"I wanted to be near you. I wanted you and I wanted you to want me. But you didn't want me, you never wanted me, you never will. I've had a lousy time, I've gone through nights when I've torn pillows apart with my teeth, so hungry for you I wanted to smash down the wall and break into your room. You knew it, Nat. Don't tell me you didn't know it."
--Gladden to Nat in The Burglar (Lion, 1953).
When I saw Truffaut's film Tirez sur la pianiste in the 60's I noticed it was based on a novel by David Goodis, which I was finally able to track down in those pre-internet days, and gradually was able to find most of Goddis's eighteen novels. In 2012 The Library of America published five of those novels, including The Burglar, which was made into a movie in 1956, directed by Paul Wendkos (I wrote about the film on Dec. 17 of last year). The novel is bleak and downbeat, as most of Goodis's novel were, reeking of the sexual frustration, violence and working class desperation of 1950's America. It's about a gang of burglars led by Nat and the girl Gladden, who had been with Nat since her father taught Nat how to burgle and who was eventually killed in a botched heist. The gang operates in and around Philadelphia, where Goodis lived and which he knew well. Gladden leaves the mob for Atlantic City and is manipulated by a crooked cop while Nat is manipulated by the cop's girlfriend. Eventually the gang and the crooked cop fight over the emeralds and everyone ends up dead, the emeralds scattered on an Atlantic City beach.
Much of the novel consists of Nat's inner thoughts about his life, his burglaries, his partners, and Gladden, who he tries to save from his life on the run but only ends up dragging her down (literally, into the depths of the ocean) with him. "Nothingness glided in. He was in the center of nothingness, taken into it, churned by it, going down in it, knowing the feeling of descending."
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