David Goodis Biography

American crime novelist mainly associated with the Hardboiled school of the 1940s, born in Philadelphia, educated at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Temple University, 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.