There’s also Dugan’s Den, a total dive with no tv and no music except for the incessant humming of the proprietor who stands behind the bar with his eyes closed until someone needs a thirty cent or less drink. The Moon in the Gutter takes place in Philly, on Vernon Street, a neighborhood in terminal despair and Goodis makes us feel it, walking us through its crack-brained shacks, “two hundred year old houses” that are no better than dumps and the loneliest alley where the blood of William Kerrigan’s sister Catherine has left a residual stain on the pavement. David Goodis is one of those artists who is embedded in our culture, whose fiction shadows our steps, whose imaginary voices lie somewhere in the background of our speech. There are also critically acclaimed films based on his fiction by Sam Fuller and Francois Truffaut. The film, released in 1947, was a famous vehicle for Bogart and Bacall which I have seen about ten times. In 1945, the film rights for his novel Dark Passage, included in this set, was acquired by Warners for 25K, which sounds like an impressive sum for the time. He is associated with at least three distinguished films. In the early 40’s, Goodis wrote for radio. That’s 1953 prices for you.ĭavid Goodis, born in 1917, lived for most of his childhood/adolescence in a middle class neighborhood in Philadelphia.
Single malt fiction like a shot glass of scotch that costs thirty cents. That doesn’t matter because I was kidnapped by the writer’s mastery of craft. It turns out my notions about what the book might be like were wrong. Also that title…it sounded like an image from a Japanese haiku. The brother/sister relationship appealed to me.
It’s included in Five Noirs Novels of the 1940’s & 50’s by David Goodis, a Library of America edition, which I purchased.īill Kerrigan is haunted by the memory of his sister, Catherine, who died by slitting her throat in an alley. Relatively unknown noir, more than a shade dated in its sexual politics, being a tale over sixty years old. In the shacks, alleys, dumps and dive bars of Vernon Street, all the moonlight seems to be for is a closer look at our nightmares. “The Moon in the Gutter”, such a poetic image? But I was wrong.
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