2. Black Friday by David Goodis

While in the Bay Area, I had a tremendous day visiting San Francisco, first going to the guided tour of The Internet Archive, which was really amazing and inspiring.  It's basically the library of the internet, constantly under attack by rights-hoarding corporations for trying to do what the internet was supposed to do in the first place:  be a repository of human knowledge.  Both the work they do and the physical space itself (it used to be a Christian Scientist church) are well worth learning about so I strongly recommend their tours (every Friday at 1:00 PM) if you are ever in San Francisco.

Their office is in the Richmond District, at the border between Inner and Outer Richmond neighbourhoods.  San Francisco has so many cool neighbourhoods with amazing residential architecture, great little stores and absolutely incredible neighbourhood bars.  I found Green Apple Books here and picked up a couple of slim crime fiction, including two Black Lizard books (also from the Bay Area).

I have somehow never read David Goodis.  Right from the beginning, I felt a sense of ease and relief, as the prose style was clean and direct and the situation immediate.  A young man is on the run in the freezing cold city.  He stumbles upon a dying man who gives him several thousand dollars in cash, which then leads him (or rather them to him) to the gang who killed him.  This could almost be a play as most of the drama takes place in the house where they are holed up.  The protagonist has murdered his brother and while a practical, experienced man for his age, he is not a career criminal.  He has to pretend to be, to stay in the shrewd gang boss's good graces.

The wrinkle for him is the short, fat and hyper-sexualized girlfriend of the boss.  She wants our hero and he doesn't want her, but she cottons on that he is not a professional and blackmails him to get with her.  I read later in the thorough introduction (by Geoffrey O'Brien; one of the elements that made the Black Lizard re-releases so good were the excellent intro essays) that Goodis had a self-loathing thing for fat women.  His forced attempt to please her is very well-written; she's actually quite hot on text.

The plot is not super compelling. It's more of a psychological character study of doom, which is usually not my thing.  But it is done so efficiently and compellingly that I quite enjoyed this one.  Goodis himself sounds like a dark figure and the quality of his books varied wildly.  This one was pretty intense.