According to critic Dennis Drabelle, "Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.

While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted.

Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown.

His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner, and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast.

Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts.

[3] Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books.

It was remade in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse starring Omar Sharif and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943, by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles.

Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal.

In 1963, ABC television began airing The Fugitive, the fictional story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife.

In the plot, Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the "one-armed man", the person he believes to be the real killer.

His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him, and several groups supported him, including the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association.

During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case.

In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, "donated his work to the public domain" when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name.

The court wrote, "We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor."

Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law.

Although Goodis's novels were occasionally adapted by Hollywood, it was mainly French filmmakers (François Truffaut, René Clément, Jean-Jacques Beineix) who were interested in his work.