David F Schmid (schmid@acsu.buffalo.edu)
Sat, 7 Aug 1999 21:01:13 -0400 (EDT)
Dear All,
With reference to the recent postings on David Goodis, it may
interest list members to know that I have just finished
writing a reference article on Goodis that will appear in the
forthcoming Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on
American hard-boiled crime writers. I am a huge fan of his
work, but I must say that writing some parts of the article
was a pain in the neck. Goodis is a notorious bibliographic
nightmare. Apart from the Garnier biography and James
Sallis's 'Difficult Lives,' there is very little substantive
critical work on Goodis. With that said, I found the
following pieces useful and informative:
Meredith Brody, "Missing Persons: David Goodis." Film
Comment, 20.5, Sep-Oct 1984: 42-43. William David Sherman,
"David Goodis/Dark Passage." Sight & Sound, 38.1
(Winter 1968-69): 41. Mike Wallington, "Introduction." *David
Goodis: Nightfall, Down There, Dark Passage, The Moon in the
Gutter.* (London: Zomba Books, 1983). Adrian Wootton and Paul
Taylor, eds. *David Goodis/Pulps Pictured: For Goodis' Sake!"
(London: British Film Institute, 1989).
The Sherman piece is especially interesting, as it contains
excerpts from a letter Goodis wrote to Sherman in 1966, just
a few months before Goodis's death. Sherman quotes what must
be one of the most self-deprecating authorial self-judgments
in the annals of literature. Referring to his first novel
(Retreat from Oblivion), Goodis wrote:
"It was nothing, and the same applies to most of the sixteen
others since then."
In terms of Goodis's uncollected short fiction, there is a
mountain of it, in a variety of genres. Goodis once boasted
that he wrote over five million words in five years
(1939-1944) while working for the pulps. A fairly extensive
list of this material appears in the 3rd edition of
*Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers", edited by
Kathleen Gregory Klein (Chicago and London: St James Press,
1991): pages 446-447.
For what it's worth, let me just mention in closing my two
favorite things about Goodis's work: his huge gallery of
entertainingly violent women, and the fact that his
protagonists always choose to believe that they can resist
their fate, even though they simultaneously know that they
can't.
Cheers,
David Schmid University at Buffalo
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