Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 223

Cold Hearts by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2013. Arcadia Books. 9781908129437. 300 pages. paperback. Cover photograph: Image Sourse.  

DESCRIPTION - On a frosty January day in Bergen, Norway, private investigator Varg Veum is visited by a prostitute. Her friend Margrethe has disappeared and hasn't been seen for days. Before her disappearance, something had unsettled her: she'd turned away a customer and returned to the neighbourhood in terror. Shortly after taking the case, Veum is confronted with a brutal, uneasy reality. He soon finds the first body - and it won't be the last. His investigation leads him into a dark subculture where corrupted idealism has had deadly consequences. Dark secrets lurk everywhere, as the murky pattern of wounded people, worm-eaten lives, and hearts long grown cold proves deadly … for someone. A dramatic, poetic and page-turning thriller from Norway's most dazzling crime writer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 235

The Writing On the Wall by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2004. Arcade Publishing. 1900850583. Translated from the Norwegian by Hal Sutcliffe. 264 pages. paperback. Cover design by Eleanor Rose.  

DESCRIPTION - In this crime drama detective Varg Veum's adventures lead him to a dark world of privileged, young teenage girls who have been drawn into drugs and prostitution. The situation worsens when the local judge is discovered in a luxury hotel, dead and clad only in women's lingerie. Called in by anxious parents and officials to look for a missing daughter and explain the judge's death, Varg finds clues that lead him only deeper into the city's criminal underworld. Gunnar Staalesen is one of Norway's leading crime writers. His Varg Veum books have been translated into 12 languages. He lives in Bergen, Norway.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 230

At Night All Wolves Are Grey by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 1986. Quartet Books. 0704325586. Translated from the Norwegian by David McDuff. 214 pages. hardcover. Cover photograph by Stephen Baxter. Cover design by Namara Design.  

DESCRIPTION - Varg Veum is a down-at-heel private detective in Bergen, Norway. Fond of akvavit, he has a broken marriage behind him and is training to run a marathon. A chance conversation with a retired policeman arouses his interest in two old, unsolved cases: a disastrous fire in a paint factory caused by arson in 1953, and the brutal murder of a suspected Gestapo informer and hired killer nearly twenty years later. Veum sifts meticulously through the past, is threatened and beaten up as he interviews millionaires and down-and-outs, but eventually brings his investigations to a surprising - even shocking - conclusion. AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is a complex, richly textured novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald, yet at the same time Staalesen writes originally and with an unmistakable individuality. As well as being an exciting thriller, the book tells us a good deal about contemporary Norway, and the setting, Bergen, emerges as a living city, through whose streets and harbour alleyways Veum roams in search of the recent past.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'. David McDuff is a translator and literary critic at present living in Greenwich, London. His published works include the SELECTED POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM (Writers & Readers, 1983) and the COMPLETE POEMS OF EDITH SODERGRAN (Bloodaxe Books, 1984). He has translated several volumes of 19th- century Russian prose fiction for the Penguin Classics series.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 224

Yours Until Death by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 1993. Constable . 009471990x. Translated from the Norwegian by Margaret Amassian. 238 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Terry Pastor. Jacket design by Splash Studio.  

