Cornell Woolrich dresses everyone in black

Michelle:  For this post, Sharon and I will be peering into the dark corners of Cornell Woolrich’s writing, both his first published novel The Bride Wore Black (1940) and other work.  Woolrich is a noir master, gritty and dark, with a spin to his tales that seems truly unique and which will get under your skin.  There is so much I want to talk about in this book that can’t be discussed without spoilers, so this writeup will be shorter and less complete than it could be.  If you'd like to read along, you can order a copy of the book on my shop's website, or get it from a terrific bookseller or library near you!

https://greenhandbookshop.com/products/the-bride-wore-black-by-cornell-woolrich

 

Sharon:  The opening pages of a Cornell Woolrich novel can be described as the Fischer Defense, a chess opening advocated for by the troubled genius of chess, Bobby Fischer. Woolrich elevates the crime-fiction genre. Oh, heck he hails a literary 747 right off the surface of the earth and sends you on a spine-chilling ascent 90 degrees straight up.

Michelle:  I peeled through The Bride Wore Black in about a day, which happens very rarely.  Then I had to read it again to take notes, because it was a full throttle ride when I was in it first time ‘round!  The edition I read was the current in-print edition from American Mystery Classics, which has a good introduction by Eddie Muller. He relates a quote from Woolrich, tossed off as a description of his writing goals: “All I was trying to do was cheat death.”  And so he has. 

Muller aptly describes Woolrich’s work, which “taken individually are nerve-jangling diversions; as a life’s work they added up to a towering wall of existential malevolence not even Sartre or Camus would dare scale.”  He also recommends consuming Woolrich’s work “in a feverish rush,” as “that’s how you feel the undertow…”  It’s certainly how I read The Bride Wore Black, and “The Night Reveals,” a short story written under his most popular pseudonym, William Irish.  The torrent of his words sweeps you before them, disbelieving yet unable to resist.

 

Sharon:  It was Woolrich's Black Series —The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944) and Rendezvous in Black (1948) – that perhaps best show off his prodigious skill and gave him a place to sprawl out in the dark shadows. At least one, the first in the series – The Bride Wore Black - produces more genuine Hollywood-worthy material. Just ask anyone who’s seen Quentin Tarantino’s loose adaptation, Kill Bill.

The Bride Wore Black, which he dedicated to a typewriter, features a study in femme fatale. From the moment Julie appears on the page at Grand Central Station she is at once a total mystery and this absolutely outrageous contradiction of moral murderess.

 

Michelle:  First of all, you must brace yourself for our detective’s name: Lew Wanger.  Perhaps the prototype for today’s ever-present Jack Reacher and Harry Hole?  Anyways, he’s a steady worker, and becomes an expert on this book’s killings, for all the good it does him.  As off-the-cuff as our protagonist’s name is, he has a serious job ahead of him. 

Second of all, you need to aware that these murders are done by killers who are determined, smart, and dedicated.  As fast a read as the book is, the cases are spaced out over a couple of years.  Are they even connected?  Lew Wanger thinks so.

At our first death scene, a blanching member of the public who sees too much is dismissed by an officer on-duty who says, “Well, what’d y’expect, violets?”  Buckle up, everyone.  The gloves are off already.

 

Sharon:  The seemingly unrelated cast of characters are not so great and when she begins to violently dispense with them, I wasn’t all that bothered.

 

Michelle:  Sunlight creeps between narrowly paced buildings, “at an angle that was enough to break its back.”  We attend a mysterious, unnamed play.  A word or phrase that someone hates, but which is never clarified, hangs in the background.  The reader has puzzles of their own that will never be unraveled.

Children observe adult foibles in their unique way.  We are left knowing there are unseen clues, nothing more.  And grateful that the child was spared     The casualties left behind in the wake of this often-creative and always-brutal wave of destruction are many and random.  Wanger observes the real-world effects on the victims left behind, the wives, girlfriends, and children: “The murder hadn’t been in the closet out there; it was in here on her face.”

Our killers deal with brutal men in a wonderfully adept manner, dismissing them in myriad ways, all summed up in one line: “You have nothing that I want.”  These men, discarded and lucky enough to survive, have no idea how to deal with their fate.

Other women fare similarly.  “Then what is she?” one acquaintance cries in frustration.  Best you do not know. 

While this book inspired Tarantino’s Kill Bill, it could just as easily have been Final Destination.  You’ll never know until it hits you, though.

 

Sharon:  The final book in the series - Rendezvous in Black – didn’t sit as well with me. It started out so well leading you down the garden path and then – I felt – dumped you out in the alley on your arse with a what the heck just happened kick from behind just for good measure.

Average Johnny and lovely Dorothy found love. Nothing saccharine or too intense, but rather perfect. They had a date at eight every night. A boy and a girl who had been meeting for years outside Getty’s Drugstore on the square. It had been that way for years – moonlit walks under star filled skies, snowy ones sucking on chocolates. But soon they would be married and Johnny was excited.  She was the one for him and he for her.

