This week for Friday’sForgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott Barry Ergang is back with his review of NIGHT
SQUAD by David Goodis.
NIGHT SQUAD (1961) by David Goodis
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
Corey Bradford used to be a
cop until he was thrown off the force when “they caught him accepting a handout
from a houseman. It wasn’t carelessness on Corey’s part; he was always very
smooth and he timed every move….He was on friendly terms with all the
neighborhood hustlers and scufflers, the numbers writers and unlicensed hooch
sellers, the professional females and dice-table bankers. When he was nabbed,
it was due solely to the persistence and drive of certain investigators from
city hall. There was a campaign going on, and aimed specifically at
badge-wearing shakedown artists, and Corey was one of many who got busted.”
Divorced, beset by a
conscience he tries futilely to suppress, searching for the flimsiest kind of
redemption even if he doesn't always consciously realize it, he now lives in a
cheap rooming house in the neighborhood in which he grew up, a section of the
city known as the Swamp that is “on the outskirts of the big city and on three
sides it was bordered by swamplands.” Something of a pariah to the so-called
Swampcats, as the area's denizens are called, he spends most of his time
drinking at a bar called the Hangout and, when he has the money for it,
gambling. There's always a poker game going on in the back room of the Hangout,
and on the night the novel opens, Bradford has
three dollars and forty cents to his name. He decides to try to parlay it into
a few bucks more.
Among those in the game is
Walter Grogan, a man who lives in and owns nearly all of the Swamp, including
the Hangout: “All his business activities were centered in the Swamp and the
same applied to his social life...Although he had considerable cash—estimates
of his wealth ranging anywhere from one hundred thousand to more than a quarter
of a million—it seemed that everything he wanted or needed was in this
neighborhood of wooden shacks, tarpaper hovels and narrow alleys.” He also has
at least one police captain in his pocket, as Bradford
learns after a couple of masked hoods burst in with the intention of killing
Grogan and he, Bradford, prevents it. This results in Grogan putting him on his
payroll, with a huge reward if he's successful in finding out who hired the
hoods. But when Detective-Sergeant Henry McDermott, head of the Night Squad, a
dangerous and dreaded police division, reinstates him and assigns him to
investigate Walter Grogan, Bradford's life becomes not only more complicated
but also far more at risk—from both sides, as well as from some other parties.
That's the core of the
storyline, but Night Squad is not a plot-driven detective story. It has all
the requisite action, tension and suspense one expects from noir
fiction, but its real emphasis is on character interaction and setting. Author
David Goodis is a dregmeister, to coin a word, more interested in
portraying the lowlifes, luckless and losers, and the squalid milieu they
inhabit, than in presenting a tightly plotted, by-the-numbers tale.
The novel had a relentless
pull, at least for this reader, which made it very hard to put down. Populated
with more than a few complex characters, it's written in a spare, gritty prose
style. I read the Kindle edition, which had a few—and really only a few, not
enough to drive sticklers crazy—punctuation errors and one or two typos. The
most frequent punctuation error concerned multiple paragraphs of speech by a
single person. Properly, there should be quotation marks at the beginning of
each paragraph but only at the end of the final paragraph. Whoever created the
Kindle edition put quotation marks at the end of every paragraph. Nevertheless,
it's not really confusing because the author does a good job of delineating
characters via their speech patterns. Thus, the reader knows what individual is
making the multi-paragraph speech.
Night Squad is the fifth novel by David Goodis I've read, and I
look forward to reading many more. Strongly recommended to fans of classic noir.
Barry Ergang ©2014
For more about David Goodis,
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Goodis
and http://www.davidgoodis.com/
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