Cornell Woolrich

• Born: December 4, 1903
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 25, 1968
• Place of death: New York, New York

Types of Plot: Psychological; thriller; police procedural; inverted; historical

Principal Series: Black series, 1940-1948

Contribution

Cornell Woolrich’s highly suspenseful plots are often recounted from the standpoint of leading characters who, however ordinary they may seem at the outset, become embroiled in strange and terrifying situations. Woolrich was particularly adept at handling questions of betrayal and suspicion, arousing doubts about characters’ backgrounds and intentions. Works dealing with amnesia or other unknowing states of mind produce genuine tension, though in other hands such themes might seem forced and overused.

Woolrich rarely made use of master detectives or other agents committed to bringing criminals to justice. His police officers attempt as best they can to grapple with apparently inexplicable occurrences; some of them are willful and corrupt. When they reach solutions, often it is with the help of individuals who themselves have been suspected of or charged with criminal acts. One of Woolrich’s strengths is the vivid depiction of stark emotional reactions; the thoughts and feelings of leading characters are communicated directly, often in sharply individual tones. Some of his plots revolve about methods of crime or detection that might seem ingenious in some instances and implausible in others. Taken as a whole, his work may appear uneven; his best tales, however, produce somber and deeply felt varieties of apprehension, plunging the reader into the grim, enigmatic struggles of his protagonists.

Biography

The dark forebodings that affected the author’s works may have originated in his early life. Cornell Woolrich was born Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich in New York City on December 4, 1903. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a socialite; as a boy, Woolrich was often in Latin America. At about the age of eight, after seeing a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1904), he was overwhelmed with a profound sense of fatalism. When revolutions broke out in Mexico, he was fascinated by the fighting and collected spent cartridges that could be found on the street. It would appear that he was badly shaken by the eventual breakup of his parents’ marriage, which left him unusually dependent on his mother.

In 1921, Woolrich entered Columbia University in New York, where courses in English may have spurred his interest in creative writing. One of his classmates, Jacques Barzun, later recalled that Woolrich was an amiable if somewhat distant individual. On one occasion, he was immobilized by a foot infection, an experience that may be reflected in the theme of enforced immobility that would appear in some of his later writings. During that time, however, under the name Cornell Woolrich he composed his first novel, Cover Charge (1926); this romantic work was favorably received. His Children of the Ritz (1927) won a prize offered jointly by College Humor magazine and a motion-pciture company; Woolrich went to Hollywood to adapt a film script from that book. In 1930, he married Gloria Blackton, a film producer’s daughter, but she left him after a few weeks. Woolrich may have had homosexual inclinations. After he returned to New York, he wrote other sentimental novels, the last of which was Manhattan Love Song (1932), before devoting his efforts entirely to mystery writing.

In 1934, Woolrich’s first crime and suspense stories were published in detective magazines. Even with the success of The Bride Wore Black (1940) and other full-length works, Woolrich remained a reclusive figure; frequently he would remain in his room at a residential hotel for long periods, venturing outside only when necessary. Success and public esteem apparently meant little to him, even when his works were widely distributed and had become known through films and other adaptations. In 1950, he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America for the motion picture The Window, based on his story “The Boy Who Cried Murder.” His mother, to whom he remained inordinately devoted, died in 1957, and he dedicated the stories in Hotel Room (1958) to her. His ensuing despondency seemed to diminish his creative output. In addition to bouts of alcoholism, he developed diabetes, yet he ignored the progressive deterioration of his health. Gangrene affected one leg, but he left this condition untreated until it became necessary for doctors to amputate the limb. He finally suffered a stroke and died in his native city on September 25, 1968. Very few people attended his funeral. His will established a trust fund, dedicated to his mother’s memory, in support of scholarships for the study of creative writing at Columbia.

