GoodisCon 2007

GOODISCON 2007

By David Hiltbrand

Posted on Tue, Jan. 09, 2007

Out of darkness

In 18 pulp novels, David Goodis wallowed in Philly noir. Forty years after his death, devotees met to celebrate this eccentric and obscure native son.

By David Hiltbrand

Inquirer Staff Writer

It's a shockingly balmy day in January. Colorfully dressed revelers are streaming down South Street to celebrate with the Mummers.

This is definitely not David Goodis' Philadelphia.

In 18 books, most set in his hometown, this Temple graduate captured desperate men, usually on the wrong side of the law, trying to survive in a cold, grim and unforgiving Philadelphia.

On this unseasonably warm weekend, a band of writers, readers, academics and collectors are burrowed in the Society Hill Playhouse to pay tribute to this tortured and talented native son 40 years after his death.

Welcome to Goodiscon, a loftily named literary convention organized by Louis Boxer, an anesthesiologist at Chester County Hospital and lifelong collector of crime novels. Over three days, there are lectures; symposiums; slide shows; a trip to Goodis' gravesite in Trevose; a visit to a new archival exhibition at the author's alma mater; and a screening of The Burglar - the 1957 film shot in Philadelphia and Atlantic City that Goodis adapted from his own novel - featuring Dan Duryea, a little known blond bombshell from Bryn Mawr named Jayne Mansfield, and, in a cameo, John Facenda.

Though Goodis enjoyed early success, he spent the last decades of his life in relative seclusion, living at his parents' house in East Oak Lane, helping to care for Herbert, his schizophrenic brother. Since his death in early 1967, the author's name and work have grown increasingly obscure.

So why has this cadre of enthusiasts gathered in the Playhouse's Red Room to celebrate this eccentric character?

Because the '50s Prince of Pulp may finally be getting his due. Contemporary noir writers such as Jason Starr and Ken Bruen have been hailing Goodis' influence. And film directors like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are raving about the cinematic quality of his books.

Robert Polito, director of the graduate writing program at Manhattan's New School and the keynote speaker at Goodiscon, cites Goodis as a seminal figure in the second generation of American crime writers, the ones who inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, a group that includes Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith and Goodis.

"It seems to me that Thompson was very ambitious and experimental in terms of the structures of his novels," Polito says by phone. "Highsmith reinvented the American-in-Europe novel of Henry James. But Goodis was the brilliant anthropologist of Philadelphia with a terrific ear not only for the way people talked but for the ways in which they use conversation and language to evade and avoid communication."

For Philadelphia crime writer Duane Swierczynski (The Blonde), a panelist at Goodiscon, it was Goodis' parochial focus that first enthralled him when he stumbled across 1954's Black Friday in a Chestnut Street bookstore.

"Not only was it brilliant and full of life, not only did it have crime gangs and bad blondes and all this great stuff, but it was set here in Philadelphia," says Swierczynski. "It was amazing to read a great book set on the streets that I knew."

Stacy Shreffler, a Frankford native who now lives in Cambridge, Mass., came to the conference as a fan. An avid reader, she discovered Goodis among a stack of used paperbacks.

"I read a lot of pulp," she says, "but Goodis is one of my favorite writers from any genre. As a stylist, he can really captivate you sentence by sentence and keep you reading."

Goodis honed that hook-and-hold technique while serving as a fertile contributor to pulp magazines like Popular Detective, Thrilling Adventures and RAF Aces in the early '40s. (Many of these titles are on display at the Paley Library exhibit at Temple.) He once bragged to a reporter that he had written five million words for the pulps over a five-year period.

After his second novel, 1946's Dark Passage, was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, Goodis was given a lucrative contract as a scriptwriter by Warner Bros., and installed in William Faulkner's former office in Hollywood.

The 1947 film version, with Humphrey Bogart as a wanted fugitive hunting for his wife's killer, was memorable, but Goodis floundered in the studio system.

Although he was making good money, he drove a beater, slept on a friend's couch, and wore second-hand clothes. He returned to Philadelphia for good in 1950, far more withdrawn, a man tarnished by failure.

Yet when he was flushed into social settings, his demeanor remained jovial. Herb Gross, a younger cousin who saw and spoke to him often during this period, saw Goodis as the second coming of Jack Benny.

"I think he missed his profession. He could have been a stand-up comic," says Gross, 79, who flew to the conference from his home in Boca Raton, Fla. "Self-deprecation was the way he did things. He was always expounding on the fact that he was so frugal. Frugal was an understatement. He still had his recess money from school."

Even then, Gross was aware that the voluble side of Goodis was only a facade. "I knew him very well. And I say that with a question mark," he relates. "I don't know that anybody knew him very well."

The '50s were prolific years for Goodis as a novelist. At night, he would leave his parents' house on North 11th Street for mysterious forays to the seedier sides of town: the Skid Row of Vine Street, the docks, Port Richmond and Southwark. Were these outings research or release?

"It's been rumored that he preferred the company of large African American women," says Boxer. "And he wasn't a very big man, but he liked to go pick fights."

Goodis is still celebrated - at least in legal circles - for a curious footnote to his career. In the '60s, after his productivity as a writer had fallen off, he sued ABC, arguing that elements of the hit series The Fugitive were stolen from Dark Passage.

After a protracted battle, the suit was settled in Goodis' favor, but not until after his death. But it became a hallmark in the field of intellectual property.

His reputation might have vanished had not the French embraced him as a fellow existential spirit. Filmmaker Francois Truffaut, for instance, adapted Goodis' 1956 novel Down There, as Shoot the Piano Player.

In this country, his books have gone in and out of print over the years. But there's a growing momentum to recognize his legacy, spearheaded by this modest conference in the city Goodis loved so mercilessly.

"His books are all about people who are down on their luck with no chance of getting out from under the yoke they are carrying," says Boxer.

Let the Mummers find their own novelist.

David Hiltbrand