David Goodis, Like You've Never Seen Him Before

That is to say, in a documentary. Larry Withers' long-awaited David Goodis... To a Pulp will make its screen debut in a little more than a month, and you're invited. You can find more details (and a segment from the documentary) over at Lou Boxer's NoirCon site.

"They Called My Husband a Gangster!"

I spent some time in a used bookstore today, and this was the hands-down find of the day: a 96-page paperback from 1952 entitled They Called My Husband a Gangster, by Mrs. Jim (Alice) Vaus. For only two bucks, and with a title like that, how could I pass it up?

But there was another reason this one caught my eye. The publisher was "Church Sales Corporation" in L.A., and a quick look at the foreword by Mrs. Billy Graham explains why: Alice's husband Jim was a former Mickey Cohen associate who "found Christ" and reformed. Now the name "Jim Vaus" would have meant nothing to me if I hadn't coincidentally been reading John Buntin's excellent L.A. Noir, a history of the war between Cohen and Police Chief William Parker during the 1950s. Vaus indeed was a Cohen man; he was a wiretapper who gave Cohen some primo blackmail fodder to use against the head of the LAPD's vice squad. This was in 1949; by 1952, Vaus had apparently found God at a Billy Graham "Big Tent" meeting and rejected a life of syndicate crime. All of which is utterly fascinating.

Apparently there's also a "he says" version of the story from Vaus himself (see below, from the back cover copy). Wonder if I'll be able to track this down. I'm also wondering if Vaus found Jesus for the long haul, or if he crept back into his old ways. Guess I'll have to keep reading L.A. Noir to find out...

Legends of the Underwood #16: Robert Silverberg

"Back in my pulp-mag days I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5000-7500 words in a single day. If I had 3000-worders to do, I usually wrote one before lunch and one after lunch. At three o'clock I poured myself a shot of rum or mixed a martini, put a record on, and sat down to relax until dinnertime, reading and perhaps sketching out the next day's work on a scrap of paper. This was the Tuesday-to-Friday routine. I never worked on Saturday or Sunday... In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write. I produced a lot of copy that way—a million words a year, or more."

--Robert Silverberg in conversation with Octopulps, Francesca Myman's website highlighting SF, fantasy and adventure pulps "featuring the wily octopus." (Hat tip to BoingBoing for the link.)

(Sixteenth in a series.)

Legends of the Underwood #15: Mario Puzo

"I used to do a book bonus on the weekends, which was at least 60 pages. I never could write in the office, I had to work at home. When I was working on The Godfather, I was doing three stories a month, I was writing book reviews for The New York Times, Book World, Time magazine, and I wrote a children's book [The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw]. All at one time. And I was publishing other articles. I had four years where I must have knocked out millions of words. I tell ya, it's absolutely the best training a writer could get, to work on those magazines. You did everything."

--Mario Puzo, in conversation with Josh Alan Friedman, from It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (by Adam Parfrey, Feral House, 2003). During the 1960s, Puzo wrote for Magazine Management titles Male and Men.

(Fifteenth in a series. Cover scan courtesy CoverBrowser.com.)

Goodis-4-Life

Above, Philly native Dan Wolkow (that's Professor Wolkow to some of you) at the intersection of 10th and Loudon in Philly's Logan neighborhood, where noir writing legend David Goodis grew up. Two decidedly un-thuggish things about this photo: the cigarette in Dan's mouth is fake. And behind the stone barriers are two mini-vans. Still, there was much fun at yesterday's Goodis Tour and Memorial 2010, and I've uploaded some photos to Flickr. I shot some video at the Goodis grave, but it came out ultra-shaky, and the sound was crap. So sorry; no HD footage this year. Maybe next time.

Goodisville: The Tenderloin

"They spotted him on Race Street between Ninth and Tenth. It was Chinatown in the tenderloin of Philadelphia and he stood gazing into the window of the Wong Ho restaurant and wishing he had the cash to buy himself some egg-foo-yung. The menu in the window priced egg-foo-yung at eighty cents an order and he had exactly thirty-one cents in his pocket. He shrugged and started to turn away from the window and just then he heard them coming."

From: "Black Pudding" by David Goodis (Originally published in Manhunt, December 1953; reprinted in Black Friday & Selected Stories, Serpent's Tail, 2006)

Photo: Race Street, between 9th and 10th streets, February 21, 1950.

About this series: Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London, wrote that Philadelphia is "the hometown [David] Goodis celebrates, described with almost maniacal attention to topographical detail and re-imagined in almost all his writing." So I thought it would be fun to tour the Quaker City through Goodis's eyes, pairing selections from his novels with photos of the city as Goodis saw it. Hence, "Goodisville," which will be updated throughout the coming year.