Analysis

The stories that marked Cornell Woolrich’s debut as a mystery writer display a fatalism that lends added weight to surprise endings and ironic twists. Almost invariably, seemingly innocuous situations become fraught with dangerous possibilities. Outwardly ordinary people prove to harbor devious and malign intentions; the innocent, by the odd machinations of fate, often find themselves enmeshed in the schemes of the guilty. Frequently, the outcome of these dark, troubled struggles remains in doubt, and Woolrich was not averse to letting characters perish or be undone by their own devices. Many of his works are set in New York or other large urban areas during the Depression and depict people who, already impoverished and often desperate, are drawn relentlessly into yet more serious and threatening circumstances.

In Woolrich’s first suspense work, “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair,” the mysterious demise of a man who has recently had his teeth filled leads to some frantic searching for the murderer. An unusual murder method is uncovered, and the protagonist is nearly poisoned during his efforts to show the culprit’s mode of operation. In “Preview of Death,” when an actress costumed in an old-fashioned hoop skirt is burned to death, a police detective shows how the fire could have been produced by one of her cohorts. “Murder at the Automat” leads to some anxious investigations when a man dies after eating a poisoned sandwich obtained from a machine; actually, the trick seems remarkably simple once the murderer’s likely whereabouts have been reviewed. Other deadly devices, some outwardly improbable, appear in various stories.

In “Kiss of the Cobra,” death from snake poison cannot easily be explained until it is learned how a strange Indian woman could have transferred venom to common articles used by her victims. Suggestions of supernatural agencies are developed more fully in “Dark Melody of Madness” (also known as “Papa Benjamin” and “Music from the Dark”), in which a musician all too insistently attempts to learn the secrets of voodoo from some practitioners of that dark religion. Although he can compel them to divulge the incantations that seemingly will summon malevolent spirits, such forces are not content to be used in the man’s stage performances. Eventually, whether from the intervention of unearthly powers or from sheer fright, he collapses and dies. “Speak to Me of Death,” which eventually was incorporated into another work, concerns a seemingly prophetic warning: When a wealthy old man is told that he will die at midnight, other interested parties take note of the means specified and gather to prevent harm from coming to him. In the end he falls victim not to any human agency or to anxiety and apprehension; rather, the original design is carried through in a wholly unexpected way. In Woolrich’s stories, the distinction between known operations of the physical world and his characters’ subjective beliefs is often left shadowy and uncertain; when improbable events take place, it is not always clear whether individual susceptibilities or the actual workings of malignant powers are responsible. Similarly, when protagonists are introduced in an intoxicated state, sometimes it cannot easily be determined whether they are actually responsible for deeds that were perpetrated when they were inebriated. In other stories, certain individuals are under the sway of narcotics, such as marijuana or cocaine.

At times, Woolrich’s protagonists find themselves implicated in grim plots that begin with apparently incriminating situations and end with unusual resolutions. In “And So to Death” (better known as “Nightmare”), a man who has been found at the scene of a murder has some difficulty in convincing even himself that he is innocent, and only with the intervention of others can the facts in the case be established. Police procedures are often portrayed as arbitrary and brutal. A marathon dance contest furnishes the background for “Dead on Her Feet,” a macabre study of a killing in an unusual pose. When a girl is found rigid, not exhausted but actually murdered, a ruthless police officer forces a young man, weary and frightened, to dance with his dead partner; though soon afterward he is absolved, he breaks down under the strain and falls prey to uncontrollable mad laughter. In “The Body Upstairs,” police torment a man with lighted cigarettes in an attempt to make him confess; all the while, another man on the force has tracked down the real killer.

“The Death of Me” and “Three O’Clock”

If the innocent generally suffer in Woolrich’s stories, it is also true that crime often fails to achieve its ends. Well-laid plans tend to go awry in strange or unanticipated ways. In “The Death of Me,” a man determines to stage his own death to defraud his insurance company. He exchanges personal effects with someone who was killed at a railroad crossing, but this other man proves to have been a criminal who had stolen a large sum of money; thus, the protagonist is pursued both by the man’s cohorts and by an insurance investigator. When he turns on his company’s agent and kills him, he realizes that he will be subject to criminal charges under whichever name he uses. In “Three O’Clock,” a man decides to eliminate his wife and her lover. He builds a time bomb that he installs in the basement of his house; once the mechanism is in place, however, he is accosted by burglars, who tie him up and leave him behind as the fateful countdown begins. After the man has abandoned all hope of rescue, it is discovered that the device had inadvertently been deactivated beforehand, but by then he has been driven hopelessly mad by his ordeal.

