Pulp According to David Goodis by Jay A. Gertzman

Author:Jay A. Gertzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

The Protagonist and the Criminal Kingpin as Equal in Fateful Vulnerability

Some of Goodis’ mob bosses have both Herman Charn’s or Matt Hagen’s sinister analytical survival skills, and a fumbling awareness (like that of Don Corleone, Whit Sterling, or Bennie Taplow) of how they might avoid Macbeth’s fate and “Professional Man” Freddie’s way of escaping. In one of Goodis’ early pulp magazine stories, “The Dead Laugh Last,”205 a hard man from the country, Rube Hansen, frightens everyone with his murderous viciousness. He appropriates another gangster’s territory, and his girl (blonde Lydia), throwing over the hard-eyed, experienced Mimi. Mimi knows that naïve Rube’s lawyer, his right hand man, and the new girl are double crossing their new boss and screws their plans. Loyal to Rube the rube (who thinks she’s tried to kill him), Mimi takes a bullet meant for him. When Rube realizes what has happened, all the fight goes out of him, he loses his cred, and waits for the pay-off: a bullet. “The only thing that lasts is the love of a good woman,” he says. Lydia—seemingly innocent with her peaches and cream complexion—turns out to be the femme fatale.

Rumor has it that Rube “had died and only his ghost remained to haunt some of the less expensive of his former hangouts.” It is in one of these dives that his enemies come for him. Impassive, he mutters, “Hello, Mimi.” After death, he is going to see her. She will laugh last. And he had betrayed this exotic beauty with the “hardness and beauty of diamonds.” Will she be his angel, or an avenging angel? Either way, she is, in the end, a symptom of the hard man’s predatory brutality and of his need to address his isolation and inner despair. The story makes an ironic gesture toward the sentimental love-conquers-all genre; perhaps Goodis might have submitted it to a romance magazine.

The key theme of this apprentice story, published just two years after the author’s graduation from Temple University, is moral blindness and its ultimate consequence. It is an early example, for Goodis, of how pulp and noir connect up. The same is true of paperback originals from varied stages of Goodis’ career: The Burglar, Down There, The Moon in the Gutter, Street of the Lost, and The Blonde on the Street Corner. These works focused the readers’ attention on the flickering awareness of both protagonist and antagonist that they have done what makes even the best of men outcasts from humanity. That does not mean there is any forgiveness for the crime boss, simply a sympathetic spotlight on his entrapment, the fate of all people.

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