Goodis’ short stories span the entire range of his career from 1939 to about 1960. Therefore, the incidents, plots, and responses to fate and betrayal are similar in both his stories and his novels. Pulp magazine writers use crime, detective, horror, war, exotic adventure, and any combination of story that exploits a sinister atmosphere. That is due to the way these genres imply panic, fear, hatred, aggression, vengeance and venality as what seem to be survival strategies. The best stories comment on the entanglement in and resignation to a bureaucratic system that ignores corruption, taxes regressively, and demands war-time preparedness.
"It's a Wise Cadaver," New Detective (1946) has hints of Goodis' major themes. Poverty (Greenwich Village tenement) makes a father desperate. His son has lied to him and not given him money for his part in a con scheme. Considering his son worthless, he kills him with an axe. Goodis leads us to wonder if the father feels remorse. But he kills himself by jumping out of a window – whether for remorse or b/c he knows a gang boss whose money was invested in the scheme will find him and torture him to death (“know what he will do to you”?). A title Goodis may have used earlier—“The Laughing Trap”—might have been better applied to this story, if the person laughing was the same indifferent force—a street, the moon-- that that sneered at the protagonists in The Moon in the Gutter, Behold This Woman, or Night Squad.
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