DESCRIPTION - The single-mother families of the isolated high-rise community under the shadow of the Lyderhorn, Bergen's great mountain - steep, dark and oppressive - were being robbed, terrorised and molested by a teen-age gang led by the psychopath, Joker, who looked like a priest, but with the eyes of a tiger and the teeth of a decaying corpse. It was at their ‘torture chamber', a hut in the pine woods nearby, that Varg Veum, Private Investigator, first encountered the gang's pathetic but deadly ferocity. Eight-year-old Roar's bicycle had been stolen and not an adult in sight dared retrieve it. But a preliminary brush with such youthful violence was as nothing compared to what awaited Veum when he got to know Roar's blue-eyed, shy yet sensuous mother, Wenche Andresen, and her estranged husband, Jonas. Veum's attempts to break up Joker and his pack of young thugs by enlisting the help of the local youth club leader proved a dead end. But not so dead as the man who lay prone with a knife in his back on the floor of Andresen's flat. YOURS UNTIL DEATH is an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder from which emerge moving statements about modern marriage, childhood bereavement and the destructive force of passion. First published in Norwegian in 1979, it was described by the critic Nils Nordberg as ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing'.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen in 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For thirteen years he was employed as the Information Manager of The National Stage, Bergen's only theatre. He is now a full time writer. In 1991 he was awarded the international Palle Rosenkrantz Prize for the best crime story published in Denmark that year. He is the author of twelve novels, nine of which feature Varg Veum. He has also written two adventure books for children, three plays for the stage and two radio plays. His work has been translated into German, French and Dutch, as well as English.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 225

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. New York. 1978. Random House. 0394419464. 259 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America's sleaziest nightmares.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Arthur Crumley (October 12, 1939 - September 17, 2008) was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as ‘one of modern crime writing's best practitioners', who was ‘a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel' and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as ‘the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years.' Crumley had a cult following, and his work is said to have inspired a generation of crime writers in both the U.S. and the U.K, including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Craig McDonald, as well as writers from other genres such as Neal Stephenson, but he never achieved mainstream success. ‘Don't know why that is,' Crumley said in an interview in 2001, ‘Other writers like me a lot. But up until about 10 to 12 years ago, I made more money in France and Japan than in America. I guess I just don't fit in anyplace' in the genre book marketplace. Crumley's first published novel, 1969's One to Count Cadence, which was set in the Philippines and Vietnam, began as the thesis for his master's degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1966. His novels The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck and The Right Madness feature the character C.W. Sughrue, an alcoholic ex-army officer turned private investigator. The Wrong Case, Dancing Bear and The Final Country feature another p.i., Milo Milodragovitch. In the novel Bordersnakes, Crumley brought both characters together. Crumley said of his two private detectives: ‘Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot.'

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 228

The Burgler by David Goodis. New York. 1991. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. 0679734724. 156 pages. paperback. . Cover design by Keith Sheridan Associates, Inc. Cover photography by Alesia Exum.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘If Jack Kerouac had written crime novels, they might have sounded a bit like this.' - Geoffrey O'Brien. Nat Harbin is a family man. His family happens to be a gang of burglars. Now Nat has met a woman so hypnotic ally 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 228

The Blonde On the Street Corner by David Goodis. New York. 1997. Serpent's Tail. 1852424478. 250 pages. paperback. 

DESCRIPTION - She took a final drag at the cigarette, flipped it away, and said, I don't get this line of talk. It's way over my head...Maybe you're waiting for some dream girl to come along in a coach drawn by six white horses, and she'll pick you up and haul you away to the clouds, where it's all milk and honey and springtime all year around. Maybe that's what you're waiting for. That dream girl. Maybe, he murmurmed. And then he looked at the blonde. His smile was soft and friendly and he said, I guess that's why I can't start with you. I'm waiting for the dream girl. But the dream girl does not come. In the meantime Ralph must deal with the yearnings of everyday life and take what he is offered. Written in 1954, The Blonde on the Street Corner is full of the passions and desires that are the hallmarks of a David Goodis novel.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 252

Street of No Return by David Goodis. Lakewood. 2007. Millipede Press. 1933618227. Introduction by Robert Polito. 252 pages. paperback. Cover image by Jeff Hersch.  

