Down There by David Goodis

I read a cluster of David Goodis novels back in the 1990s, in the striking Black Lizard editions - probably coming to him from Jim Thompson, like so many other readers for the past three generations. Looking at this blog, I don't seem to have read any Goodis over the past twenty years - that's the way a reading life can flow: you read "everything" of someone, get to the end of it, and put it down for a while.

But maybe you always come back, eventually.

Down There is probably Goodis's most famous novel, because it was adapted into Francois Truffaut's film Shoot the Piano Player - which title the novel has had, more often than the original, ever since. And it was included in the Library of America book Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, alongside books by Thomson and Chester Himes and Charles Willeford and Patricia Highsmith. I've been going through that omnibus, and so it was Goodis time again.

Eddie is the piano player in a Philadelphia dive bar, Harriet's Hut, sometime in the mid-50s. He's quiet, withdrawn, meek - like he's given up on life, just keeping his head down and getting through each day, with no desires or dreams. But one day his brother Turley shows up after three years with no contact, on the run from two thugs, and begs for Eddie to help him, to hide him. Eddie doesn't do what Turley asks, but he does intervene when the two thugs arrive, giving Turley a little time to run away.

And that starts to make his small, constrained life start to come apart. The new waitress at the Hut, Lena, wonders about this changed Eddie. The bouncer, an ex-wrestler named Wally who has been harassing Lena despite being common-law married to Harriet, the bar owner and tender, also wonders what's going on.

And then there's those two thugs, who know Eddie's connected to Turley somehow - and soon learn how. Turley and Eddie's other brother are criminals, though we don't learn the details of this particular operation until nearly the end of the novel. But we do know they have the old family home - more of a hide-out, as everyone keeps saying - out in the South Jersey barrens, and that's where the thugs want Eddie to guide them. They want to "talk" to Turley, of course.

We readers think Turley might even survive that conversation, at least early in the novel.

Eddie used to be someone else, of course - no one is born a bottom-tier barroom piano player - and we learn those details, of his upbringing in that hide-out house with two wild and criminal older brothers, how he got out, his classical-music career and marriage, what happened after that, and how he ended up at the Hut.

This is a noir novel, so Eddie's past is tragic and his future is constrained. He's broken and damaged, though it looks for a while like he might have the skills he needs to get through this and end up on the other side with Lena. But, again, it's noir. Happy endings aren't in the cards.

Goodis tells the story through Eddie's eyes, after a quick opening sequence following Turley. His thinking is contingent, complicated, twisted, all options that he can't see himself taking and memories he doesn't want to remember. He's often thinking like he wants to convince himself of something, or keep himself settled in his current life, his current way of thinking - not return to any of the men he used to be in the past. But the hero of any noir novel doesn't get to choose what happens to him, or how he reacts to it, or even whether he'll make it out the other end.