David Goodis Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Retreat from Oblivion (1939)
  2. Dark Passage (1946)
  3. Behold This Woman (1947)
  4. Nightfall/Missing Believed Murdered / The Dark Chase / Convicted (1947)
  5. Of Missing Persons (1950)
  6. Cassidy’s Girl (1951)
  7. Of Tender Sin (1952)
  8. Street of the Lost (1952)
  9. The Burglar (1953)
  10. The Moon in the Gutter (1953)
  11. Black Friday (1954)
  12. The Blonde on the Street Corner (1954)
  13. Street of No Return (1954)
  14. The Wounded and the Slain (1955)
  15. Down There/Shoot the Piano Player (1956)
  16. Fire in the Flesh (1957)
  17. Night Squad (1961)
  18. Somebody’s Done For (1967)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

David Goodis Books Overview

Dark Passage

Sentenced to life in San Quentin for the alleged murder of his wife, Vince Parry escapes in a desperate attempt to prove his innocence. A fugitive from justice, in the depths of despair, he finds refuge with a beautiful woman as he struggles to unravel a nightmarish plot. First published as a magazine serial, Dark Passage was filmed in 1947 by Delmer Daves. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it is regarded as a classic of noir filmmaking.

Nightfall/Missing Believed Murdered / The Dark Chase / Convicted

‘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 19171967, 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.

Cassidy’s Girl

They say that a man needs a woman to go to hell with. Cassidy had two. One was Mildred, the wife who kept him chained with ties of fear and jealousy and paralyzing sexual need. The other was Doris, a frail angel with a 100 proof halo and a bottle instead of a harp. With those two, Cassidy found that the ride to hell could be twice as fast. Cassidy’s Girl has all the traits that made its author a virtuoso of the hard boiled: a fiercely compelling ploy; characters who self destruct in spectacularly unpredictable ways; and an insider’s knowledge of all the routes to the bottom.

The Burglar

A dreamlike masterpiece of crime, honor, and perverse loyalty by the legendary author of Shoot the Piano Player. Nat Harbin is a family man. His family happens to be a gang of burglars. Now Nat has met a woman so hypnotically 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.

The Moon in the Gutter

In the rough end of Philadelphia, docker William Kerrigan obsesses over the mysterious suicide of his sister. Into a dive bar walks Lorretta Channing the beautiful, enigmatic socialite and sister of Newton the drunk. Loretta’s the impossible dream, the escape route from his hellhole existence, but maybe she holds the key to his sister’s death.

Black Friday

‘Surreal, disturbing, frequently brilliant. Nobody like him.’ Time Out

‘David Goodis is the mystery man of hardboiled fictionhe wrote of winos and bar room piano players and small time thieves in a vein of tortured lyricism all his ownHe 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.

The Blonde on the Street Corner

Long out of print major work from a master of classic American crime fiction

The Wounded and the Slain

THEIR VACATION IN PARADISE BECAME A DESCENT INTO HELL

Their marriage on the rocks, James and Cora Bevan flew to Jamaica for a last chance at patching things up. But in the slums of Kingston James found himself fighting for his life – while Cora found her own path to destruction, in the arms of another man.

Available for the first time in more than 50 years, this lost novel by legendary pulp author David Goodis is a stunning, shocking tale of cruelty, danger, desperation…and the possibility of redemption.

Night Squad

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.

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