Convicted of murdering his wife, a crime he did not commit, Vincent Parry escapes from San Quentin, undergoes a face change operation, and heads for South America, but complications involve a beautiful blonde, a man in a Studebaker, and several corpses

Dark Passage

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

David Goodis

Mystery

Kensington Pub. Corp

From the author of Dark Passage and Shoot the Piano Player, a thriller about the dark ethics of crime, and the man unlucky enough to violate them.With its chilling portrait of a doomed man sorting his way among the perverse loyalties of a criminal "family," Black Friday has all the earmarks of David Goodis's classics, Dark Passage and Shoot the Piano Player.  It is a haunting and often devastating foray into a world where no one has anything left to lose and survival itself is an act of malice.

Black Friday

Creative Arts Book Company

Street of No Return

Geoffrey O'Brien

“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.

Nightfall / The Moon in the Gutter / Down There / Dark Passage

Zomba

In 1997 The Library of America's Crime Novels: American Noir gathered, in two volumes, eleven classic works of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s--among them David Goodis's moody and intensely lyrical masterpiece Down There, adapted by François Truffaut for his 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player. Now, The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up again to celebrate the full scope of Goodis's signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career. Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia- born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder (Dark Passage); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money (Nightfall); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sister's brutal death (The Moon in the Gutter); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion (The Burglar); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction (Street of No Return). Long a cult favorite, Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s (LOA #225): Dark Passage / Nightfall / The Burglar / The Moon in the Gutter / Street of No Return (Library of America Noir Collection)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Library of America

“Surreal, disturbing, frequently brilliant. Nobody like him.”—Time Out
“David Goodis is the mystery man of hardboiled fiction…he wrote of winos and bar-room piano players and small-time thieves in a vein of tortured lyricism all his own…He was the poet of the losers.”—Geoffrey O’Brien
It’s winter in Philadelphia. Hart is broke, freezing, looking for a place to lay low from the cops. If he can’t find somewhere soon he might do something rash—like accept a wallet containing $11,000 from a man dying from gunshot wounds in the street. Whoever killed him might have a bed, though, even if that means hanging out with a bunch of thieves and drifters. Lucky for Hart he’s handy with his fists. And if he can use his looks and smarts to get in with the gang, maybe he can ride this out and score big on his own.
Originally published in 1954, Black Friday is one of David Goodis’ leanest, meanest melancholy thrillers. In this edition, the novel is combined with the best of Goodis’ short stories, first written for pulp magazines in America over 50 years ago and published for the first time in book form.
One of the greatest an American crime writers, David Goodis was born in Philadelphia in 1917, and wrote his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion, in 1938. He died in 1967.

Black Friday: And Selected Stories

Serpent's Tail

Shoot the Piano Player (Film Ink S.)

Contemporary

Prion Books Ltd

This adventurous two-volume collection presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s: The Killer Inside Me / The Talented Mr. Ripley / Pick-up / Down There / The Real Cool Killers (Library of America)

CHARLES WILLEFORD

Robert Polito

JIM THOMPSON

Chester HIMES

Patricia, Highsmith

Les Polars : François Truffaut (Coffret 5 volumes) (FOLIO POLICIER)

Gallimard]

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Books by David Goodis