CORNELL WOOLRICH
THE POET OF OUR SHADOWS

By Jim Doherty

 

He was, with Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, one of the most important and influential of the many crime writers who started out in the pulps and eventually found mainstream success between hard covers.

He was, arguably, to noir what Hammett and Chandler were to hard-boiled.

His biographer called him the “Poe of the twentieth century.” And yet, as screwed-up as Poe's life was, he was a sterling example of stable living compared to this 20 th Century counterpart.

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born in New York City on 4 December 1904, but, at the age of 3, he and his parents moved to Mexico , the homeland of his father. His parents' marriage was not happy, and they eventually separated, agreeing that Cornell would stay in Mexico with his father, at least until early adolescence.

There's not a lot of information about Woolrich's childhood in Mexico , but from the kind of life he led in adulthood, it's easy to infer that he was not happy there. He later wrote that it was in Mexico , at the age of 11, that he suddenly became aware of his own mortality.

“One night,” he said, “huddling over my own knees, [I] looked up at the low-hanging stars of the Valley of Anahuac , and knew I would surely die, or something worse.”

For the rest of his life he was haunted by what he called “the sense of personal, private doom,” which he compared to the feeling a bug might get when one “put it inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't.”

This obsession with his own death made him a lonely, tormented man, but it also gave him the mind-set that allowed him to produce some of the most suspenseful, darkest, most sinister crime fiction ever written.

Ironically, unlike contemporaries Hammett, Chandler, or Gardner, who started out in pulps and, by dint of hard work, eventually broke into hardback books put out by major publishers, the sad, tragic figure whose crime stories and novels would come to be regarded as prototypical exemplars of the noir style began his literary career by writing critically regarded straight novels in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He'd dropped out of Columbia sometime during his junior year when his first novel, Cover Charge (Boni & Liveright, 1926), was sold, and over the next six years, turned out one Fitzgerald-influenced novel a year, along with occasional short stories or articles for magazines like McClure's and The Smart Set .

Some time during those six years, possibly about the time his second novel, Children of the Ritz (Boni & Liveright, 1927), was being adapted for the screen, he was invited out to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. It was not, apparently, a profession he was successful at, and there's no record of his ever having written a film script during this brief period.

But it was while he was in Hollywood that he married for the first and only time in his life. His bride was Gloria Blackton, the daughter of studio honcho J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage only lasted a short time and apparently ended without ever having been consummated. Woolrich's wife had discovered that her husband, though unable to be sexually active within his own marriage, was spending his nights cruising waterfront dives in a sailor's uniform looking for homosexual one-night stands. In those days, homosexuality really was the “love that dared not speak its name,” and that being the case, it's easy to suppose that he'd married Miss Blackton merely as a cover he thought necessary, but it's just possible that it might have been a sincere attempt at a conventional heterosexual marriage, an attempt he was simply not able to successfully bring off.

When the marriage ended, Woolrich moved back to New York . “I was born to be solitary,” he would later write. Yet his later fiction has many examples of happily married couples living a life he could never experience first-hand, and as many examples of characters craving such a romance. Despite his orientation, he seems to have craved a romantic relationship with a woman, to have been tortured by his inability to enter into such a relationship, and he used his fiction to either experience those relationships vicariously, or to express his deep yearning for such a relationship.

After 1932, as the Depression set in, Woolrich was unable to sell any more of his “jazz age” novels. By this time, Woolrich was living with his mother in an apartment at the Hotel Marseilles. He would share that home with his mother, becoming increasingly reclusive and cut off, for the next quarter-century.

When, after two fruitless years of trying to sell a novel he called I Love You, Paris , he turned, in desperation, to the pulps as a market, and to a form of fiction he may have despised but at which he would come to excel. “Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair” ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 4 August 1934) was his first attempt at crime fiction. This tale had many of the hallmarks that would come to be associated with Woolrich. Bizarre coincidences, a trenchant depiction of Depression-era New York, a race against time to save a doomed protagonist, and a dark, sinister atmosphere, what Chandler once called “the smell of fear,” all elements that would become Woolrich's stock in trade, were all present in that first story. It began a streak of frenzied creativity that would last for nearly a decade and a half, during which Woolrich would produce eleven crime novels and some 200 short stories.