“It Had to Be Murder”

In other cases, those who in one way or another are confronted with crime are able to confound lawbreakers. In “Murder in Wax,” a woman uses a concealed phonograph machine to record the testimony that is required to save her husband from murder charges. “After-Dinner Story” has the host at a social gathering use the threat of poison to elicit a vital admission from one of the guests. The notable story “It Had to Be Murder” (also known as “Rear Window”) begins with a man with a cast on his leg casually observing others in his vicinity; some mysterious movements by a man at the window across from him attract his attention, and he arrives at the inference that his neighbor’s wife has been murdered. Although at first the police are inclined to dismiss this theory, these suppositions prove to be correct, and an encounter at close quarters with the killer takes place before the matter is settled.

Woolrich’s crime novels, notably those that came to be grouped together because of their common “color scheme”—the word “black” figures in the titles of six Woolrich novels—deal with more complex issues of anxiety and violence. Multiple killings, for example, raise questions about how apparently unrelated persons and occurrences may have become part of a larger web of havoc and destruction; the pattern is eventually explained by reference to previous events that have left the perpetrators permanently embittered and changed. In some cases, the murderer’s actions and the efforts at detection are shown in alternating sequences, so that the overarching question becomes which side will prevail in the end. Although clues and testimony figure prominently in some works, the reader rarely is challenged directly by such means; assessments of character and intentions often are equally significant. Problems of love frustrated or gone wrong frequently account for the single-minded intensity and twisted, circuitous logic underlying murderous deeds; some characters are driven by an anguished loneliness that has turned ordinary emotional impulses inside out.

The Bride Wore Black and Rendezvous in Black

The pursuit of revenge is a common motivation for crime in Woolrich’s novels. In The Bride Wore Black, various murders seem to implicate a mysterious woman; it is learned that years ago her husband was killed on the church steps immediately after their wedding ceremony, and she has vowed to eliminate those responsible. In some respects Rendezvous in Black (1948) is a haunting, bittersweet study in love denied. After the death of his fiancé, a man sets forth to inflict similar anguish on others who may have been involved; killing those whom each of them loved most, he leaves a trail of bodies that can be explained only when his original design is uncovered. All the while tangled, turbulent feelings have welled up within the killer; when a woman is hired by the police to lure him into the open, she creates the illusion that his beloved has returned to him.

The Black Curtain and The Black Angel

Woolrich was adept at portraying the lonely desperation of those who must struggle against the most unfavorable odds to prove their innocence or to save loved ones. Sometimes it appears that sheer willpower and determination can triumph over the most imposing obstacles; even the most unlikely forms of evidence can be instrumental in efforts to find the real culprits. The Black Curtain (1941) concerns a man who has suffered a blow to the head that has effaced the memories of three years; uneasily, he sorts out the bits of information that may cast some light on the missing period of his life. It emerges that under another identity he was falsely implicated in a murder, and the actual perpetrators have been trying to do away with him once and for all. The protagonist’s groping, agonizing attempts to learn about his own past, despite his fear that some terrible secret lies at the end of his quest, makes this work a highly compelling one. The Black Angel (1943) begins with a man’s sentence to death for the murder of his presumed mistress; his wife believes in him implicitly, however, and as the date for the execution draws near she sets off on her own to clear him. Beginning only with a monogrammed matchbook and some entries in the victim’s notebook, she succeeds finally in confronting the real killer. Along the way there are a number of unsettling encounters in the murky night world of call girls and criminal operators. A man who fled to Havana with a gangster’s wife is implicated in her murder, in The Black Path of Fear (1944); dodging threats from several sides, he receives aid from some unexpected quarters, and eventually some bizarre and vicious criminals are brought to justice.

