Noir fiction for the modern reader.

CASSIDY’S GIRL by David Goodis (1951)

Review by Mike Dennis

When you open a David Goodis novel, you can be pretty sure of two things: it’s probably going to be set in Philadelphia and it’s definitely going to be populated by characters whose lives have no significance, often not even to themselves. And that’s exactly what you get when you open Cassidy’s Girl, a 1951 effort by the master storyteller of doomed human beings.

I say doomed because even in this book, which has Goodis’ twisted version of a happy ending, the characters are all lost souls, thrown out with the bathwater into the filthy streets of the Philadelphia waterfront.

Jim Cassidy drives a bus from Philadelphia to Easton three times every day, back and forth, back and forth, because that’s the only work he can get. As a ruined former airline pilot, he’s well into his downward spiral, and his monotonous job only sets him up for his evening activities. He hangs around a slimy waterfront bar where all the hard case drinkers go, he gets in fist fights, and he’s completely under the spell of his wife Mildred, a breast-shaking, hip-swaying drunken nag who would rather cheat on him than make him dinner.

Well, one night while in an alcoholic stupor in his favorite dive, he spots Doris, a twentysomething girl who is, as she puts it, drinking herself to death, and she looks it. Sallow-complected and vacant-eyed, she makes love to the bottle every day and every night. Cassidy falls for her, more out of genuine caring than lust, and he eventually moves in with her. As he falls more and more in what passes for love in a Goodis novel, he tries his very best to get her to quit drinking. In one wild fantasy, he even envisions a proper, straightened-out life for the two of them, dining in fine restaurants and sipping an after-dinner sherry. “There would be no need for the other kind of drinking,” he thinks to himself.

Mildred, however, has different ideas, and Cassidy’s problems start multiplying.

This is why Goodis was such a great writer. He can take the very lowest players on society’s scale and make you care about them. Even when you know they have absolutely no shot, which is usually the case, you still care. Cassidy’s Girl reads like Goodis’ love letter to these people, and for that matter to all the losers who ever appeared in his novels. Anyone who appreciates great writing should make a point of locating a copy.

Covers. Every author’s favorite subject. Especially when the cover design for his/her novel is imminent. I would imagine that during this uncertain period, more Tums are consumed per capita among crime fiction authors than at any other time. And for good reason. Covers are the source of great anxiety. Will it be dynamite? Will it be terrible? Can I live with it? What’s an author to do?

Of course, the answer is nothing. There’s not a single thing you can do about it, unless you’re Stephen King or somebody. Don’t believe your friends when they tell you you can’t judge a book by its cover. That made for a good Bo Diddley song, but you might remind them that forcing a person to make snap judgments with very little else to go on is precisely the purpose of covers.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to have a hip editor, as Megan Abbott did for her debut 2005 novel, Die A Little, then a lot of the stress melts away and you get a cover like this.

This outstanding cover, designed and photographed by Richie Fahey, is, as I said in a review of this novel, almost worth the price of the book by itself. The use of hand-coloring over a black & white photo, with all the tones just right, make this a book which will grab the attention of even the most casual browser.

Fahey also painted, but did not design, the cover of Andrew Vachss’ The Getaway Man (2003), arguably Vachss’ best novel.

These two covers, along with the ones that follow, are among my favorites. Here’s Cruel Poetry, a great 2007 Florida noir novel by Vicki Hendricks. I just love all the elements of this one.

John Ridley’s terrific noir novel, Love Is A Racket (1998), sported an attention-getting cover. I love the little heart in the gun barrel, as well as the scary font.

No need to introduce Hard Case Crime. We all know the great work they do. Here are a couple of their stunning efforts.

Black Lizard/Vintage Crime put out some pretty damned good covers back during the late 80s and early 90s. Jim Thompson’s classic nightmare novel from 1952, The Killer Inside Me, leaps to the front of my mind whenever I think about them.

I don’t know who they got to pose for this photograph, but one look into his eyes and I can promise you I never want to meet up with him.

Another Jim Thompson book, 1953′s Recoil, has a particularly creepy cover. I think it’s the glasses the guy is wearing.  

The cover to Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up (1967) is a great example of how a photograph can start off looking romantic and then end up looking dangerous.

