David Goodis is the mystery man of American crime fiction. A cipher even to people who knew him, Goodis would have vanished from the annals of America literature were it not for the extraordinary esteem afforded him by French readers. At a time when none of his books were in print in the United States (the 1970s)--all were available in France, lauded as classics of noir-stained existentialism.

A prodigious producer of pulp fiction in the late 1930s and early '40s, Goodis scored an immense success with his second novel, Dark Passage, published in 1946. It was immediately snapped up by Warner Bros. and turned into a hit movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Goodis was promoted by Warner Bros. as the next big thing--the latest incarnation of Hammett. He struggled to live up to the hype, writing several unproduced original scripts and a remake of Bette Davis' 1940 hit The Letter, released in 1947 as The Unfaithful. But Goodis had his own ideas about what--and how--he wanted to write--as well as a few personal peccadilloes--that drove him back to his native Philadelphia, where he spent the next decade churning out paperback originals for low-end publishers. And it's those books--dark, stream-of-consciousness nightmares (Cassidy's Girl, Black Friday, Down There, The Burglar, The Wounded and the Slain)--that are his literary legacy. Goodis was back in native Philadelphia, churning out manuscripts for Lion Books and Gold Medal Paperbacks, when he was approached by first-time film director Paul Wendkos to adapt his 1953 novel, The Burglar, into a screenplay. It's his only screenwriting credit after he'd left Hollywood.

After achieving international success with his directorial debut, The 400 Blows (1959), 27-year-old Francois Truffaut surprised the film world by choosing as his next project an obscure American paperback called Down There, written by Goodis in 1956. Well, everyone was surprised but the French. Their "New Wave" filmmakers often turned to the work of American crime writers for inspiration. They'd read translations of the novels in the Serie Noire, a line of crime novels wildly popular with French intellectuals. Adapting these books allowed a new generation of French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, to honor an American genre they revered--in both its literary and cinematic form. Goodis may have had no literary cachet in the States, but in France he had a reputation as a poet of the urban demimonde, the master of existential despair.

Truffaut's film, retitled Shoot the Piano Player (1960), starred Charles Aznavour, who coincidentally (?) was almost a dead ringer for David Goodis, especially in the only picture of the author published in France. The French simply accepted Truffaut's character as the spitting image of a mysteriously reclusive, chain-smoking, jazz-loving American writer. It remains the iconic image of the author. Perhaps we'll set the record straighter this year with the publication, for the first time in English, of journalist Philippe Garnier's definitive biography, David Goodis: A Life in Black and White. As the book's publisher, I can't recommend it highly enough.

I've chosen to show: Dark Passage (1947, novel), Nightfall (1957, novel), The Burglar (1957, novel and screenplay), Shoot the Piano Player (1960, novel).

By Eddie Muller