Looking For Lost Streets/High Fliers, Middleweights, and Lowlifes - Cullen Gallagher

I haven’t read a great deal by David Goodis, but everything I’ve read has been very good. He’s one of those authors I need to read more. I’ve never read any of the scores of stories Goodis wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, mostly under his own name but a good number of them under house-names, as well. However, Cullen Gallagher has read those aviation yarns, as well as the sports, mystery, and Western stories Goodis sold to the pulps. In fact, there’s a good chance Gallagher has read more of Goodis’s short fiction than anyone else, since there are less than a handful of stories he hasn’t read.

Gallagher puts the knowledge gained from all this reading to superb use in two recent non-fiction books about Goodis’s pulp fiction. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF DAVID GOODIS’S PULP FICTION lays the groundwork, and then HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS delivers in spectacular fashion as Gallagher provides summaries and critical commentary on nearly 200 stories, as well as developing a well-researched case that the themes and characterizations that made Goodis’s later hardboiled crime and noir novels modern-day classics actually grew out of his work for the aviation pulps, not his early efforts in the detective pulps.

Along the way, Gallagher adds considerable insight to the use of house-names in the pulps, and LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS contains an invaluable section that identifies not just the stories Goodis wrote for Popular Publications that were published under house-names but also identifies the actual authors of dozens of other house-name stories. I’ve never seen this information before, and it’s great to know which well-known Western pulpsters actually wrote stories under the names Lance Kermit, David Crewe, Ray P. Shotwell, and others. Gallagher dug most of this out of Popular Publications pay records that are part of a collection at the New York Public Library. This is research and scholarship well beyond the call of duty and is a real boon to fans of pulps and popular fiction.

If you’re a David Goodis fan, you really need to read these books. If you’re interested in pulp fiction in general, I give them my highest recommendation. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS is available in e-book and paperback editions. HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. They’re two of the best books I’ve read this year.

Now, we need to get more of Goodis’s aviation yarns back in print . . .