His crime fiction ran the gamut from international thrillers like “Death in the Yoshiwara” ( Argosy , 29 January 1938) to fair-play whodunits like “Murder at the Automat” ( Dime Detective , August 1937), from horror stories with a touch of the supernatural like “Dark Melody of Madness” ( Dime Mystery . July 1935) to nail-biting suspense set pieces in which the threat is all too earthbound, like “Three O'Clock” ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 1 October 1938).

Best-remembered today for stories about ordinary people caught up in forces beyond their control, he nevertheless wrote about professional detectives quite a bit. Occasionally, his stories featured private eyes, as in “Hot Water” ( Argosy , 28 December 1935), “The Night Reveals” ( Story , April 1936), or “One and a Half Murders” ( Black Book Detective , July 1936), but mostly, when he wrote about professional crime-solvers, he used cops.

Woolrich seems to have been both admiringly fascinated and morbidly fearful of the police. Obsessed with his own death, he was clearly impressed by men who routinely and deliberately went in harm's way for no other reason than that it was their job. An early scene in his fast action thriller “Blue is for Bravery” ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 27 February 1937), shows the hero, beat cop Danny O'Dare unhesitatingly walking into a deadly situation as the supposedly omniscient narrator admiringly describes the young officer's potentially suicidal courage with something bordering on mystification. “An ordinary man would have thought twice about bucking it, and then not bucked. Which is why cops wear blue uniforms to distinguish them from ordinary men.” Yet later in that same story, in a scene prefiguring the film Dirty Harry (Warners, 1971) by nearly forty years, O'Dare uses shockingly brutal interrogation techniques, Gestapo-style techniques, to torture information on the whereabouts of his kidnapped wife from a gangster he's got in custody.

That's the way it is with Woolrich cops, basically honest, unbelievably courageous, yet casually capable of shocking brutality. And, in some odd way, Woolrich seems to be almost in favor of that brutality. In “Dead on Her Feet” ( Dime Detective , December 1935), the cop-hero forces a suspect to continue to dance with his partner in a marathon dance contest after she's already died in his arms. In “ Graves for the Living” ( Dime Mystery , June 1937) the police, purely on the basis of a palpably ridiculous (though, as it happens, true) story told them by a not entirely reliable witness, pour acid on the person that witness has implicated until he confesses. And in the story Woolrich described as his personal favorite, “Endicott's Girl” ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 19 February 1938), a police captain, gradually convinced that his teen-aged daughter has committed a murder, spends most of the story trying to frame a man he believes to innocent in order to save his daughter, only to find, when he's on the brink of murder himself, that his suspicions were erroneous, that his daughter is innocent, and that the real killer's someone else altogether. He's pulled back from the brink in the nick of time, and manages to redeem himself, to a degree, by finding the actual murderer, but he's already condemned for his intentions and really does not deserve the happy ending he gets.

For all that, Woolrich's cops are surprisingly convincing. Indeed, many of his cop stories are described as early examples of police procedurals, though it's unlikely the reclusive Woolrich researched police work (or researched much of anything else) very carefully. Yet, with the standard for technical accuracy that would be set years later by the radio-TV series Dragnet still in the future, and, indeed, the term “police procedural” not even coined, Woolrich managed quite well by “humming a few bars and faking it.” Affecting a kind of knowing vagueness, the sheer pace of his stories left his readers so little time to reflect on the improbabilities that he usually got by just fine.

Nevertheless, anyone with a passing knowledge of law enforcement would usually have no trouble detecting errors. Occasionally, though, Woolrich managed, improbably, to get everything right. His best single cop story, “Detective William Brown” ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 10 September 1938), crams a novel's worth of plot into six or seven thousand words, covering the entire career arc of two boyhood friends who join the NYPD together. The titular character is a flashy amoral opportunist. His friend is an honest, hard-working plodder. The story takes them from childhood, to their entrance exams, through the academy, their promotions to detective, and their finally being partnered on a major murder case. Little by little the honest plodder comes to realize that his life-long friend, Bill Brown, is framing an innocent suspect to get a quick closure on the case, and the kudos that will go along with it. It's thoroughly convincing and, apparently by sheer chance, is also, for the most part, technically accurate.

But, while he used cops frequently, a technically accurate depiction of police work was not typical of Woolrich, who was more concerned with the emotional impact of his stories than proper technique. He really was a completely different kind of writer than others who plied their trade in the pulps. Not that his characters weren't capable of being tough or colloquial, which is to say “hard-boiled.” He could write tough with the best of them. But he arrived at that destination from a completely different starting point, and went past it to a place all his own.

