Life isn't easy in big city America when you have no job and no prospects. Ralph and his three friends spend most of their evenings hanging around on street corners watching time pass them by and dreaming of a better life. Jobs aren't easy to come by and even less so when you don't really want one. A man has to have at least some principles left so when the wife of one of his friend's brother seeks his attention he initially refuses her advances but life has a way of beating up on you when you're down and it's not long before Lenore is after Ralph once again. Can he stay true to his morals or will he succumb to temptation?

This is written in very much a hardboiled, noir style but without a crime or mystery to solve. Not much in the way of a plot, it's just a slice-of-life tale centering on Ralph, an unemployed young man living at home with his parents and two sisters, and his interactions with his three friends. Easy to read if you like the style and weighing in at just over 150 pages it's also a quick one to get through. Gets a bit violent at times but as that comes readily with the hardboiled genre then it's to be expected I suppose. I first heard of this author when he was recommended in one of the Jack Taylor books by Ken Bruen and while I don't think this title is generally regarded as one of his best I'd certainly be interested n picking up another. ( )

David Goodis was one of the major writers of crime noir in the 1940s and '50s. Many of his best works were filmed to good effect, including DARK PASSAGE, with Bogart playing the lead, Tourneur's NIGHTFALL, Truffaut's SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, Sam Fuller's STREET OF NO RETURN, and THE BURGLAR. Goodis's novels painted bleak, black views of the inner-city life he himself lived, populated by losers and drunks. As Ed Gorman once said, Goodis didn't write novels, he wrote suicide notes. But his power lay in his ability to get down on paper the stark reality of the low-life he witnessed around him, before he too fell victim to the type of decline experienced by the characters he wrote about.

It's a tragedy that few of the eighteen novels Goodis wrote are currently in print. This is the first publication of THE BLONDE ON THE STREET CORNER since it originally appeared in a paperback edition in 1954. The story is set during the depression years of the 1930s, in Goodis's own home town of Philadelphia, and seems to be at least partly autobiographical. Ralph and his buddies are out of work, and jobs are not easy to find. He'd like to be a song-writer, but there's little hope of getting that kind of break. Christmas is coming and he needs some money, and the only other options involve crime and sex. With his usual talent for brilliant prose description and language, Goodis takes you effortlessly into the murky realms of depression America to meet the deadbeat characters who populate the streets and bars.

Midnight Classics are to be congratulated for reissuing this long-lost classic by one of the legendary writers of the hardboiled. It's to be hoped that more by Goodis follows from them soon. ( )