8 Classic Hardboiled Noir Books by David Goodis

American crime novelist mainly associated with the Hardboiled school of the 1940s, born in Philadelphia. Goodis benefited from the 1980s revival of interest in the darker styles of crime writing although his reputation in France has been consistently high. Like Jim Thompson, Goodis presents a sombre and disillusioned portrait of the world, in which his solitary male protagonists search fruitlessly for meaning and significance in their lives. This mood is ironically and tersely expressed in his first novel, Dark Passage (1947); the brooding atmosphere of doubt and suspicion was memorably captured in the Delmer Davies film, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Throughout the 1950s his novels were consigned to the ‘pulp’ market. None the less, his work from this period is strikingly individual, with The Burglar (1953) and The Moon in the Gutter (1953) offering characteristic highly charged variants on the theme of nemesis. Goodis's gift for fast-paced narrative is best seen in Down There (1956), filmed by François Truffaut in 1962 as Shoot the Piano Player.
Considered by many to be one of the greatest American Noir writers of all-time, David Goodis' novels reach a level of bleak, back alley truth seldom seen, even within the genre. If you love hard-boiled mystery of the first order, you owe it to yourself to experience one of the true masters. "Cassidy's Girl" is an excellent place for the uninitiated to begin.

NIGHTFALL (1947) -- The book that gave Goodis his greatest success. James Vanning, artist, suffers through blackouts and hallucinations. He's not sure if he's even committed robbery and murder. A police psychologist says he's there to help, but only wants to entrap Vanning. Meanwhile, a bunch of crooks are after Vanning for the proceeds of that robbery he might have done. First published 1947 as "Nightfall." Also published as "Convicted," and "Missing: Believed-Murdered."

CASSIDY'S GIRL (1951) -- They say that a man needs a woman to go to hell with. Cassidy had two. One was Mildred, the wife who kept him chained with ties of fear and jealousy and paralyzing sexual need. The other was Doris, a frail angel with a 100-proof halo and a bottle instead of a harp. With those two, Cassidy found that the ride to hell could be twice as fast.
Cassidy's Girl has all the traits that made its author a virtuoso of the hard-boiled: a fiercely compelling ploy; characters who self-destruct in spectacularly unpredictable ways; and an insider's knowledge of all the routes to the bottom.

THE COP ON THE CORNER (1951) -- When racketeer Jimmie Renzelli was found bumped off in an alley, the murder wasn't as simple to solve as it looked!

THE BURGLAR (1953) -- A dreamlike masterpiece of crime, honor, and perverse loyalty by the legendary author of Shoot the Piano Player. Nat Harbin is a family man. His family happens to be a gang of burglars. Now Nat has met a woman so hypnotically seductive that he will leave his partners and his trade to possess her. But you don't get away from family that easily.
The Burglar has the hallmarks that made David Goodis one of the great practitioners of the hard-boiled crime novel: a haunting identification with life's losers, and a hero who finds out who he is only by betraying everything he believes in.
"If Jack Kerouac had written crime novels, they might have sounded a bit like this." --Geoffrey O'Brien

BLACK FRIDAY (1954) -- With its chilling portrait of a doomed man sorting his way among the perverse loyalties of a criminal "family," Black Friday has all the earmarks of David Goodis's classics, Dark Passage and Shoot the Piano Player. It is a haunting and often devastating foray into a world where no one has anything left to lose and survival itself is an act of malice.

STREET OF NO RETURN (1954) -- In Street of No Return, we meet the pathetic figure of Whitey. Once upon a time Whitey was a crooner with a million-dollar voice and a standing invitation from any woman who heard him use it. Until he had the bad luck to fall for Celia. And then nothing would ever be the same.
In Street of No Return, David Goodis works the magic that made him one of the most distinctive voices in hard-boiled fiction, creating a claustrophobic universe in which wounded men and women collide with cataclysmic force.

SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1956) -- Shoot the Piano Player is a bittersweet and nerve-racking exploration of different kinds of loyalty: the kind a man owes his family, no matter how bad that family is; the kind a man owes a woman; and, ultimately, the loyalty he owes himself. The result is a moody thriller that, like the best hard-boiled fiction, carries a moral depth charge.

NIGHT SQUAD (1961) -- They Gave Him Back His Badge, and Sent Him Down Into the Brutal Throbbing Heart of the Slums. Crooked ex-cop Corey Bradford turns out to be an ideal candidate for an underground police unit known as the Night Squad. First published 1961.