Nightfall

By: David Goodis

Narrated by: Larry Withers

Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

They say, no good deed goes unpunished, and James Vanning is living proof of this maxim when he stops to helps three men who have smashed up their car in the mountains of Colorado. This single act of kindness implicates him in a murder and a bank robbery to the tune of $300,000. Somehow he evades his captors and makes off with the dough. Now with the robbers are on his tail, Vanning would gladly give the money back except he can't quite remember where he left it. In this fast-paced novel David Goodis exhibits all the stylistic characteristics that make him one of the finest noir novelists.

©2016 On Air Video, Inc. (P)2016 On Air Audio

Critic reviews

"An almost perfect book, spare, balanced, and inexplicably moving." (Geoffrey O'Brien, Editor-in-Chief, Library of America)

Set the Speed to 1.25x

I found this impossible to follow at normal speed. Too slow, reading too flat. I set it to 1.25x, made a significant difference. I can't remember ever listening at anything except 1x speed; if you listen faster step on it. I was interested in this because Goodis, writer for hardboiled pulp magazines of the 40s and 50s, wrote The Piano Player (1956 aka Down There), which Francois Truffaut turned into Shoot the Piano Player (1960). He also wrote Dark Passage(1946), which became the Humphrey Bogart Lauren Bacall movie (1947). Goodis sued the TV show The Fugitive claiming that its basic premise of a wrongfully accused man escaping to chase down the 'real murderer,' was a copyright violation of Dark Passage. [Seems that they should've just acknowledged the connection and given him some money.] All of this says you read Goodis not for style flourishes, but for taught plots with no easy exits.

Nice idea, poorly written & narrated

Being a Noir fan & Goodis being a big name I figured I’d better get to another of his novels. Aside from slow, flat, uninspired narration I also sadly found the novel to be rather poorly written. Descriptive/narrative elements are very amateurish at times & the dialogue is much of the time laughably clunky. Perhaps better narration with more attention to voice & inflection would help, but even then there remain some terrible sentences. & it’s not really a true Noir actually. There are much better actual noir writers like Thompson & Williams (who deserves more attention), among others.

Nightfall

Could not even finish the book. Did not like it at all. The story actually frustrated me.