Our town …

… Philly and South Jersey Gothic: On Jay A. Gertzman’s “Pulp According to David Goodis” - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Goodis considered his novels to be more than crime stories; they were psychological portraits of the life on the other side of the tracks, in conditions of poverty or near-poverty. He pioneered an in-between genre, which Gertzman, with tongue only half in cheek, refers to as “Philly, and south Jersey, gothic.” Gertzman also balks at applying the term hard-boiled to Goodis’s writing, preferring to call it noir; he explains, with reference to critic Eddie Duggan, that while the former deploys as its backdrop social corruption, the latter is concerned with the interior life of a given protagonist, including his or her obsessions, psychic wounds, self-hatred, sociopathy, and compulsion to control others. To my mind, given those definitions, it’s clear that while Goodis belongs in, and maybe even owns, the terrain of noir, he doesn’t altogether forsake the hard-boiled either.