He's been called the "Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century," the "father of noir fiction," "the Hitchcock of the written word," and "our poet of the shadows." It's quite possible more film noir screenplays were adapted from his works than any other crime novelist, including films by Hitchcock, Truffaut and Fassbinder, with many Stories also adapted during the 1940s for radio.Yet, when the centennial of his birth rolled around in 2003, few of his works were available in stores in or print, and the date passed with mostly a collective yawn.
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich, who also wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, was an eccentric, alcoholic, and a diabetic, who had a leg amputated due to an infection from a too-tight shoe. He was both shy and arrogant, but primarily a loner, who was said to have so few friends he rarely put dedications on his novels, and when he did, they were to things like his Remington Portable typewriter and a hotel room he hated. He was a conflicted homosexual who married briefly as a joke, and ended up living with his mother in a rat-infested Harlem tenement with pimps, prostitutes and criminals, even though they could have afforded better (upon his death, he left a bequest of one million dollars to Columbia University, to fund a scholarship for young writers).
He started out writing romantic fiction imitating F. Scott Fitzgerald, but turned to pulp fiction in 1934 and wrote for magazines like Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. His golden period came between the years of 1934 to 1948, although he continued to write off and on until his death in 1968. Both his earlier and many of his later works weren't on the same level as the middle output (although he wrote several good later stories for EQMM). Even Francis M. Nevins, Woolrich's literary executor who wrote a critical biography and edited three of the Woolrich short story collections, admitted that "purely on its merits as prose, it's dreadful."
Yet, those middle works included tales like the story "Rear Window" which later became a famous Alfred Hitchcock movie. In the introduction to the Woolrich story collection, Night and Fear, Nevins talks about Woolrich's first crime story, "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair," which paints a vivid picture of New York City during the Depression, a bizarre murder method (cynanide in a temporary filing), and a race against the clock to save the poisoned protagonist, elements that would become Woolrich hallmarks. Nevins writes "in his tales of 1934-39, Woolrich created, almost from scratch, the builidng blocks of the literature we have come to call noir."
The 14 stories in Night and Fear, published by Otto Penzler in 2004, contain all the elements that came to be associated with Woolrich, including the intense, feverish, irrational nature of his world, and plots often filled with outlandish contrivances and coincidences. But Nevins concludes that "in his most powerful work these are not gaffes but functional elements," and that Woolrich believed "an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story." Thus, Woolrich's oft-quoted aphorism, "First you dream, then you die."
In Night and Fear, you'll find stories like "Endicott's Girl," which Woolrich once listed as his personal favorite, about a cop who begins to suspect his beloved teenage daughter is a murderer and covers up the evidence; "Cigarette" where a poison cigarette is passed from person to person; and "New York Blues," which is probably Woolrich's final story, involving the claustrophobic imaginings of a lonely man as he waits for the police in his secluded hotel room for a crime he's not sure he even committed:
Fortunately you can find more Woolrich works available these days, including re-releases of some of his novels and short stories by Hard Case Crime, Pegasus Books. Random House, and others. Almost any one of his stories would make for fine Halloween-season fare, as you find yourself sucked down into the nihilistic noir world that Woolrich created.