Phantom Lady and Deadline at Dawn

In many of Woolrich’s works, time itself becomes an enemy. This motif is utilized most powerfully in Phantom Lady (1942), which begins 150 days before a man’s scheduled execution. The time remaining, down to the final hour, is announced at the beginning of each chapter. The protagonist has been found guilty of murdering his wife, after no one would believe that he had actually been with another woman on the night in question. Even he has begun to doubt that she ever existed. Finally, after much fruitless searching, the mystery woman is located. The evidence used to bring her into the open is no more substantial than an old theater program. In the end, the real culprit turns out to be an individual who had been close to the condemned man. In Deadline at Dawn (1944), a man and a woman who happened to be at the scene of a killing must find the actual murderer within a matter of hours; chapter headings consist simply of clock faces showing how much closer the protagonists have come to freedom, or to disaster, at each turn.

Waltz into Darkness

Suspicion and conflict at close quarters also appears in Woolrich’s works; while husbands and wives, and for that matter lovers of various sorts, often act on behalf of each other, when differences arise the results can be frightful and unsettling. In Waltz into Darkness (as William Irish; 1947), set in New Orleans in 1880, a man seeks a mail-order bride, but he discovers that the woman he has married is not quite the one he had expected. His new wife appropriates his money, and he discovers that she probably had a hand in the death of his original betrothed. Yet she exercises a fatal sway over him, and though she mocks him for his apparent weakness, he believes that the signs of her deep underlying love for him are unmistakable. This curious polarity seems to enervate him and leave him without a will of his own; he commits murder for her sake, and even when he learns that she is slowly poisoning him, his devotion to her is so strong that he cannot save himself.

Woolrich frequently employed first-person narratives. Those works in which accounts of crime and detection follow each other on parallel courses utilize an omniscient narrator, who appears, however, never to be far from the thoughts, hopes, and fears of the leading characters. In some of his stories he adopts a lilting, sentimental tone for the recounting of romantic aspirations; the shock of disillusionment and distrust is conveyed in a jarring, somber fashion. In some of his later offerings such tendencies took on maudlin qualities, but at his best Woolrich could create an acute and well-drawn contrast between lofty ideals and close encounters with danger. Reactions to impending threats are expressed in a crisp, staccato tempo; blunt, numbing statements, either in direct discourse or in narration, generally bring matters to a head. Often situations are not so much described as depicted through the uneasy perspective of characters who must regard people and objects from the standpoint of their own struggles with imminent danger. Odd metaphors for frenzied and violent action sometimes lend ironic touches. In much of Woolrich’s writing, action and atmosphere cannot readily be separated. Indeed, quite apart from the original conceptions that are realized in his leading works, the dark and penetrating power of his studies in mystery and fear entitle his efforts to be considered among the most important psychological thrillers to appear during the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at Woolrich’s contribution to the pulps and the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Examines a half dozen of Woolrich’s novels, from The Bride Wore Black to I Married a Dead Man.

Lee, A. Robert. “The View from the Rear Window: The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich.” In Twentieth-Century Suspense: The Thriller Comes of Age, edited by Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Analysis of Woolrich’s contributions to the suspense thriller genre, centering on Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, Rear Window (1954).

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die. New York: Mysterious, 1988. This comprehensive study of Woolrich’s lengthy career also serves as a history of the pulp and mystery publishing industries.

Renzi, Thomas C. Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Comprehensive study of twenty-two Woolrich novels and short stories and twenty-nine film and television adaptations of his work. Bibliographic references and index.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A poststructural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Contains discussion of Woolrich’s work.

Woolrich, Cornell. Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Woolrich provides a series of vignettes, rather than a single coherent narrative, detailing moments and episodes from his life and career.