Trilogy: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), The Locked Room (1987), which have been described as "surreal variations of the urban detective story." Auster supposedly wrote this book while living in France in the 1970s during a period that he needed money. While the Avon edition often is listed as a paperback original and offered at high prices by book dealers, an earlier edition was published in 1982. In his memoir, Hand to Mouth; a Chronicle of Early Failure (1997), Auster does not identify the publisher and writes, "production of my novel dragged on for two years. By the time it was printed, he had lost his distributor, had no money left, and to all intents and purposes was dead as a publisher. A few copies made it into a few New York bookstores, hand-delivered by the publisher himself, but the rest of the edition remained in cardboard boxes, gathering dust on the floor of a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn. For all I know, the books are still there."

Andy McCue, the current president of the Society for American Baseball Research and author of Baseball by the Books: a History and Complete Bibliography of Baseball Fiction (1991), has added to the story. "I have never seen a hardbound copy of Squeeze Play, but do have a 1982 paperback. This could explain the 1982 copyright on the 1984 Avon reprint. The trade-sized paperback has a highly garish pinky/purple cover, with a series of shapes breaking up the cover into several sections, most of them filled with drawings. The drawings are fairly amateurish, as are the production values of the book as a whole. The publisher is listed as Alpha/Omega Book Publishers, Inc. of New York."

An interesting history to a book that likely is not on the radar of anyone other than Auster completists and baseball fiction collectors.

Paul Bishop
Paul Brazill
Bill Crider
Loren Eaton
Martin Edwards
Ray Foster
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Brian Lindenmuth
Todd Mason
Scott Parker
Eric Peterson
James Reasoner
Rick Robinson
L.J. Sellers
Kieran Shea
Kerrie Smith
R.T.