The story opens one evening in May as Johnny is walking to meet Dorothy. He is a minute or two late to meet her and thinking of their love as he approaches a crowd of people on the corner by Getty’s. The crowd thins out, an unidentifiable woman lies dead in the street and his Dorothy has disappeared. For months Johnny lives in shock and despair spiraling into a dark place and emerging a phantom of his old self. A severely damaged human obsessed with not so much righting a wrong as leveling the playing field.   

I found it utterly depressing.  The glitter had run out.

 

On Shorter Works:

 

Michelle:  Sharon suggested reading one of Woolrich’s short stories to give us an idea of his other work, and I picked “The Night Reveals.” This tale is part of his short story collection, written under the pseudonym William Irish, titled After-Dinner Story (1944).  I was bowled over by it. 

 

Sharon:  As a young man, Woolrich locked himself in his mother’s apartment and wrote about love and death and revenge. Even among a cluster of immensely talented writers including Patricia Highsmith and Ross Macdonald his prose would stand out.  A highly regarded crime-fiction writer nobody really knew anything about. Woolrich knew character, cruelty, and complexity. He knew glamour far better than grittiness.

That finesse, that silkiness he sculpted his characters from was likely part of what attracted Alfred Hitchcock to him, or more specifically to his 1942 short story “It Had to be Murder,” which he adapted into the iconic cinema fête Rear Window.  

 

I could see into it, from the rounded projection of my bay window, as freely as into a doll house with its rear wall sliced away.

    He’d been packing a trunk, packing his wife’s things into a large upright trunk.

– Woolrich, in “It Had to be Murder”

 

The three fictional works of his that I read featured characters who seemed familiar and yet were complete strangers who in turn pursued supporting characters who may or may not have been guilty of the crimes they were accused of.

 

Michelle:  I will say just a little about “The Night Reveals” here, but it is serious proof of Woolrich’s creative skill in storytelling, and of the way he can draw you into the most innocuous life and remind you that we are all pieces of the puzzle. 

The narrator, a hard-working and earnest fire insurance adjustor, takes us through this awful tragedy step by step, doubting his own eyes at every turn.  As Woolrich says himself: “There was no melodrama in the way he said it…” 

And that is how this story sneaks up on us, step by step, inch by inch, and forces us to bear its final, fatal blow with our eyes wide open.

Sprinkled through the story are heartbreaking moments of clarity.  The narrator sees around him the perfect coziness of his own home, but in the world outside sees New York City in its late-WWII realness: “…decrepit, unprotected tenements, all crammed from basement to roof with helpless sleepers…”  He sees the decay, but he also sees the vulnerable human lives stacked within it, as vacant buildings intersperse each packed block like zombies among the living.  He is all too aware that some people must make their homes in the deserted buildings, because life is hard.

Suffice it to say he lives in a world of contrasts.  Teeming life vs. empty windows, black shadows and mold vs. the harsh light of destruction vs. the clean, civilized light of safe well-maintained buildings.

In his world, fire is an ungovernable devil, capable of any monstrosity even in its wild natural state – but in the hands of someone directing it?  Just as crazy, but more satanic in its dance. 

This story is in no way simple.  It would sound like that if I summed it up, but the variety of human conditions embedded in it for observation and comprehension, for viewing with compassion and being forced to look at for fast clear decision-making, make nothing else clear but that there are gray areas, and that at the same time everything is black and white.  All at the same time.  We are all flammable.

And also, as a very random sidenote, I now have to go look up the word “beanery,” because I feel like I’m missing out on a mid-century phenomena I’ve never heard of.  Thank you Cornell Woolrich, and good night!

 

Woolrich’s backstory in brief

by Sharon: 

 

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born on December 14, 1903 in New York City to Genero and Claire (neé Attalic) Hopley-Woolrich.

In 1907 the family moved to Mexico and Genero and Claire divorced soon after. Cornell stayed with his father in Mexico for the duration of his childhood.

 

His formative years:

As a teenager, he returned to the US and lived with his mother, his aunt, and his grandfather on West 113th Street. He went on to attend Columbia U. dropping out his senior year.  (I wonder what that must have been like returning to the US at the start of the Great Depression, going to high school and college during it.)

 

His adult life:

Married to Gloria Blackton for a month then disappeared. While he was gone Blackton discovered his diary and realized he had been having daily affairs with men throughout their marriage. She divorced him.

Woolrich moved back in with his mother into a formerly glamorous Harlem apartment hotel, where he maintained a reclusive lifestyle and continued to write. 

In life he maintained an elusive identity to such an extent there is little information about his personal life and the info that exists may or may not be true.* Woolrich wrote an autobiography (unpublished), yet he sensationalized much of it and in some cases fabricated complete parts of it.

 

*Biographical facts largely sourced from Columbia University Library, which is where Cornell Woolrich’s papers are held.