DESCRIPTION - 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. Special features of this edition - New introductory essay by Robert Polito; An extra short story, ‘Black Pudding'; New design with entirely reset text.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 238

Nightfall by David Goodis. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390293. Introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien. 160 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - An almost perfect book, spare, balanced, and inexplicably moving.' - Geoffrey O'Brien Jim Vanning has an identity crisis. Is he an innocent artist who just happens to have some very dangerous people interested in him? Or is he a killer on the lam from his last murder - with a satchel worth over $300,000 in tow? Relentlessly focused, Nightfall may be David Goodis' most accomplished novel. It is a fiendishly constructed maze, filled with unpredictable pitfalls and human predators whose authenticity only makes them more terrifying. David Goodis (1917-1967), a former pulp, radio, and Hollywood script writer, is now recognized as a leading author of crime fiction. Besides sojourns in New York City and Hollywood, he lived primarily in Philadelphia.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 231

Dark Passage by David Goodis. London. 1947. Heinemann.  207 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - DARK PASSAGE is a novel by David Goodis which was the basis for the 1947 film noir of the same name. In DARK PASSAGE, Vincent Parry, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, escapes from prison and is taken in by Irene Jansen, an artist with an interest in his case. Helped by a friendly cabbie, Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon, thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real killer. He has difficulty staying hidden, in part because Madge Rapf, the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, and who has an unhealthy interest in Irene, keeps stopping by. DARK PASSAGE was adapted for film in 1947, with a screenplay by Delmer Daves, who also directed. It reunited Bogart and Bacall onscreen, and co-starred Agnes Moorehead and Bruce Bennett.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 226

Night Squad by David Goodis. New York. 1961. Fawcett. Paperback Original. 191 pages. paperback. s1083.  

DESCRIPTION - When a cop goes bad, he can always become a crook. When a crook goes bad - that's when the Night Squad wants him. David Goodis's irresistibly readable study of corruption is a masterly portrait of a man clawing his way back from betrayal - and betraying countless others along the way.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 216

Cassidy's Girl by David Goodis. New York. 1951. Fawcett/Gold Medal. Paperback Original. 173 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Mildred Cassidy was a lusty woman who knew what she wanted - and how she wanted it. Huge, redheaded Cassidy belonged to her. No one else could have him. They fought, they parted, they tried new loves, then met and fought and parted again. But through despair and anger, through violent, tempestuous love, and hate as deep as love, they had to come back to where they belonged - to each other. In this powerful, salty, elemental novel of the waterfront, David Goodis, author of such bestsellers as DARK PASSAGE, NIGHTFALL, BEHOLD THIS WOMAN and OF MISSING PERSON, comes to Gold Medal with his finest work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 281

Black Friday by David Goodis. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390285. 129 pages. paperback. Cover art by Kirwan.  

DESCRIPTION - From the author of Dark Passage, a riveting thriller about a doomed man sorting his way among the perverse loyalties and passions of a family of criminals. Filled with coiled menace and eerie authenticity, Black Friday is a foray into a world where no one has anything left to lose and malice is the only motive for survival.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 235

Behold This Woman by David Goodis. New York. 1948. Bantam Books. 214 pages. paperback. 407.   

DESCRIPTION - BEHOLD THIS WOMAN - Could she be anybody you know? Yes, she lived quietly with her husband . . . BUT she had errands at night. Yes, she wanted her step-daughter happy . . . BUT beat her into submission. Yes, she loved a man passionately . . . BUT she framed him. Yes, she just wanted to live well . . . BUT she had to murder to do it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 246

The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis. New York. 1955. Fawcett Gold Medal. 174 pages. paperback. 530.  

DESCRIPTION - He was a trespasser in heaven - and a fugitive from hell. James Bevan was born too late. He was a walking tragedy - a knight in a century of grab-and-run, a lost man of honor in a glib, glittering world. He had a mistress who wanted him, a wife who rejected him, and a bottle that enfolded him in the arms of oblivion. He was balanced on the edge of civilized disaster - and then he went to Jamaica. In that jungle of the flesh James Bevan sought the end. He found instead a target for his honor, and, in so doing, and in fear and in agony, he found a new beginning for himself. Bur first he had to kill a man.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 254

Down There by David Goodis. New York. 1956. Fawcett Gold Medal. A Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original. 157 pages. paperback. 623. Cover painting by Mitchell Hooks.  

