Double Jeopardy

Martin M. Goldsmith (1913-1994) was an American novelist and screenwriter best remembered for Detour, the dark crime novel that became the basis for Edgar G. Ulmer's celebrated 1945 film noir. Born in New York, Goldsmith worked in fiction and motion pictures during a period when American popular storytelling was moving easily between pulp magazines, novels, radio, theater, and Hollywood. His writing drew on the hard-boiled atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s, with particular attention to drifters, performers, criminals, desperate lovers, and people caught in the machinery of bad choices.Goldsmith's Detour stands as his most enduring work because of its compressed structure, fatalistic voice, and powerful sense of doom. The novel's movement across the American road gives it the shape of a journey, but its real subject is entrapment: how fear, poverty, desire, chance, and self-deception can narrow a life until every available exit seems to close. Its later film version became one of the defining low-budget noirs, helping keep Goldsmith's story alive for generations of crime readers and film scholars.In addition to fiction, Goldsmith worked as a screenwriter, contributing to films and television in the mid-twentieth century. His association with noir and crime storytelling has made him a figure of continuing interest to readers of hard-boiled fiction, collectors of film-source novels, and students of American noir. Though not as widely known as some of the major crime writers of his era, Goldsmith's best work belongs firmly in the dark current of American suspense fiction where accident, guilt, desire, and fatalism do most of the damage.