Vanning is carjacked near Denver by some car jackers from Seattle. He is forced to kill a guy and then forget where he left the 300K and goes back to NYC where he lives in fear of being found by the bad guys. they do find him and rough him up of course- he can't remember where he left the 300K. a good cop spies on him for weeks and becomes convinced he didn't do it. a mysterious girl appears. is she in cahoots with the bad guy or not? pretty great- good suspense with the girl and the cop is good. kinda of a fake happy ending so that part isn't so great, but still. ( )

Wanted to like it more than I did. Pretty typical crime thriller. ( )

Back when David Goodis' 1947 noir novel Nightfall was first published, Beat Generation critic Seymour Krim wrote as part of his book review for the New York Times: "There is much Freud in the air, much Faulkner in the sentence, much Hemingway in the talk. But any way you slice it, it's the old chase again." And what a chase we have! Goodis serves up big, strong James Vanning as the ultimate victim of circumstances.

Vanning is ex-Navy, driving to Chicago where his new dream job as a commercial artist awaits, when he rounds a bend and hits a broken down station wagon. No sooner does he come to a halt than a serious-looking fellow walks up and points a gun between his eyes. Turns out, gunslinger and his two buddies crashed their getaway car fleeing from a Seattle bank robbery. They need a car and Vanning's car will do just fine. Vanning is forced to join them - he's seen too much.

The four travel to a hotel in Denver and the robbers put Vanning in the bathroom. After some time, Vanning tries the door, its unlocked and when he comes out, to his amazement, he's alone with the sack of bills and a revolver siting out in the open on a bureau. He grabs both and flees.

But he doesn't get far; in the hallway a stranger sticks a gun in his ribs (every citizen has the right to bear arms) and forces Vanning to take a side exit. Once alone, far from the hotel and out in the woods, the stranger lets down his guard and Vanning pulls out the revolver and shots as an act of self-defense. He grabs the sack and runs for it but in his haste and terror, Vanning looses the money along the way.

Thus we have James Vanning, a man on the run, pursued left and right, bank robbers on one side who think he still has their money and police on the other who deduce he committed grand larceny and murder. A hunted man, James Vanning makes his way to New York City's Greenwich Village, changes his name and sets up his own studio to work as a commercial artist.

David Goodis is good at writing novels about the guy on the run, like Dark Passage where Vince Parry is wrongly handed a life sentence for allegedly murdering his wife and becomes a perpetual fugitive from the law (a controversy developed between Goodis and ABC over their prime time TV show, The Fugitive). Bleak, nihilist Black Friday is another such novel featuring Al Hart bolting to Philadelphia after killing his brother. Al gets mixed up with gangsters in the City of Brotherly Shove with heaps of Goodis-style sex and violence in the mix. Black Friday is pulp fiction, but this book is worth the read to observe the close connection between American postwar fiction and stark alienation portrayed by French existentialists such as Camus and Sartre.

On the topic of pulp fiction, it is worth noting as a beginning writer under a string of pseudonyms David Goodis churned out dozens and dozens and dozens of novels at a furious pace, sometimes a book a week. This hardboiled rock ‘em sock ‘em dime store writing style carried through to Goodis’ more mature fiction collected in the prestigious Library of America, works like Down There (Shoot the Piano Player), Dark Passage, The Burglar and Nightfall. This being the case, I would modify the above Seymour Krim quote to “much Faulkner and Raymond Chandler in the sentence, much Hemingway and Jim Thompson in the talk.”

James Vanning is 32, an ordinary, honest, All-American kind of guy who desires first and foremost a loving wife and kids. I can picture the typical reader, a family man, in the late 1940s forking across his hard won quarter to read all about someone much like himself caught in the snare of stolen loot and murder. As a study in cover design for reader appeal, check out the two covers below: the lurid original from 1947 destined for the dime store and the 1991 reissue that found its way to bookstores:





Nightfall, a psychological thriller complete with intellectual, empathetic detective and heart of gold knockout dame. One of my favorite parts is how James Vanning eventually realizes he isn’t going to win points with the gangsters by being honest. Like Hansel and Gretel confronting the wicked witch, Vanning learns what is needed is not honesty but cleverness.

And how about those two Denver mysteries: Why did Vanning find the money and revolver sitting out for the taking? What ever happened to all that cash? The answers are revealed in the dramatic closing scene. Slap down your quarters on the counter, or, more likely, punch the purchase button on your computer to find out all about it.


American author David Goodis, 1917 - 1967 ( )

Bank robbers can be pretty scary people, wouldn't you agree? Jim Vannings knows so. He was unlucky enough to happen upon a gang right after a heist and they were in desperate need of a wheel man. Even though Jim had his objections, the gun in his face quickly changed his mind. So he found himself in the thick of it and along the way the money disappeared, and so did Jim. Now the gang is looking for him. The Law is on his tail too. Jim is sure everything would work out fine, if he could just remember where he put that three hundred thou...

I felt like Goodis was trying to hard with this one. Sometimes I just shook my head at the prose, especially when he started in on what seemed like a three-paragraph color montage and his constant reminders of the heat. Also, some of the circumstances felt too improbable to me. An FBI agent would not stop at a pay phone and call his wife at home during a hot chase. He certainly wouldn't tell her every little detail and ask her advice on operational matters. Well, everyone has to cut their teeth somewhere. I will continue my foray down Goodis street. He's capable of better work and I have faith he won't let me down. ( )

Interesting story with a lot more psychology thrown in than usual. A few implausibilities make it not as realistic as some hard-boiled, noir novels, but Goodis avoids most of the traps in writing such a story and rises above most of his competitors. A few cases of over-writing from time to time, but none of them make you cringe. This is a fairly early work, and I intend to keep reading his other books to see how he improves. ( )