DESCRIPTION - From the great concert halls of the world - he descended the stairway to hell. DOWN THERE. . . was Eddie, behind the battered piano in Harriet’s Hut, a rickety gin palace at the dark dead end of Skid Row. DOWN THERE . . . was a million lights years away from Carnegie Hall, and from Edward Webster Lyn - the young genius for whom audiences once had rioted. It has been a long, anguished journey, but now Eddie was safe - in a dream world where the only sound was music and the people were ghosts. Then flesh and blood called Eddie back - in the form of a woman who demanded his love, and in a pattern of sudden, final violence. Life jolted Eddie from his dream - and he woke in a wet back alley, standing over a dead man, with a knife in his hand. A fast-moving hardboiled noir novel of a piano player with another life, from which Francois Truffaut's film, "Shoot the Piano Player" was subsequently made.

In a Black Lizard edition with a different title:

Shoot the Piano Player by David Goodis. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390307. Originally Published by Fawcett In 1956. 156 pages. paperback. Cover art by Kirwan.

DESCRIPTION - Once upon a time Eddie played conert piano to reverent audiences at Carnegie Hall. Now he bangs out honky-tonk for drunks in a dive in Philadelphia. But then two people walk into Eddie's life - the first promising Eddie a future, the other dragging him back into a treacherous past. 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 209

Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Mystery by Paula L. Woods. New York. 1999. Norton. 039304680x. 316 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph of Los Angeles by Stephen Simpson.  

DESCRIPTION - Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very hostile Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he'd long since fled? Charlotte's quest for the truth behind Cinque's death will set her at odds with the LAPD hierarchy, plunge her into the intricacies of everything from L.A.'s gang-banging politics to its black blue-bloods, and lead her into deep emotional waters with Mitchell's partner (and her old flame), Dr. Aubrey Scott.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paula L. Woods is the author of the Charlotte Justice mystery series. The first novel in the series, INNER CITY BLUES (1999), was on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for three weeks and was also named by the newspaper as one of the best books of 1999. Inner City Blues received the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, was named Best First Novel by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards for best first mystery novel. Paula began writing mysteries after studying the genre and editing the critically acclaimed anthology SPOOKS, SPIES, AND PRIVATE EYES: BLACK MYSTERY, CRIME, AND SUSPENSE FICTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY (1995). Although SPOOKS, SPIES was nominated for an Anthony Award, Macavity Award, and received a special award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews books regularly for the Los Angeles Times and has served a a mystery columnist for the Washington Post.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 209

Violent Spring: An Ivan Monk Mystery by Gary Phillips. Portland. 1994. West Coast Crime. 1883303133. 277 pages. paperback. Cover art by Mohammad Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - In one of the hottest debut mysteries in years, African-American private investigator Ivan Monk must investigate the murder of a Korean shopkeeper in riot-torn, racially-charged Los Angeles . . . WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING - ‘ . . . Tough, smart, and unabashedly political, Monk is (to paraphrase basketball sart Charles Barkley) a P.I. for the nineties, and Violent Spring is Phillip's perfect intro to him.' - Gar Anthony Haywood . . . ‘Ivan Monk traverses the terrain of the boosters and mercenaries who run Blade Runnerville. He is an unbowed post-modern protagonist who with brains and brawn confronts this Hobbesian universe in his quest for the answers. Violent spring peels away the studded rind of the golden orange, exposing its dete noir core.' - Mike Davis.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl's mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven't improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 258