David Goodis’ Black Friday (1954) is minimalist cover design at its most effective.

Last, and certainly not least, is Dorothy B Hughes underrated 1946 novel, Ride The Pink Horse.

By the way, these are all great novels. If you haven’t read them, I urge you to do so. You won’t be sorry.

Anybody out there got any fave covers they’d like to share? These are just a few of mine, but my list is long.

THE BLONDE ON THE STREET CORNER by David Goodis (1954)

Reviewed by Mike Dennis

“Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver’s candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep.”

That’s the opening line of The Blonde On The Street Corner, a 1954 novel written by David Goodis. Of course, Ralph doesn’t go home. Instead, he spots a blonde across the dark street and gawks at her. She eventually calls him over to light her cigarette, which he does.

Now, at this point, one might expect that Ralph would be lured into a tight web spun by this dazzling femme fatale, resulting in his eventual moral destruction, if not death. But Goodis doesn’t write that way. In fact, the blonde is fat, sharp-tongued, and lives in the neighborhood. Ralph knows her, and knows that she’s married. She propositions him right on the corner, but he rejects her. “I don’t mess around with married women,” he tells her. Then he goes home.

Much to the reader’s surprise, this encounter does not trigger the plot of the novel. In fact, it would be right to say that the novel has no plot, in the usual sense. Ralph returns to his impoverished Philadelphia home and spends the rest of the book wallowing in misery with his friends, all of whom are in the same boat as he: in their thirties, usually unemployed, and filled with unrealistic dreams. One of his friends says he is a “songwriter”, but no one has ever recorded any of his songs. Another wants to be a big-league baseball player, but lasted only a week on a class D minor league team. They spend most of their time leaning up against buildings, wearing only thin coats against the bitter Philadelphia winter, and wishing they had more money. They talk a good deal about going to Florida, where they can get jobs as bellmen in a “big-time hotel”, convinced this would jump-start their desperate lives.

The book goes on like this pretty much all the way through, with no moving story line, but it’s Goodis’ prose that keeps you riveted to the page. No one can paint a picture of a hopeless world better than he can. For Goodis, Philadelphia is a desolate place, whose bleak streets offer little in the way of promise. Many of his novels were set there, and they all shared that common trait. Life in that city is, for him and his characters, usually an exercise in futility. These are people who walk around with twenty or thirty cents in their pockets, who cold-call girls out of the phone book asking for dates, and for whom escape to Florida is always right around the corner. The finale provides the mortal body blow to Ralph, stripping him of the last shred of his dignity.

The Blonde On The Street Corner is a potent novel, filled with the passions and despair of its characters.All through this book, you find yourself longing to run into characters whose lives mean something. Then, you realize there aren’t any.

SUCKER PUNCH by Ray Banks (2007)

Review by Mike Dennis

The world of small-time boxing makes for an irresistible backdrop in noir fiction.  Films such as Fat City and The Set-Up gained classic status by their dramatic depiction of the hopeless nature of that world and those who inhabit it.  There are very few options for these people, and almost all of them end in flames.  This is the message delivered in Sucker Punch, a 2007 novel by British author Ray Banks.

The big time in the sport, represented by championship bouts in Las Vegas, is clearly out of reach for everyone involved in this book.  But that doesn’t stop them from dreaming, and when you think about it, that’s what boxing is all about:  one man’s dream to escape a life of grinding poverty.

Liam Wooley is not the central character in the book, but he’s the fighter from Manchester, the one with the big hopes.  He’s got talent, no doubt about it, but his temper may prevent him from “turning pro”, which is his immediate goal.  He’s laconic to a fault, a sort of young Charles Bronson, who just wants to train in the gym and be left alone.

Cal Innes, a former private investigator, is out of prison on probation.  He forges prescriptions to quench his pill habit and does odd jobs for Paulo Gray, owner of a seedy gym in Manchester.  Paulo gets an invitation to send a fighter to Los Angeles to compete in a small tournament, where it’s rumored that high-level scouts will be in attendance.  He decides to send Liam, his best prospect, and asks Cal to keep him company on the trip and make sure he shows up for the bouts.

Told from Cal’s point of view, the novel takes them to LA, during which time Cal can’t find anywhere to smoke, he rubs Liam the wrong way, and he meets Nelson Byrne, a stranger in a bar who says he’s a former fighter, but now “does some coaching and scouting”.  Hmmm.

