Nightfall by David Goodis

You can't escape the fickle finger of fate?

You may remember a bestselling nonfiction book that came out back in 1981 called When Bad Things Happen to Good People in which a rabbi gives advice on dealing with grief. Separated from its context, I've always felt that title sums up what a lot of noir fiction is all about. As for why bad things happen to good people, noir's answer is: there is no why, shit just happens.

Review

Cornell Woolrich, whom some credit with inventing noir, was the master of plots built around the random, meaningless accident that changes a life -- a brick falls off a building and robs a man of his memory, a whiskey bottle thrown from a plane kills another man's fiancé, and so on. And to be honest, some of those people bad things happen to weren't so good to begin with. Just unlucky.

David Goodis, the author of Nightfall, was also an accomplished master of stories about the noir twist of fate. In this novel, the protagonist, Jim Vanning, pulls off the highway to help the survivors of an automobile accident. But the men in that roadside accident just stole $300,000 from a bank, and it turns out they are going to be needing a little more help from Vanning than he had bargained for -- and they'll get it at gunpoint. That's what being a Good Samaritan gets you in the noir universe.

Jim expects to die before his involvement in the getaway is over. But then he's confronted with an opportunity to escape that seems too good to be true. It is, of course, a setup. But the setup goes wrong, Jim shoots and kills one of the criminals in self-defense, and he really does escape -- with the satchel full of thousand-dollar bills.

While there are violent scenes and some bareknuckle fights, Nightfall can't be called a hardboiled action novel. Goodis injects too much existential handwringing and philosophical pondering for this to be anyone's idea of fast-paced. That said, though, it's a twisty little tale that keeps your attention for the two or three hours it takes to read. My only complaint is that the story relies on my least favorite plot device, amnesia, and, to make it worse, I really believe Goodis could have made the story work without that crutch.

Nightfall was published in 1947 but feels surprisingly modern for a crime novel of the era. Sure, Jim is a war vet, everybody smokes cigarettes like there's no such thing as cancer, and traditional gender roles are taken for granted. But there's little in the way of macho posturing or misogyny. The wife of the detective who's after Jim is the detective's greatest ally and confidant, and Jim longs for nothing but marriage and a family. Even the villain, "John," is clearly a man who's been wounded by life; he doesn't want to kill anyone, he just wants the money so he can sail away from all this grief with his girlfriend, and never come back.

John won't get that break. But here's where Goodis breaks with the true noir tradition: in the end Jim has a glimmer of hope.

Originally posted to Amazon March 24, 2021.