Unlike Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, David Goodis is not a household name. Even among aficionados of hard-boiled crime fiction, Goodis is less well known than James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Nevertheless, during the course of a career spanning nearly thirty years, Goodis produced an important and enduring body of work. Although sharing with other writers in the genre certain themes, such as urban angst, paranoia, and alienation, Goodis made a distinctive contribution to American hard-boiled crime fiction. In a marked contrast with Hammett's Sam Spade or Chandler's Philip Marlowe, who move purposefully in a corrupt world, the archetypal Goodis hero is more acted upon, a man trapped by both a haunted past and a sordid present. No other writer in the genre matches Goodis's empathetic obsession with the lives of losers, victims, drop-outs, and has-beens. Although the hero tries to cheat his fate, his attempt to...