There’s enough British street slang in this book to fill a soccer stadium, and I often had to pause to try to decipher it.  But Banks was able to deftly switch back and forth from British voice to American in those scenes where Cal is speaking to Byrne.

I was over halfway through the book before I realized that nothing was really happening.  The first hint of real conflict didn’t come until later, and normally, this is the kiss of death for any crime novel.  Banks’ prose, though, is so hard-hitting that it holds your attention through it all and makes you forget that the story is just standing still.  David Goodis was a master at this, forcing you to turn the page on the strength of his writing alone.

Banks’ Manchester, always cold and drizzly, brings to mind Goodis’ Philadelphia, a miserable, bleak place where the minor players have no shot and where their dreams are easily extinguished.

Be careful when you read Sucker Punch.  You’ll need to take a shower to wash away the grime.

THE GAMBLER by William Krasner (1950)

Review by Mike Dennis 2010

“This is it, fellow,” the motorman said impatiently.  “End of the line.”

That’s the opening of William Krasner’s The Gambler (1950), a gritty noir novel of one man coming face to face with his own limitations.  That man is Ben Wulfson, who, unlike most noir protagonists, starts at the end of the line and pretty much stays there.

He’s just returned to town from an eight-year absence, which is never fully explained.  He makes his way to commission row, which looks like an area straight out of David Goodis’ black vision of Philadelphia.  It’s full of sooty buildings and merciless streets and people with few options, but right away, Ben feels at home.

He wants to get back into the swing of the gambling world, which he knows well, so he hooks up with Tim Coogan, a pasty-faced young man who worked with him years earlier.  Together they set up a dice game.

Now, if you run a dice game legitimately, you’re going to make money in the long run because the odds are immutably in your favor.  Problem is, Ben doesn’t want to wait for the long run.  He wants to make a pile of dough fast, then get out of town for good.  So he introduces doctored dice into his game.

The game cruises along, Ben and Tim make some pretty good money, and then Ben meets Alice, a girl wandering aimlessly in the park, clutching a crust of bread.  She’s wet, cold, and very sick.  Out of sympathy, he takes her back to his fleabag hotel room to dry her out and warm her up.  They develop a strange, distant relationship, but each of them welcomes it in his/her own way.

Problems arise when Ben’s loaded dice are discovered.  Then the local gambling kingpin decides Ben’s game is disrupting the natural order of things.  Meanwhile, his own troubled family issues reverberate throughout the book.  The cops, the gangsters, the gamblers, Ben’s family…they’re all out to get Ben in one way or another, as each scene narrows his window of opportunity to escape.

Krasner paints a desolate picture of people on the other side of town, where no one ever goes.  The scenes are described in great detail, maybe too much so in spots, but all in the language of true noir.  Even the scenes that take place under the daytime sun feel dark and hopeless.  Under his hand, light is co-opted by shadow as easily as ambition is extinguished by reality.

The author of only eight novels, Krasner spent most of his career writing scientific essays for journals and magazines, as well as a lot of TV and radio scripts.  Don’t let that fool you, though.  The Gambler is a bitter, uncompromising tale, very well told.

Welcome to my website, mikedennisnoir.com.  This is my first post, and I’m very excited to finally get this site up and running.  A boatload of thanks to Leslie Michaelis of Las Vegas, who built it from the ground up.

I’m a crime fiction writer, living in Las Vegas, who’s been toiling in the vineyards for years until L&L Dreamspell Publishing picked up one of my novels, The Take.  It’s a fast-paced little noir effort that will be out sometime in 2010.   Thanks go to Morgan St James for her energetic efforts in helping me with the preliminary editing.  You can read an excerpt of it here on this site. 

I’ve always admired the best of the crime novelists.  I’m talking about hardboiled fiction guys like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Gil Brewer, and Raymond Chandler, among others, who between them, managed to kick the door open a crack or two, all the while operating under the stigma of  “pulp” writer.  They made it ”respectable” to write crime fiction, elitist public opinion notwithstanding.  Later, you had Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and so many others who shoved the door all the way open so guys like me could just walk right through it.  Speaking only for myself, I owe these men a serious debt of gratitude.