Perdition, U.S.A. by Gary Phillips. Salem. 1996. John Brown Books. 0963905066. The Second Ivan Monk Mystery. 255 pages. paperback. Cover art by Mohammad Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - The mystery series that launched Gary Phillips's career. When three young black men are gunned down within blocks on one another, Ivan Monk investigates for a possible link--and finds himself on the trail of a racial conspiracy centered in a small Northwestern town. Robert “Scatterboy” Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in Pacific Shores, a port city south of Los Angeles. One day, he’s gunned down in the street, seemingly at random. Then drug dealer Ronny Aaron is shot and killed leaving a liquor store. Shortly thereafter, college student Jimmy Henderson is rendered comatose after two bullets to his body. The three victims have nothing in common save the neighborhood where they were shot—and the color of their skin. The police categorize Scatterboy’s murder as business as usual. But his girlfriend convinces private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like three unrelated shootings of Black men in Southern California will put Monk on a tortuous trail unraveling a larger nefarious plan: the rise of an extremist demagogue.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl's mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven't improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 224

Angels Flight by Michael Connelly. Boston. 1999. Little Brown. 0316152196. 393 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Melissa Hayden/Michael Ian Kaye.  

DESCRIPTION - The man most hated by the LAPD - a black lawyer who has made his name by bringing lawsuits alleging racism and brutality by police officers - has been found murdered on the eve of a high-profile trial. The list of suspects includes half the police force. And Harry Bosch is the detective chosen to lead the investigation. The political dangers of the case are huge. If it's not investigated fairly, the public outcry could make the Rodney King riots look tame. But a full investigation will take Bosch into the ugliest corners of law enforcement. To make matters worse, Bosch's wife, Eleanor, has disappeared. Bosch fears she has left him - or succumbed to her gambling addiction. He's not sure which would be worse. ANGELS FLIGHT reads in a white heat. It continues to up the ante of the series that is ‘raising the hard-boiled detective novel to a new level - adding substance and depth to modern crime fiction.' (Boston Globe).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 232

The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. Boston. 1992. Little Brown. 0316153613. 375 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.

DESCRIPTION - For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch -- hero, maverick, nighthawk -- the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal. The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam ‘tunnel rat' who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell. Now, Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city to the torturous link that must be uncovered, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit. Joining with an enigmatic and seductive female FBI agent, pitted against enemies inside his own department, Bosch must make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, as he tracks down a killer whose true face will shock him.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 223

The Old Dick by L. A. Morse. New York. 1981. Avon Books. 0380783290. Paperback Original. 236 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - They thought he couldn’t handle the rough stuff. That’s where they were wrong... Retired private eye Jake Spanner may have gotten old, but he hasn't gone soft. When an old gangster Jake put away some forty years ago shows up at his door, it's time for Jake to grab his hat and Browning automatic and get back to work. Old? Sure. Slower to catch his breath? Maybe. But, sharp as a tack and with a lifetime of investigating know-how, Jake Spanner has nothing to lose and everything to prove. Sniffing out leads between Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills, Jake pulls in old friends to help. The work is hard; it's gritty. So is Jake. And, with a three quarters of a million dollars ransom at stake, the bad guys don't stand a chance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Larry Alan Morse grew up in Los Angeles. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College, and somehow managed to get two degrees in English Lit. He moved to Toronto in the late ‘60s, and has had the usual variety of jobs, including a brief stint in educational television and five years as an administrator at the University of Toronto. Upon returning from extended travels through Southeast Asia, he decided to try and write a novel - something delicate and sensitive and artistic. He discovered just what he was looking for in the true story of Sawney Beane and his family, The Flesh Eaters, the 15th century cannibal clan who ate their way through a good part of Scotland. L. A. Morse has written four other crime novels. The Old Dick won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America; The Big Enchilada and Sleaze, featuring Sam Hunter, the L. A. private eye who, according to one reviewer, “makes Dirty Harry look like Mother Teresa”; and he was instrumental in arranging the publication of An Old-Fashioned Mystery, the lost masterpiece by the enigmatic and reclusive author, Runa Fairleigh. He shifted to another medium with the publication of Video Trash and Treasures, a two-volume guide to the obscure and bizarre movies of the 1980s. For the last 15 years, L. A. Morse has worked as a visual artist, primarily sculpture. He is an avid birder with over 1,500 species on his world list. When not off looking for birds in the tropics, he currently divides his time between stone carving and making a living in the stock market. L. A. Morse won a Best Paperback Original Edgar Award from the MWA (Mystery Writers of America) for his first novel, The Old Dick, an homage to the classic detective tale with an eighty-year-old working detective. He went on to publish two novels in an over-the-top re-take of the private-eye-style mystery, Sleaze and The Big Enchilada. Under the pseudonym Runa Fairleigh, he switched subgenres and created a perfect example of the classic cozy mystery, An Old-Fashioned Mystery. In a complete change of styles, he then wrote a period thriller based on the historical character Sawney Beane, the notorious and legendary cannibal killer of Highland Scotland, called The Flesh Eaters.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 232

