David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s (LOA #225)

An “impressive new volume” of 5 noir novels by the cult-favorite author who stands alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as a master of American crime writing (The New York Review of Books)

Among the pantheon of American crime writers—those masters of noir whose powerful vernacular style and dark and subversive themes transformed American culture and writing—David Goodis was a unique figure. Now, The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up to celebrate the full scope of Goodis’s signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career.

Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia-born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder (Dark Passage); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money (Nightfall); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sister's brutal death (The Moon in the Gutter); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion (The Burglar); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction (Street of No Return). Long a cult favorite, Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers.ROBERT POLITO, editor, is a poet, biographer, and critic whose Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was the founding director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School where he is now a professor of writing.