No, no, the title isn’t a reference either to Guy Debord or Scott
Walker, though I suppose by saying that, I’ve sort of turned it into one. Rather it’s a reference to David Goodis. That’s him above.
This being the season of good will and good cheer, any man with blood
in his veins is likely need a bit of hairy-chested, noir fiction, to remind
himself of other possibilities. And so,
over the weekend, I read Goodis’s “Black Pudding” in Manhunt magazine, December
1953. That’s it below.
The magazine describes it as a “novelette” though I think most of us
would say it was a short story of fairly average length. The metaphor lodged in that title is slightly
lost on me: one of the characters says, “It’s a choice you have to make. Either you’ll drink bitter poison or you’ll
taste that sweet black pudding.” That
would be the sweet black pudding of revenge, but you know, still .... Apparently there’s a TV adaptation starring
Kelly Lynch as Hilda.
Goodis was a massively prolific writer which no doubt explains why his
output is so mixed, but I think there’s a pretty top notch noir paragraph right
before the climax of “Black Pudding.” The hero, Kenneth Rockland, watches his
ex-wife, Hilda, from outside the house she’s holed up in.
“She moved with a slow weaving of her shoulders and a flow of her hips
that was more drifting than walking. He
thought. She still has it, that certain way of moving around, using her body
like a long-stemmed lily in a quiet breeze.
That’s what got you the first time you laid eyes on her. The way she moves. And one time you said to her, ‘To set me on
fire, all you have to do is walk across a room.’”
OK, I could probably do without the long-stemmed lily, but otherwise, I
like that. I like that a lot. There is actually a far more overwrought
reference to walking in Goodis’s The
Burglar. In which the hero and his
woman are strolling on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, watching the other
strollers. He says, "Look at them walking. When they take a walk, they take a walk,
and that's all. But you and I, when we take a walk it's like crawling through a
pitch black tunnel."