(Photo courtesy PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.)

Out Today: Cable #22

I've been lax with these reminders lately, but Cable #22, the second installment of the big "Homecoming" arc, hits finer comic shops everywhere today. There are guns. Explosions. Muskets. Stand-offs. And as seen above, cute little badgers from the past. How can you resist, especially with amazing art by Gabriel Guzman?

Also, those of you who missed the Cable/Hope backup stories I did with Steve Dillon will be able to pick them up in a single issue this February.

Goodisville: Northwood

"The house was a bungalow on the outskirts of Frankford, where Philadelphia gives way to the Roosevelt Boulevard. It was a neighborhood of new homes, low-priced but solidly constructed. The bungalows were detached and each had a reasonably wide skirting of lawn, a small garage, an open porch, and an altogether attractive appearance. They were nice little bungalows and it was a clean and pretty little neighborhood. But the fact remained that it was lower-middle-class, and Alvin Darby told himself it wouldn't sum up as the usual target of a burglar."

From: Of Tender Sin (1952) by David Goodis

Photo: Adams and Castor Avenues, Northwood, June 2, 1950

About this series: Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London, wrote that Philadelphia is "the hometown [David] Goodis celebrates, described with almost maniacal attention to topographical detail and re-imagined in almost all his writing." So I thought it would be fun to tour the Quaker City through Goodis's eyes, pairing selections from his novels with photos of the city as Goodis saw it. Hence, "Goodisville," which will be updated throughout the coming year.

(Photo courtesy PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.)

Dash in Philly

A while back someone asked if I knew where Dashiell Hammett had lived during his time in Philadelphia. Sadly, Hammett hardly lived here at all. Just a year and change around 1900, when Hammett was only six years old, before Hammett's father moved his family to Baltimore. (So I guess we won't be launching any Philly Poe Guy-style crusades anytime soon.) Biographer Richard Layman includes the two Philly Hammett addresses in his Shadow Man: 2942 Poplar Street and 419 N. 60th Street. (Layman's source was Philadelphia city directories from 1900 and 1901.) At first, when I did a Google map search and a PhillyHistory.org search, I was hopeful... could the Hammett homes still be there?

Above is the intersection of Poplar and N. 30th, and according to Google, 2942 is just one house in from the corner (on the left side). This photo was taken January 11, 1932, a little more than 30 years after Hammett lived here. However, a real estate search reveals that these homes were built in 1920; the original Hammett home razed by then. Same thing with the N. 60th Street address; those rowhomes, too, were built in 1920.

Still, we can claim that Hammett probably skinned his knees on the mean streets of turn-of-the-century Philly...

(Photo courtesy PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.)

Goodisville: Germantown

"He wondered if there was a lot of crime in Germantown. If things hadn't changed there wouldn't be much police activity there, because long ago when he was at the University he saw Germantown as a collection of dignity, just a bit smug and perhaps unconsciously snobbish against the historical background and the old colonial flavor. It might still be quiet and dignified up there. He wished he had cab fare. The dime for beer left him eighty-three cents, and he knew a cab to Germantown would cost much more."

From: Black Friday (1954) by David Goodis

Photo: 6358 Germantown Avenue, June 20, 1957

About this series: Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London, wrote that Philadelphia is "the hometown [David] Goodis celebrates, described with almost maniacal attention to topographical detail and re-imagined in almost all his writing." So I thought it would be fun to tour the Quaker City through Goodis's eyes, pairing selections from his novels with photos of the city as Goodis saw it. Hence, "Goodisville," which will be updated throughout the coming year.

(Photo courtesy PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.)

Machine Gun Work

"Hymie the Riveter was a Philadelphia racketeer who had moved north to the big city, carrying a Thompson submachine gun wrapped in blue-checkered oil cloth, after a disagreement with his partners. New York wasn't so good a field as Philadelphia for machine gun work. The Thompson lay idle for a year or so while Hymie made expenses with an automatic, preying on small-time crap games in Harlem."

From "Fly Paper" by Dashiell Hammett

(Photo: the mug shot of real-life Philadelphia racketeer Mickey Duffy.)

101 Years Ago in Philadelphia

January 1, 1909: the Day the Aliens Landed on South Broad Street.

(Photo from the Bain Collection at the Library of Congress. Click on the photo for a super-nifty higher-res image.)

101 Years Ago in Philadelphia

The view up South Broad Street, New Year's Day 1909. What's amazing is not how different everything looks... but how much of this area looks the same today.

(Photo from the Bain Collection at the Library of Congress. Click on the photo for a super-nifty higher-res image.)