In Woolrich, there was none of the matter-of fact, laconic pragmatism of Hammett, none of the breezy, wise-cracking toughness of Chandler , none of the nuts-and-bolts straightforwardness of Gardner . Woolrich's style was almost frantic, sometimes bordering on purple, an edgy, tormented style that suited the kind of story he told perfectly.

Woolrich wasn't about carefully worked out plots. He was about action, and pace, and making the reader desperately want, indeed need , to read the next page. What set all his fiction apart was unbearable suspense, an impending sense of claustrophobic doom, and uncontrollable randomness. Coincidence ruled the day in Woolrich's universe. Doom fell on the just and the unjust alike. Some of his stories had happy endings. Some didn't. If Hammett posited a world in which one had to be prepared for the possibility of falling beams, in Woolrich's world falling beams were the norm, not the exception, and there was no way to prepare for them, no matter how hard you tried.

And if the mechanics of his plots often couldn't stand up to even a cursory examination, what did it matter? You read Woolrich for the full-throttle ride, a that ride ended in a fatal crash as often as in a safe stop.

Two elements that suffuse much of his crime fiction are the Depression and New York City .

The Depression, of course, occupied the thoughts of just about everyone in the 1930's, and in any story written in the ‘30's, there's a sense of the economic tumult going on in the background. But Woolrich, rather unusually for crime writers of the era, made use of the Depression. “People had given up hoping,” he would later write in his autobiography. “[The Depression] was now a part of everyday existence, and everyday existence is the most difficult thing of all to change . . . It became hard even to remember the time when there hadn't been a Depression.” In his posthumously published memoirs, Blues of a Lifetime (Popular Press, 1991), the chapter from which this quote is drawn is called “Even God Felt the Depression.” Describing his own loss of religious faith in the face of the worldwide economic collapse, the title also gives a sense of how far-reaching the effects of the Depression were.

And it found its way into his fiction. Over and over again, characters in his stories are shown to be up against it, living hand-to-mouth wondering where the next meal was coming from. In his very first story, “Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair,” the murder victim is an out-of-work laborer sent to a dentist who's known for giving jobless patients a break on payments. “Dead on Her Feet” is set during one of the punishing marathon dance competitions so ubiquitous during the Depression. “One and a Half Murders” begins as its private eye hero, just laid off from his job with a New York City investigative agency, is complaining about how “the Depresh” has finally caught up with the detective business. And in “Murder Always Gathers Momentum” ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 14 December 1940), an honest man, out of work for months and on the verge of eviction, is finally driven by his desperate situation to kill five different men in a twenty-four hour murder spree.

Still there was something about New York at the height of the Depression that Woolrich found fascinating. He set stories in other American cities, like Los Angeles and St. Louis , and even in foreign locales like Spain or Japan , but New York was his most frequent setting, and few have written about it better. And what makes this most surprising is that, though he lived in New York , once he moved into that hotel room with his mother, he probably ventured out into the city very seldom. Still he could make it live, and he liked to make use of various landmarks and monuments. “Murder at the Automat” is set at one of the ubiquitous fast food joints that could be found all over New York during the Depression years. “You Pays Your Nickel” ( Argosy , 22 August 1936) and “Death in the Air ( Detective Fiction Weekly , 10 October 1936) are both set in New York City's subway system, the first in its subterranean tunnels and the second on its elevated rails. “Red Liberty” ( Dime Detective , 1 July 1935) is set at the Statue of Liberty. And “The Body in Grant's Tomb” ( Dime Detective , January 1943) tells the story of a maiden lady tourist who discovers a corpse at the monument to the Civil War hero. Woolrich at one time hoped these “ New York landmark” stories might be gathered into a single collection, but, though all of these stories were eventually preserved in hardback collections, the “themed” collection never came to fruition.

The maiden aunt heroine of “Grant's Tomb” points up another of his strengths. Woolrich had a surprising knack for writing stories from the viewpoints of people completely outside of his sphere of experience. Tough, hard cops when he was not tough, not hard, and had never been a policeman. Fathers when he'd never had kids. Loving husbands when, for practical purposes, he'd never been married. He was especially adept at writing from the viewpoint of women, as in “Face Work” ( Black Mask , October 1937) “Dime a Dance” ( Black Mask , February 1938), or “The Death Rose” ( Baffling Mysteries , March 1943), and of children as in “The Corpse and the Kid” ( Dime Detective , December 1935) and “The Boy Cried Murder” ( Mystery Book Magazine , March 1947).

