Invisible ink no 264: Cornell Woolrich

The big three names of American crime writing were long considered to be Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner (the bestselling American author of the 20th century at the time of his death in 1970). But just behind them was another name we’ve almost completely forgotten. Cornell Woolrich’s crime novels lent themselves to visual versions so well that more noir screenplays were adapted from his works than from anyone else.

Born in New York in 1903, Woolrich began his career writing light jazz-age novels in the style of F Scott Fitzgerald, but found his feet in a series of bleak, brilliantly plotted detective pulps, writing pseudonymously to skip around his publisher’s ownership of his name. His 1942 story “It Had To Be Murder” was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Rear Window and François Truffaut directed versions of The Bride Wore Black and Waltz Into Darkness. In addition, Phantom Lady, Night Has A Thousand Eyes, and I Married a Dead Man were also successfully filmed.

Woolrich’s tales were page-turning races against time to prove innocence or take revenge. In Bride, a groom gunned down on his wedding day is fabulously avenged by his wife, while in Phantom Lady, a convicted wife-strangler must find the only woman who can provide him with an alibi. Woolrich wrote “All at Once, No Alice”, a spin on a 19thcentury urban legend in which a man briefly leaves his bride in their hotel room on their wedding night. When he returns, the room no longer exists, his bride can’t be found, and everyone with whom they came in contact denies having seen them before.

His heroes are persecuted victims, frequently beset by paranoid fears as the options left open to them vanish. His ideas are terrific, although his characters are cold and remote, yet Woolrich’s bitter pessimism was perfectly suited to the noir genre. His worldview extended from his private life; after a brief, disastrous marriage he returned to live with his saintly mother while cruising the docks for sailors, and was by all accounts uncomfortable and unpleasant in company. Bouts of alcoholism exacerbated his diabetes, and his remaining friends were finally driven away. Although wealthy, he spent the last decade of his life angry and alone, his gangrenous leg amputated, as if he had become a noir character from his own pages. When he died in 1968, he left behind 250 stories and nearly 20 novels.