The Concrete River: A Jack Liffey Mystery by John Shannon. Salem. 1996. John Brown Books. 0963905058. Paperback Original. 190 pages. paperback. Cover by Mohammed Smith.

  
DESCRIPTION - Jack Liffey lost his aerospace job, and then his wife and daughter. All he had left was an ability to track down missing children, so he set himself up as a child-finder. Then a woman from Mexico shows up with only a few words of English, and when he sets off to find her daughter in the frightening urban nightmare of L.A., he is sucked into a violent world of developers and local politicos where nothing is quite what it seems. Before long his search becomes a fight for redemption and for life itself in a world gone mad around him.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Shannon is one of America's leading writers of neo-noir. An L.A. Times bestselling author, he has published fourteen novels in the Jack Liffey mystery series, one of the most critically praised mystery series in the genre, reviewed by newspapers from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Denver Post and Los Angeles Times. The novels are set in the various gritty subcultures and ethnic communities of Los Angeles.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 234

True Crime by Michael Mewshaw. New York. 1991. Poseidon Press. 0671732048. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.  

DESCRIPTION - Tom Heller is a true-crime writer. His specialty: family murders. When his own father - poor, alcoholic, and a source of unresolved guilt and shame to his successful son - is brutally slain in his rundown Maryland home, Tom returns to make his own investigation. Soon there are two more victims: the father and son of Tom's college girlfriend are found murdered on their exclusive estate. Tom sees almost immediately what the police can't: the murders are linked. And it is this link that will carry Tom twenty years into his past to come face to face with the emotional traumas he has run from - his rivalry with his brother whose help he now needs, the calculated cynicism of his own career, and the impossible love of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks for a rich and privileged woman. Dangerous passions are reignited, and as Tom replays his doomed romance he himself becomes a suspect in murder. In this masterly story of murder and money, love and family, Mewshaw brilliantly combines the authenticity and detail of non-fiction with the inventive power and range of the novel, and portrays a tidewater region - from the Washington D.C., area slums to the posh shores of Chesapeake Bay - as immediate and vital as Robert B. Parker's Boston or Tony Hillerman's Arizona.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Mewshaw (born February 19, 1943) is an American author of 11 novels and 8 books of nonfiction, and works frequently as a travel writer, investigative reporter, book reviewer, and tennis reporter. His novel YEAR OF THE GUN was made into a film of the same name by John Frankenheimer in 1991. He is married with two sons. Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio's longtime ‘voice of books,' has called him ‘the best novelist in America that nobody knows. Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the suburb of Prince George's County, Maryland, Mewshaw graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland (1965), then was granted a four-year fellowship to attend the graduate writing program at the University of Virginia, where he attained his Masters (1966) and Doctorate (1970) degrees under the tutelage of George Garrett. While studying at UVA, Mewshaw completed two unpublished novels, then embarked on a road trip across Mexico with his wife (at the urging of William Styron, who was the subject of his masters thesis and doctoral dissertation); a journey which would form the basis of his first novel MAN IN MOTION (1970), which he completed while on a Fulbright Fellowship in France. Mewshaw taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and subsequently was named Director of Creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking leaves of absence every other year from this post, Mewshaw based himself in Rome, Italy, and continued traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. While Mewshaw researched his third novel THE TOLL (1974) in Marrakesh, Morocco, his wife Linda was hired as Lindsay Wagner's stand-in on the set of Robert Wise's film Two People. Mewshaw's experience of that shoot was the jumping-off point for his fifth novel LAND WITHOUT SHADOW (1979).