In 1940, The Bride Wore Black (Simon & Schuster) , was published, Woolrich's first crime novel to appear in book form (in 1939 he'd had a novel, Eye of Doom , serialized in Argosy , but it would not be published as a book for almost twenty years). Bride was the first of six suspense novels, unrelated save for all sharing the word “black” in the title. In it, Julie Killeen, who sees her new husband killed on her wedding day, decides to exact vengeance on the men she holds responsible for that crime. The book is divided into five parts, each part, in turn, divided into three chapters. The first is told from the point of view of Julie as she prepares to murder her next victim. The second from the point of view of that victim. The third from the point of view of the detective trying to solve the series of murders that seem unrelated, but which the detective is convinced are connected.

In this way, Woolrich manages to ratchet up the suspense, managing to make the reader worry about opposed figures. We worry whether Julie, a sympathetic character for all that she's the killer, will be able to carry out her plans and escape successfully in her chapters. We worry whether or not her intended victim will wake up to the danger he's in and escape before he's killed in the victims' chapters. And we worry whether the killer will be apprehended in time to prevent the next death in the cop's chapters.

In the final section, Woolrich manages a technical tour-de-force that I've never seen accomplished before or since. Having established the plot as an “inverted” mystery, in which we know who the killer is, and see her commit each crime, then watch the detective try to figure out what we already know, Woolrich, in the final section, manages to turn the book into a whodunit, hiding the identity of the very killer through whose point of view one full third of the novel has been told. It may have seemed like cheating, but, while Woolrich was certainly capable of cheating, what he actually accomplished in The Bride Wore Black is simply an adroit, literary sleight-of-hand that works marvelously.

In the last novel of his “Black” series, Rendezvous in Black (Simon & Schuster, 1948), Woolrich basically reworked the plot of Bride , changing the grieving bride to a grieving bridegroom, and making his plan for revenge, not the death of the persons he holds responsible for his wife's death, but the death of the one each of those persons holds most dear. My own preference between the two is for Bride , but many, including Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins, prefer Rendezvous .

By 1942, he was producing enough book-length work that it seemed advisable to adopt pseudonyms to accommodate his prodigious output. “William Irish” was the name under which one of Woolrich's most famous novels, Phantom Lady (Lippincott, 1942), was published. This is one of the finest stories ever worked around the admittedly hoary old theme of rescuing a wrongfully convicted man from being executed for a murder he did not commit. The title of the first chapter, “The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution,” sets the stage. Before the murder for which Scott Henderson will be convicted and sentenced to die has even been committed, the countdown to his impending doom has begun. Proving him innocent hinges on finding a witness, the titular “phantom lady,” who can provide him with an alibi for the time of the murder. The ending, in all honesty, is confusing and the resolution requires some twenty pages of not-particularly-easy-to-follow explanation. But the logic of the plot doesn't matter. The ever-tightening tension is what most readers will take away from this novel.

“George Hopley,” derived from his middle names, was used as the byline for Night Has a Thousand Eyes (Farrar & Rinehart, 1945). Like many of Woolrich's short stories, this novel had a touch of the supernatural to it, being built around a psychic's prediction that a man will die at a certain time. Over and over again, the psychic's predictions prove correct. The deadly fate of the man whose demise has been foretold seems more and more certain. And, as is often the case with Woolrich, the tension is not released once the book ends.

As his novels became more and more popular, Woolrich was able to develop a market for collections of his pulp stories, such as I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (Lippincott, 1943), After-Dinner Story (Lippincott, 1944), If I Should Die Before I Wake (Avon, 1945), Dead Man Blues (Lippincott, 1948), and The Blue Ribbon (Lippincott, 1949). Though virtually all of the stories in these collections made their initial magazine appearances under Woolrich's own name, the collections were bylined “William Irish.”

