After graduating with a degree in journalism in 1937, Goodis spent a year writing advertising copy and his first novel, the Hemingway-influenced Retreat From Oblivion, a tale of infidelity that has itself retreated into oblivion. Moving to New York, he wrote for pulp magazines, pounding out horror, western and mystery yarns at a cent a word, and also writing radio serials, including episodes for House of Mystery and Superman. In 1946, he wrote Dark Passage, which was serialized in the respectable and prestigious Saturday Evening Post and sold to Warner Brothers, who filmed it starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The following year, he wrote two more books: the novella, Nightfall, filmed by Jacques Tourneur, and Behold This Woman, a lurid, masochistic work. Following six years scriptwriting in Hollywood, a period and place that he disliked, Goodis continued producing novels, successfully tapping into the burgeoning post-war paperback market. The first of these, Cassidy's Girl, published in 1951, sold over a million copies, and was followed by a dozen others, all depicting losers cursed by fate and destined to fail. Many were filmed, with varying results, but none of the screen versions had the bleakness and dark power of the originals and when Goodis died in 1967, few were in print.

Dark Passage was published in hardback only after it had been filmed and is the grim story of Vincent Parry, a man falsely accused of murdering a wife whom he did not love, his protests of innocence netting him a life sentence in San Quentin. Breaking out, his face changed forever by a quack surgeon, Parry hooks up with a mysterious young woman as he struggles to discover who framed him for his wife's murder. Once outside, however, he finds that he has just gone from one prison to another, and this time, there is no escape.

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