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 261

Hollywood and Levine by Andrew Bergman. New York. 1975. Holt Rinehart Winston. 0030138167. 216 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Stan Zagorski.

  
DESCRIPTION - It is February, 1947. In a shabby office building on Omar Avenue in Los Angeles, Congressman Richard M. Nixon (B., Cal.) is addressing Jack LeVine, New York's wisecracking, wily private eye. ‘America is facing the greatest national security crisis in her history. You have your right to disagree and that's what makes America great. What I am saying is that your right to disagree will be endangered if the Soviet program for world domination progresses any further.' ‘Thanks for the tip,' says LeVine. Jack LeVine, in Hollywood to help a troubled screenwriter pal, discovers that the movie capital is rife with fear and mistrust. As Humphrey Bogart tells LeVine during a heartstopping chase up the Pacific Coast Highway: ‘They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem.' LeVine, it seems, has stumbled upon the very dawn of the blacklist, as well as a couple of murders, and a disturbing romance with a beautiful, enigmatic widow. Nixon, Bogart, John Garfield, Lauren Bacall, the FBI, Ava Gardner, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities are but a few of the forces LeVine must face in solving a case-comical, tragical, political - that begins and ends where fantasy and reality collide, a Hollywood movie lot. . Andrew Bergman introduced Jack LeVine in his first NOVEL THE BIG KISS-OFF OF 1944. and wrote the original story and co-authored the screenplay of Blazing Saddles.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrew Bergman (born February 20, 1945) is an American screenwriter, film director, and novelist. New York magazine in 1985 dubbed him "The Unknown King of Comedy". His best known films include Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, and The Freshman. Born to a Jewish family, Bergman graduated from Binghamton University and earned a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation, a study of Depression-era Hollywood films, was published in 1971 by NYU Press under the title We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. He wrote James Cagney: The Pictorial Treasury of Film Stars. Bergman broke into the film industry by writing the original screenplay (titled Tex X) that served as the basis for Mel Brooks's classic Blazing Saddles (1974), and was among the co-writers who adapted it into its final state. He wrote a gangster film Rhapsody in Crime that was never made. Warner Bros approached him to write a sequel to Freebie and the Bean with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. Instead Bergman came up with The In-Laws (1979). The In Laws was a success so Bergman could direct his next script, So Fine (1981) starring Ryan O'Neal. It was a box office disappointment. Bergman wrote Oh, God! You Devil (1984) and Fletch (1985) starring Chevy Chase. The latter was a big hit. Less successful was Big Trouble (1986). He wrote and directed The Freshman (1990) starring Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick and did a rewrite on Soapdish (1991). He executive produced a number of movies including Chances Are (1989), White Fang (1991), Undercover Blues (1993) and Little Big League (1994). Bergman wrote and directed Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) starring Nicolas Cage, James Caan and Sarah Jessica Parker ; and It Could Happen To You (1994) starring Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda. He wrote The Scout although he says the resulting film is different from his version. Bergman wrote and directed Striptease (1996) starring Demi Moore; and directed the Jacqueline Susann biopic Isn't She Great (2000) starring Bette Midler and Nathan Lane. He has written four novels: The Big Kiss-Off of 1944, Hollywood and LeVine, Tender Is LeVine, and Sleepless Nights. He also wrote the Broadway comedy, Social Security, and Working Title. The Andrew Bergman History Writing Prize is awarded by the University of Wisconsin. In 2007, Bergman received the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing from the Writers Guild of America.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author