Nightfall (Book) (1947)

Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s, by David Goodis

New York: The Library of America, 2012

Goodis’s novel Nightfall was originally published in 1947.

List of main characters:

Jim Vanning, Navy veteran

Mr. Fraser, police detective

Mrs. Fraser

Martha Gardner

Sam

Pete

John

The image of the front cover is from The Library of America anthology. The page references in this blog post refer to The Library of America publication listed above.

Jim Vanning is a freelance illustrator with serious problems. Right away, in Chapter 1, readers learn that he killed a man in Colorado. He’s thinking about it as does his freelance advertising work in his Manhattan apartment:

. . . [B]ut the one color about which there was no mistake was black. Because black was the color of a gun, a dull black, a complete black, and through a whirl of all the colors coming together in a pool gone wild, the black gun came into his hand and he held it there for a time impossible to measure, and then he pointed the black gun and pulled the trigger and he killed a man. (page 196)

Vanning forces himself to take a break from his work and take a walk outside. It is hot and muggy. A man, a stranger, asks him for a light, and they start a conversation.

The novel then picks up this man’s story, the stranger’s story. He takes a cab back home to his apartment, where his wife asks him about the case and whether he is still tailing Vanning (although she doesn’t mention Vanning’s name). They are Mr. Fraser and Mrs. Fraser. The reader learns later that Fraser is a police detective tailing Vanning because he doesn’t believe he committed the crimes that he is accused of in Colorado.

(This blog post about the novel Nightfall contains spoilers.)

The plot alternates between Vanning and Fraser until their paths cross again toward the end of the novel. Fraser cannot figure out how Vanning is connected to a bank robbery in Seattle, Washington; a homicide in Denver, Colorado; and his current job and residence in New York City. He discusses the case briefly with his wife:

. . . “Three men rob a bank in Seattle. They run away with three hundred thousand dollars. They get as far as Denver. In Denver they register at a hotel under assumed names. They have a contact man in Denver. A smooth manipulator named Harrison. This man Harrison has the job of taking the money, getting it in a safe place or putting it in various channels or something. You follow me?” (pages 222–223)

No one—in Seattle, in Denver, or at Fraser’s headquarters in Manhattan—can figure out what made Vanning rob a bank with these accomplices or what made him commit a murder.

Readers know that Vanning has Fraser on his side, but Vanning doesn’t throughout most of the story. Like many noir protagonists, he is caught in an existential crisis. At a bar near his apartment in Manhattan, he thinks of the meaninglessness of his own life and life in general:

                . . . He wanted to talk to someone. About anything. And again he saw himself in a mirror, this time the mirror behind the bar, and he saw in his own eyes the expression of a man without a friend. He felt just a bit sorry for himself. At thirty–three a man ought to have a wife and two or three children. A man ought to have a home. A man shouldn’t be standing here alone in a place without meaning, without purpose. There ought to be some really good reason for waking up in the morning. There ought to be some impetus, there ought to be something. (page, 206, emphasis added)

Vanning’s existential quandary is alleviated a bit when he meets Martha Gardner in the bar. She agrees to have dinner with Vanning, and they leave for a small restaurant off Fourth Street. But he is still plagued by thoughts of his past and whether he can really believe that his life can change for the better. And his doubts appear to be well founded: Three men, Sam, Pete, and John, stop Vanning and Martha on their way out of the restaurant. One of the men thanks Martha for her work. She was the bait, it seems. Or was she? The three men kidnap Vanning and take him for a ride over the Brooklyn Bridge. They blindfold him before letting him out of the car and taking him to a deserted location.

Vanning escapes from his captors, but he doesn’t know who to trust as a series of events forces him to decide what he must do to protect himself. Readers may know that Fraser is on Vanning’s side, but they don’t know why. And readers, like Vanning, don’t know if he can trust Martha while he tries to figure out what to do about a past that he can remember only imperfectly. Is he guilty of murder and bank robbery? The only person who seems to be sure of Vanning’s innocence to any degree is Fraser, but even he isn’t 100 percent sure. Martha decides to trust Vanning based on what she knows of him since first meeting him in the bar in New York City. But can Vanning trust her?

All of these questions and ambiguities make the novel a great read and very noir. Vanning is in serious trouble, and he isn’t sure how he can get out of it. Outside factors force Vanning to confront his past, and his decisions help push the plot forward when the novel’s time line is in the present. Readers learn to sympathize with his predicament as they follow his every move, and this perspective helps them to sympathize with Martha, too.

Nightfall ends on a rather optimistic note, much more so than The Burglar. I read The Burglar (1953) first, but it was published after Nightfall, which was published in 1947. These are the only two novels that I have read so far by David Goodis, and he seems to have taken a darker view of life as time went on. But Nightfall is still very noir, with its postwar existential crisis and Vanning’s amnesia, which is the result of civilian, not wartime, trauma. Vanning is a veteran, but it’s not his wartime experiences that are giving him a case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The full truth about Vanning isn’t revealed until the final chapter, a very satisfying ending.

I have seen the film noir based on Goodis’s novel Nightfall. Anne Bancroft plays the role of Martha Gardner; in the film, her first name is Marie. The more I see of Bancroft in film noir, the more I can appreciate what she brings to all of her film roles. The film also captures the novel’s existential quandary. It has some great dialogue that exemplifies the confusion and fear for Jim Vanning and Marie Gardner and the role that fate plays in their lives. After Marie reluctantly lets Jim into her apartment, when he still has questions about her role in his abduction by John and Red, he says to her one of my favorite lines in film noir: “Nice place. I’ll try not to bleed over everything.” It captures his cynicism and his fear about her role up to that point. Fate brings Jim Vanning and Marie Gardner together and embroils them in a dangerous situation that neither one of them wants. Fate seems especially cruel to Marie, who is an innocent bystander in Jim’s story. After Jim enters her apartment and they begin talking, she asks the question that many film noir protagonists could ask about their own situation:

• Marie: “Why me?”

• Jim: “I used to ask myself the same question, ‘Why me?’ Because you were unlucky enough to talk to me tonight.”

◊ Click here for my blog post about the film Nightfall.

◊ Click here for my blog post about Goodis’s novel The Burglar.

Nightfall is one of those rare instances for me where the film and the novel each stand on their own merits, which is a bit unusual because I usually like the novel more than the film. On film and in print, it’s a great story.