Jay A. Gertzman is Professor Emeritus of English at Mansfield University, where his specialties included Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, noir crime fiction, and literary censorship. He's written books on the editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and on the distribution and prosecution of erotic literature in the 1920s and 30s. He's also the author of the seminal study of Samuel Roth, Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist. Gertzman has published articles on David Goodis in Paperback Parade, Crimespree Magazine, Academia.com, Alan Guthrie’s Noir Originals, and the programs of the Noircon conferences.
His new book is titled Pulp According to David Goodis, which, as the title suggests, focuses on the work of David Loeb Goodis (1917-1967), an American writer of crime fiction noted for his output of short stories and novels in the noir and pulp fiction realm. Gertzman's work starts with six characteristics of 1950s pulp noir and works its way to drawing parallels between Goodis's work and Kafka’s. Other elements covered in this critical analysis of Goodis’s oeuvre include his Hollywood script-writing career; his use of Freud, Arthur Miller, Faulkner and Hemingway; and his "noble loser's" indomitable perseverance. Woody Haut (author of Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction), called Gerzman's book "The most comprehensive Goodis study yet. Gertzman culls the files, brings everything together and then some. Not only essential reading for all Goodis obsessives but an excellent introduction to one of noir’s greatest writers."
Jay Gertzman stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching his new book:
AGING BOOKWORM’S PAPER TRAIL TRACES PULP WRITER
David Goodis became exclusively a writer of crime paperback originals (not previously published in hardback) in 1950. He remained so the rest of his life. The points of sale, the readership, and the selling points of the novels were the same as for the pulp crime magazines. They had the same distributors. People scoped them out on newsstands, in drug stores, super markets, candy stores, cigar stores, hotel lobbies, bus and train stations, and for a while in subway station vending machines.
My first task was to study the pulp market. The Association of National Advertisers recorded magazine circulation and rate trends, from 1937 to 1995. Popular Publications studied the parameters of marketing and distributing the paperback “original.” The “original” was a new and highly significant post-war development in mass market popular entertainment. Publishers like Lion and Fawcett paid writers upon acceptance of the MS. Popular Publications specialized in sports, men’s adventure, romance and western magazines. They recorded the number of copies sold in various parts of the country of each of these genres and the most lucrative points of sale.
The New American Library files include advice to editors about instructing writers how to sell books. Publisher Victor Weybright wanted writers who could combine “sparse sentences, the conscious use of short, punchy words, inexorable movement,” and stories that “got under the skin of life. He had Mickey Spillane under contract, but much preferred James M. Cain, whom Raymond Chandler dismissed as sleazy. Two of Cain’s most famous passages describe a wife and her lover making violent love immediately after the killing of her husband; another couple have sex on the altar of an abandoned church. Spillane, anyone?
L Ron Hubbard’s correspondence describe how to create workable pulp story lines and character types. He headed The American Fiction Guild of magazine writers in the 30s. His yarns featured good-guy cops and reckless heroes. Yes, he stated he first learned the ropes by “dragging the story into the muck.” Surprisingly or not, there is no better source for understanding 1930s pulp magazine formulae.
Goodis set many novels in the working class and underclass neighborhoods of his native Philadelphia, where “blight” was the result of political abandonment of what once were proud ethnic enclaves. Loan sharking, alcoholism, prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling addiction were the motivating forces of the “Philly gothic” in which Goodis (“the poet of the losers”) specialized.
I have gathered census figures of the neighborhoods about which he wrote, as well as newspaper stories and photographic coverage of 1950s urban Philadelphia. The Temple University Urban Archives contain clippings of reporters’ interviews with residents suffering in enclaves of declining population and businesses. They document the elimination of playgrounds, corner stores and other support services for the neighborhoods, and of the odorous and unhealthy rendering factories that zoning commissions did not prevent from existing next to houses and schools. The city’s own archives have stunning photos of this process. Philadelphia police statistics in 1950 show that Philadelphia skid row and river wards ranked highest in the city in arrests. The reason was the racketeering that replaced lawful means of employment when City Hall turned its back instead of helping people in stress. Goodis’ writing is as productive a treatment of this process as any sociological study. This is partly the result of his use of the slang and idiom that people actually spoke. Novels with titles such as Street of No Return and Down There show that he is the master of Philadelphia Gothic.
A Major theme of American 20th century literature is the existence of discontent and isolation because of obligations to family and community. I detected the effects on Goodis’ writings by reading Nathaniel West, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway and Faulkner. They also write about manic behavioral repetition, familial obligations, and psychic entrapment what Arthur Miller called “The Tragedy of the Common Man.” Reading then-reputable critics who dismissed pulp crime as a form of “masscult” gave me a perspective on the false contrast between the “low” entertainment of pulp stories and the cultural capital of “literature.”
Analogues in Goodis’ writings to Kafka’s occur throughout his career. I can’t say that I took a trip to the Kafka Museum in Prague as research, but the shadowy lighting, the expressionistic background music, and the roomful of art based on Kafka’s work did deepen my feeling about Goodis’ own work. A construction modeling the killing machine from Kafka’s “Penal Colony” was a revelation: Kafka and Goodis, who wrote less than two generations apart, were brothers under the skin.
You can read more about Jay Gerzman and his book via the Down & Out Books website or the book's Facebook page, or follow the author on Twitter and Facebook. American History is now available via Down & Out Books and all major booksellers.
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