David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s (LOA #225): Dark Passage / Nightfall / The Burglar / The Moon in the Gutter / Street of No Return (Library of America Noir Collection)

An impressive new volume of 5 noir novels by the cult-favorite author who stands alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as a master of American crime writing (The New York Review of Books) Among the pantheon of American crime writersthose masters of noir whose powerful vernacular style and dark and subversive themes transformed American culture and writingDavid Goodis was a unique figure. Now The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up to celebrate the full scope of Goodiss signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career. Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia-born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wifes murder (Dark Passage); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money (Nightfall); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sisters brutal death (The Moon in the Gutter); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion (The Burglar); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction (Street of No Return). Long a cult favorite Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers.