Goodis presents us with a harsh world where everything has the aroma of defeat, but his characters have great dignity.
Night of the Caiman, a novel by Diego Ameixeira is an affectionate homage to David Goodis and the hardboiled genre. It creates a metanarrative that becomes a meditation on the creative process of the author as well as telling a compelling noir story. It alternates between two worlds: the world of the writer and the world of noir fiction, as Ricardo Barrros, a writer, seeks to complete his crime fiction masterpiece while trying to retrace the footsteps of David Goodis. Within the novel, Barros will travel to Goodis’ hometown Philadelphia, and traverse the nooks and crannies of the city to discover a dark side.
I was fortunate enough to meet up with Diego, and the translator of the text, Jonathan Dunne, via Zoom and to follow up with a series of questions for a look inside the writer’s process and the influence of hardboiled literature around the world.
Diego Ameixeiras (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1976) is a journalist and author of thirteen novels. He writes in La Voz de Galicia. Since 2004, his career has been recognized with various awards, including the National Critics Award and the Xerais Award. He has written plays and scripts for films, television series and comics. Translator of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler into Galician. Among his novels, which frequent the noir genre, marginal environments and social analysis, the highlights are Dime algo sucio (Pulp Books, 2011), Matarte lentamente (Akal, 2015), Conduce rápido (Akal, 2017), La crueldad de abril (Akal, 2018), La noche del Caimán (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2020) and El ciervo y la sombra (Alrevés, 2022), winner of the Pata Negra-Domingo Villar Prize and finalist for the Hammett Prize of the Semana Negra de Gijón.
Jonathan Dunne has translated more than eighty books from the Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish languages. He directs the publishing house Small Stations Press. He also writes about the theology of language. His latest book is Seven Brief Lessons on Language (2023).
Diego, what is the appeal of David Goodis which was so influential on this novel, and what does he mean to you as a writer? Furthermore, what does Philly represent as a setting? You delve into the city in great detail down to the authenticity of the food, which I think is great.
I discovered David Goodis a few years ago, through the film adaptation of “Dark Passage”. From then on, I read most of his novels and became fascinated by his settings and characters. Unlike other great masters of crime fiction such as Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, whose protagonists were private detectives, David Goodis’ characters were loser types, marginalized beings beaten by life who fought to survive in the world of crime. From the beginning I was attracted to its atmosphere and its poetic and fatalistic look, close to existentialism. There is something fragile and luminous at the same time in his stories. Goodis presents us with a harsh world where everything has the aroma of defeat, but his characters are characterized with great dignity. They are victims of their bad decisions and of a system that separates and marginalizes them.
Philadelphia is the setting for David Goodis and the last part of my novel is set in that city. It is part of the game and the literary tribute that I try to dedicate to the author. My recreation of the city is made from imagination, because I have never been there. It was fun. Writing that part I felt like some of those old pulp novel writers who set their stories in remote cities they’d never been to. Now I am very happy to know that my descriptions are credible.
This is a question for you, Jonathan. What was the greatest challenge in translating the text from its original language to English?
JONATHAN DUNNE: First of all, I have to say that while I normally translate from Galician, in the case of Night of the Caiman there was a later, Spanish edition translated by the author and Isabel Soto, and the author asked me to translate from this, since he had introduced what he considered to be improvements to the text. So, I didn’t translate the text from its original language, but from Spanish, at the author’s request, though I think we have to be careful about such words as “original” and “author”. After more than thirty years of translating Galician literature, I know the dictionaries pretty well (Galician, Galician-Spanish, Spanish, Spanish-English, English), so a lot of my work centres on Google. I think the amount of research involved in literary translation is heavily underestimated, especially when translating into English (since this is a dominant culture that has influenced a lot of writers). I have to check the titles of books, the names of places, historical events, and, in the case of a Galician author writing about David Goodis, it is often a question of going back to the source and finding the original quotes as they were spoken in English. This happened with quotes by Marvin Yollin and Jane Fried about Goodis’s wife, Elaine Astor. They were spoken to Philippe Garnier, the author of a biography about Goodis, who translated them into French. He then passed them on (in English) to James Sallis, the author of Difficult Lives, a book that was then translated into Spanish and read by Diego Ameixeiras, who translated the quotes into Galician, then back into Spanish (slightly differently), which is where I encountered them. I had to go all the way back to the quotes as they were given to Philippe Garnier when he was interviewing people for his biography in 1982 (I made contact with Garnier through Daryl Sparks at Film Noir Foundation). We think of translation as being unidirectional, but in this case the translation ended up being more original than the original, because I was translating into English, the language, the language of David Goodis.
Diego, Who was the inspiration for Ricardo? How much of “you” is in this novel?
I share with Ricardo his somewhat obsessive vision of literature. He is someone who is a perfectionist and takes the craft of telling a story very seriously. I think that the writer is a somewhat lonely being who always carries a feeling of dissatisfaction that he must be willing to endure. One is always alone before his imagination. I also think that the writer should always opt for his own voice, for a style that makes his novels recognizable from the first pages. The novel tries to get closer to the sufferings that a writer suffers during the writing process. I’m not saying that in reality this is always the case, because I usually have a lot of fun when I write, but sometimes it is hard work that involves significant emotional exhaustion.
“The most important thing for a writer was to accept solitude in its most extreme form as an essential tool for doing one’s work”. I love this line. Why do believe this is true?
Solitude is the writer’s natural place. I think I write to be able to bear it better, to fill that void. We are social beings: our emotional well-being and our happiness depend, in large part, on how we relate to others. It is impossible to deny that. But the voluntary solitude of the creative act, unlike unwanted solitude, can give us moments of enormous satisfaction. The writer knows well these two faces of loneliness. Something of that happens to Ricardo in the novel.
I wouldn’t say that a writer has to be an anguished and unhappy person to write well, but I do believe that creative work always springs from a certain dissatisfaction.
You alternate between worlds. Why structure the novel this way?
The story moves between Ourense, a small Galician city in northern Spain, Barcelona and Philadelphia. I wanted to play with contrasts, with very different geographical spaces. That everything had a very realistic atmosphere and that what was not told was as if submerged in fog, in a kind of dream. I think that in this novel what is not made explicit is very important. I like that the reader plays an active role and completes what is not told. I prefer to reveal, tell things without showing everything.
How would you describe your own creative process?
Before I start writing, I try to plan the plot and what happens in each chapter, although later the story deviates during the writing process, which is where the essentials come into play. There is a part of prior planning and another in which it is important that the story discovers itself. I think that balance is the key. In short, everything arises from an initial idea to which characters, a plot, some conflicts are gradually applied…
The novel blends several genre, defies conventional narrative, and creates a meta-narrative. How would you describe the genre? Is it hard-boiled or a novel of development or an artistic journey (or all of these)?
I think that the novel is, above all, a tribute to hard-boiled and classic crime novels. And Goodis in particular, of course. But it is a slightly peculiar tribute, since it is accompanied by my little literary obsessions. There is also recognition of the writers who in Spain, during the Franco dictatorship, wrote pulp novels under Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms. My father had some of those books at home. When I was a child, I was fascinated by his covers. My novel is full of literary and cinematographic references, and there are even some invented ones.
You choose you phrasing very carefully. How long did it take you to write this work?
A year, more or less. It is a short but very intense novel, and the editing and rewriting process was quite slow. I like literature that defends a style, a personal and recognizable voice. I think that is where a writer’s talent is defined, in his ability to play hard with words.
You have quite a significant body of work. How is this work different from other works you’ve written?
Perhaps because it is my most metaliterary and personal story. And also the one I had the most fun writing. For example, the antique book novel market that appears in chapter 6, where Ricardo and Vicente find books by Gil Brewer or Kenneth Fearing, is the same one where I bought several novels by David Goodis many years ago, in some out-of-print editions in Spanish. I think it is the one that is aimed at a reader who is more complicit and fond of classic crime novels. That it can now be read in English, with Jonathan Dunne’s translation, is something I couldn’t imagine when I started writing it. He has completed a wonderful journey, reaching some North American readers and specialists in the life and work of Goodis.
Do you think the world will ever tire of “noir” or “hardboiled” literature? Why do you think it is important to continue to be written and studied?
The crime novel will always exist, although I suppose it will evolve with the times. It is a genre that attracts readers because it tells a reality that we have before our eyes and that is not always treated with the depth it deserves. The explanations for crimes, in many cases, have to do with an economic and social system that favors the powerful. As long as our societies continue to have their underworld and dark angles, noir will be there to tell the tale.
Some of the phrasing, like Goodis’ own writing, is poetic, and almost existential. For example, you write short, sharp sentences that have rich subtext such as “In short, everything led to the anguish of being alive.” This hits in the gut! What is it about writers and anguish? Does a successful writer have to suffer and sacrifice for art to be successful at it?
I wouldn’t say that a writer has to be an anguished and unhappy person to write well, but I do believe that creative work always springs from a certain dissatisfaction. Also the act of reading itself. In literature we look for entertainment, but also depth and answers. When life is not enough or we feel a lack, books are responsible for comforting us.
William Blick is a film and literary/crime fiction critic; a librarian; and an academic scholar. His work has been featured in Film International, Senses of Cinema, Film Threat, Cineaction, and CinemaRetro, and he is a frequent contributor to Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of Noircon. His crime fiction has been featured in Close to the Bone, Pulp Metal Magazine, Out of the Gutter, and others. He is an Assistant Professor/Librarian for the City University of New York.
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 