The Duality of David Goodis’s Criminal Femmes Fatales

Abstract

If Dashiell Hammett writes about the underworld of crime and chaos, David Goodis delves into the dark psyche of people on the margins, fallen heroes, and dangerous women. Goodis’s world is one in which his characters are doomed to fail, as they struggle with fear, paranoia, and hopelessness. Goodis shows another side of the mean streets, one that is full of “paranoid reveries linked to some kind of identity crisis” (Haut 1995: 21). Although we can find some commonalities between early detective writers such as Chandler and Hammett and Goodis, the latter’s work marks a departure that signals the new trends in post-war crime narratives. While Hammett and Chandler create detectives who strive to assert law and order, and those detectives function in a world of corruption and crime, Goodis’s heroes are more like victims who exhibit a breath of desperation in the way they deal with the violent world around them. Indeed, Goodis’s characters are disempowered by forces they cannot name; perhaps it is simply fate. Yet they also have inner struggles. In one novel after the other, we find characters who are crushed and destroyed by forces within and outside them. Goodis sustains the interest in urban settings, violence, and sex, but his work also intensifies this recipe of violence and sex (in a way that harks back to Cain’s fictional method) by investing in a noir — literally dark — world of urban crime tainted with a relentless sense of defeat.