![]() Nightfall (1947) further develops the theme of the innocent pursued, as artist Jim Vanning becomes accidentally embroiled in a violent robbery and must evade criminals and police alike. The story of a man railroaded for his wife’s murder and forced to assume a different identity after escaping from prison becomes in Goodis’s hands a lyrical evocation of urban fear and loneliness. Goodis experienced a brief celebrity when his novel Dark Passage (1946) became the basis for a popular movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Now, for the first time, his best work is collected in a single volume. Though little acknowledged during his lifetime, he has long enjoyed an international cult following, and his works have been adapted for the screen by directors including François Truffaut, Samuel Fuller, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and Jacques Tourneur. Born in Philadelphia, he brought a jazzy, expressionist style and an almost hallucinatory intensity to his spare, passionate, uncompromising novels of mean streets and doomed people. Among the pantheon of American crime writers-those masters of noir whose powerful vernacular style and dark and subversive themes transformed American culture and writing-David Goodis was a unique figure. ![]()
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