In 1949, Woolrich was awarded the second Edgar award ever given in the short story category. At that time, the award in this category was not given for the best single short story, but for the best achievement in the field of the short story, which might mean the editing of a magazine or a particularly fine anthology, being the author of a particularly fine collection, or simply a lifetime of contributions to the short story medium. Woolrich apparently received his award for general, continued excellence as a short story writer. Oddly, perhaps because all of his short story collections to that point had been published under the Irish pseudonym, the prize was awarded to him in his “William Irish” persona.

At about the same time he received the Edgar, Woolrich's mother took ill, and would never really recover, and Woolrich received word that his estranged father had died. Perhaps overwhelmed by the crises in his family, his frenzied productivity came to a sudden end. For the next 20 years, he was able to produce only a tiny fraction of the protean output he'd so easily managed during the previous 15. His income (and it actually wasn't a bad one), mostly derived from adaptations of his work for radio, television, and film, and from collections of previously published short material, like Nightmare (Dodd, Mead, 1956) and Violence (Dodd, Mead, 1958), now finally appearing under the Woolrich byline.

Two of the most successful dramatic adaptations of his work, the 1949 noir classic, The Window (RKO) , based on “The Boy Cried Murder,” and the Hitchcock-directed Rear Window (Paramount, 1954), based on “It Had To Be Murder” ( Dime Detective , February 1942), both came out during this dry period (and, coincidentally, both won Edgars in the screenplay category).

What little original short fiction he was able to produce during this period was due largely to the efforts of Frederic Dannay at Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Hans Stefan Santesson at The Saint Magazine , who both made a point of encouraging him to keep writing, but most of the little he produced fell below the standards he'd reached during his peak years. Occasionally, though, he was still able to give readers a glimpse of the talent that had made him a legend in the mystery community between 1934 and 1948. “One Drop of Blood” ( EQMM , April 1962) is a masterful, if forensically dubious, inverted tale about the battle of wits between a tough cop and a clever killer. “For the Rest of Her Life” ( EQMM , May 1968), the last story to be published in Woolrich's lifetime, is a harrowing story of the doomed efforts of a brutalized wife to escape her abusive husband. And the posthumously published “New York Blues” ( EQMM , December 1970), a haunting character study of a man who may (or may not) have killed the girl he loved, is Woolrich at his bleakest.

He was equally sporadic with his production of novels. From 1949 until his death in 1968, only six novels were published, compared to eleven between 1940 and 1948. And one of these, The Doom Stone ( Avon , 1960) was simply the 1939 Argosy serial, Eye of Doom , finally published in book form, with a heavily revised final section. But his early novels, particularly The Bride Wore Black and Phantom Lady , were almost continuously in print. And with collections of his short work continuing to be published, and income from film, radio, or TV adaptations, he was actually making a reasonably comfortable living without having to produce new material. Or what would have been a comfortable living if he spent any of his money to be comfortable.

Woolrich's mother finally died of her long illness in 1957. Woolrich responded by writing Hotel Room (Random, 1958), a collection of linked stories set in the same suite of a New York inn at different points in the building's history, and dedicating it to her memory. It had far less success than his reprints.

With his mother gone, Woolrich's life continued to spiral downward. Diabetic, alcoholic, craving friendship, but tending to drive friends away, he got more and more reclusive, and his personal situation got worse and worse. Early in 1968, a shoe that was too tight, but which Woolrich never bothered to get repaired or replaced, caused an infection to develop in his foot, which, untreated, led to gangrene, which, in turn, spread to his leg. When he was finally discovered unconscious in his hotel room, he was rushed to a hospital where the gangrenous leg was amputated. A few months later, apparently too frail to sustain the massive physical trauma of losing a limb, he died of a stroke. Killed by an uncomfortable shoe. As stupid, pointless, and needless a death as any he ever wrote about. In the months before his passing, he returned to the Catholicism into which he'd been baptized as a child, and one hopes that, in the Church's teaching about salvation and redemption, he was able to find some kind of solace during his final months.

But it doesn't seem likely.

Francis M. Nevins, author of the Edgar-winning Woolrich biography First You Dream, Then You Die (Mysterious, 1988), and editor of most of the posthumous collections of Woolrich's short fiction, gave perhaps the best description of the lonely, tormented man who became noir 's definitive practitioner. "He was," said Nevins, “the poet of . . . shadows, the Hitchcock of the written word.”

As for his work, and the forces that compelled him to complete that work, perhaps Woolrich himself gives the most insightful comment.

“I was only trying to cheat death,” he wrote. “I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.”