A review by davidwright
The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis

4.0

Every now and then I know it is time, time to go down there, down to that place where nothing matters anymore, and hope is just a lost dream of yesterday that you turn to when today gets to be just too much to bear, when the night sweats come back, and the dark secrets come welling up from below, down, down deep. Down to David Goodis country. Goodis is one of the most essential noir writers – his lyrical prose sings with the plangent dying fall of his obsessive damned souls as they chase their twisted Freudian tragic flaws to grim guttering ends. To enter one of the Goodis nightscapes is to step into a world thrillingly awash with regret, secret shame, and the pulsing, throbbing call of taboo urges. His doomed characters send up a gorgeous wail that is something like Aeschylus’s Prometheus tied to his rock, or the exquisite torture of Wagnerian music that yearns and yearns toward resolution but never seems to get there; the prose is both pain and its easement in one. Turgid, torrid Goodis skirts dangerously close to a parody of a stereotypical impression of noir, but in so doing he creates a special reality that is all his own. I didn’t even have to go looking for my fix this time; I opened my mailbox and there it was in my latest shipment from Hardcase crime, looking back at me tauntingly, the lurid cover of the torrid 1955 novel, The Wounded and the Slain. James Bevan is on vacation in Jamaica, where he hopes to pull out of his alcoholic tailspin and maybe rekindle a long lost physical intimacy with his frigid blonde wife Cora (in Goodis, they’re always blondes, and frequently frigid). We join him on page one, on his umpteenth gin and soda (he has yet to discover the joys of rum), idly contemplating various methods of suicide. But oh no – you don’t get out of this vale of tears so easily, Jimmy my boy. Its not so simple – not by half. There’s a whole tangled past to unravel, and further fatal tangles ahead. ‘nuff said – great pulp fiction, built for speed and total immersion.