Didn't want Goodis month to end without someone mentioning OF
MISSING PERSONS.
This may be, for most Goodis fans, the least favorite of his
works, because it's a fairly straightforward whodunit, with
good guys, bad guys, and an ending in which the hero emerges
triumphant.
But I think it's worth remarking on because it's an early
example, before the term had even been coined, of a carefully
researched police procedural. In fact, Goodis even dedicated
the book to his technical advisor, the head of LAPD's Missing
Persons Detail.
Interestingly, though the book is apparently set in LA, the
city is never mentioned by name (prefiguring Ed McBain's "New
York that isn't New York but really is").
The one disappointing aspect of the book, at least for me,
was an unconvincing climax in which the cop-hero pulls off a
complicated and unlikely sting operation in order to flush
out the villain.
I've heard that OF MISSING PERSONS started life as a movie
script which, when it failed to get produced, Goodis
novelized. Of course, it might have been that he wrote a
screen adaptation of the novel that was never produced.
Accounts differ. The out-of-place climax doe lends some
credence to the story's having started out as a screenplay.
It reads kind of like a movie climax.
Any Goodis experts out there know for sure?
JIM DOHERTY
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 01 Feb 2007 EST