A BRIEF SKETCH OF CORNELL WOOLRICH

If you have never read the works of Cornell Woolrich, you are missing out on one of the great masters of 20th-century American fiction. Cornell George-Hopely Woolrich started writing in the 1920s, specializing in ‘jazz-youth’ novels in imitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But after a failed marriage, a brief career in Hollywood, and a major mental crack-up, Woolrich turned his skills to suspense and mystery stories, most of which were published in the pulp magazines, the main forum for popular literature of the day.

Woolrich virtually invented the genre of ‘noir’: dark, existential crime stories filled with paranoia, doom, death, double-crosses, and a prevading bleakness where life is meaningless in the face of the overwhelming powers of fate. Woolrich was able to wring more suspense out of a single story than most writers could with five full novels. He could put you in a character's shoes and make you shiver and suffer right along with him or her (he wrote many female protagonists, unusual for the time). He could break your heart with just a sentence on the cruelty of a capricious world. He could plunge you into a nightmare race against time and death and never let you go until the final sentence; and even then, he might leave you devastated. There never was a writer quite like him, and there probably never will be again.

His first suspense story was “Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair” in 1935. His first novel of his major period was The Bride Wore Black, and he continued writing novels at a fast pace (sometimes under pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopely) until 1948, when he hit a long dry spell. He lived on, a lonely recluse occasionally turning out short stories and forgotten novels, until his death in 1968.

I discovered Woolrich while in college. I started reading the ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective authors and soon fell in love with the works of the original masters of the genre, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I noticed that along with Hammett, Chandler, and James M. Cain (whose work I have never liked as much as that of his compatriots), a fourth name frequently occurred as their equal and the four pillar of noir literature: Cornell Woolrich. Tracking down his work took some time, but I finally located a volume called Angels of Darkness, focusing on his stories written from the perspective of a woman (Woolrich wrote quite convincingly from the P.O.V. of the frightened, desperate young woman). After a slow start with some of Woolrich’s less-convincing early stories, the anthology soon started to dig its way into me as each tale turned more psychological, grotesque, unnerving, and suspenseful than the last. “Mind over Murder” twisted me up with its horrific suspense middle and nasty—if technically unbelievable—mutilation finale. “Death Escapes the Eye” read like a brilliant piece of noir post-modernism; I still think it is one of the great contemporary works of short literature. And the final story, one of Woolrich’s last called “For the Rest of Her Life,” so floored me that I knew I had to find everything I could from this writer. I had a new favorite American writer.

His best novels
The Bride Wore Black
Black Alibi
I Married a Dead Man
Night Has a Thousand Eyes
Phantom Lady
Rendezvous in Black
The Black Angel
 
His best short stories
Three O'Clock
Momentum
Goodbye, New York
The Night Reveals
The Light in the Window
All at Once, No Alice
New York Blues
For the Rest of Her Life
Rear Window (basis for the film)
Fire Escape
Too Nice a Day to Die
Graves for the Living
Dead on Her Feet
Dime a Dance
...and many more