Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Read online

  Darkness at Dawn

  Early Suspense Classics by

  CORNELL WOOLRICH

  Edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. & Martin H. Greenberg

  Introduction by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

  Peter Bedrick Books

  New York

  Introduction. Copyright 1985 Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

  “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair.” Copyright 1934 Red Star News Co.; copyright 1962 Cornell Woolrich.

  “Walls That Hear You.” Copyright 1934 Red Star News Co.; copyright 1961 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Preview of Death.” Copyright 1934, 1961 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Murder in Wax.” Copyright 1935, 1962 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “The Body Upstairs.” Copyright 1935, 1962 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Kiss of the Cobra.” Copyright 1935, 1962 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Red Liberty.” Copyright 1935, 1962 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Dark Melody of Madness.” Copyright 1935 Popular Publications, Inc.; copyright 1962 Cornell Woolrich.

  “The Corpse and the Kid.” Copyright 1935 Popular Publications, Inc.; copyright 1962 Cornell Woolrich.

  “Dead on Her Feet.” Copyright 1935, 1962 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “The Death of Me.” Copyright 1935 Red Star News Co.; copyright 1963 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “The Showboat Murders.” Copyright 1935 Red Star News Co.; copyright 1963 Popular Publications, Inc.

  “Hot Water.” Copyright 1935 Frank A. Munsey Co.; copsrright 1963 Popular Publications, Inc.

  Cornell Woolrich: A Checklist. Copyright 1985 Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR

  Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair

  Walls That Hear You

  Preview of Death

  Murder in Wax

  The Body Upstairs

  Kiss of the Cobra

  Red Liberty

  Dark Melody of Madness

  The Corpse and the Kid

  Dead on Her Feet

  The Death of Me

  The Showboat Murders

  Hot Water

  Introduction

  ––––––––––––––––

  FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR

  Noir.

  Any French dictionary will tell you that the word’s primary meaning is black, dark, or gloomy. But since the mid-1940s and when used with the nouns roman (novel) or film, the adjective has developed a specialized meaning, referring to the kind of bleak, disillusioned study in the poetry of terror that flourished in American mystery fiction during the 1930s and 1940s and in American crime movies during the 1940s and 1950s. The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie).

  During the 1940s many American books of this sort were published in French translation in a long-running series called the Serie Noire, and at the end of World War II, when French film enthusiasts were exposed for the first time to Hollywood’s cinematic analogue of those books, they coined film noir as a phrase to describe the genre. What Americans of those years tended to dismiss as commercial entertainments the French saw as profound explorations of the heart of darkness, largely because noir was so intimately related to the themes of French existentialist writers like Sartre and Camus and because the bleak world of noir spoke to the despair which so many in Europe were experiencing after the nightmare years of war and occupation and genocide. By the early 1960s cinephiles in the United States had virtually made an American phrase out of film noir and had acclaimed this type of movie as one of the most fascinating genres to emerge from Hollywood. Noir directors—not only the giants like Alfred Hitchcock (in certain moods) and Fritz Lang but relative unknowns like Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Toumeur, Robert Siodmak, Joseph H. Lewis, and Anthony Mann—were hailed as visual poets whose cinematic style made the bleakness of their films not only palatable but fantastically exciting.

  Several first-rate books on this movie genre have recently been published in the United States, and one can attend courses on film noir at any number of colleges. But there has not yet developed a corresponding interest in the doom-haunted novels and tales of suspense in which film noir had its roots. Although Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the poets of big-city corruption, and James M. Cain, the chronicler of sexual obsession, have received the fame they deserve, the names of countless other noir writers are known primarily to specialists.

  Names like Cornell Woolrich.

  Woolrich was bom on December 4,1903, to parents whose marriage collapsed in his youth. Much of his childhood was spent in Mexico with his father, a civil engineer. At age eight, the experience of seeing a traveling French company perform Puccini’s Madame Butterfly in Mexico City gave Woolrich a sudden sharp insight into color and drama and his first taste of tragedy. Three years later he understood fully that someday, like Cio-Cio-San, he too would have to die, and from then on he was haunted by a sense of doom that never left him.

  During adolescence he lived with his mother and maternal relatives in New York City, and in 1921 he entered Columbia College. It was there that he began writing fiction, and he quit school in his junior year to pursue his dream of becoming another F. Scott Fitzgerald. His first novel. Cover Charge (1926), chronicled the lives and loves of the Jazz Age’s gilded youth in the manner of his and his whole generation’s literary idol. This book was followed by the prize-winning Children of the Ritz (1927), whose success propelled Wool-rich to Hollywood as a screenwriter, a job at which he failed, and into

  a brief marriage, at which, being homosexual, he failed even worse. Before long he fled back to New York and his mother. For the next quarter century he lived with her in residential hotels, going out only when it was absolutely essential, trapped in a bizarre love-hate relationship which dominated his external world just as the inner world of his later fiction reflects in its tortured patterns the strangler grip in which his mother and his own inability to love a woman held him.

  From 1934 until his death in 1968, this tormented recluse all but created what we know as noir, writing dozens of haunting tales of suspense, despair, and lost love, set in a universe controlled by diabolical powers. During the ‘30s his work appeared only in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Detective Fiction Weekly. Then, beginning with The Bride Wore Black (1940), he launched his so-called Black Series of suspense novels—which appeared in France as part of the Serie Noire and led the French to acclaim him as a master of bleak poetic vision. Much of his reputation still rests on those novels and on the other suspense classics originally published under his pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. Throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s Woolrich’s publishers issued numerous hardcover and paperback collections of his short stories. Many of his novels and tales were adapted into movies, including such fine films noirs as Toumeur’s The Leopard Man (1943), Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946), Maxwell Shane’s Fear in the Night (1947), and, most famous of all, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Even more of Woolrich’s work was turned into radio and later into television drama. But despite overwhelming financial and critical success his life remained a wretched mess, and when his mother died in 1957 he cracked. From then until his own death eleven years later he lived alone, his last few months spent in a wheelchair after the
amputation of a gangrenous leg, wracked by diabetes and alcoholism and homosexual self-contempt. But the best of his final “tales of love and despair” are still gifted with the magic touch that chills the heart, and in a title for a story he never wrote he captured the essence of his noir world in six words.

  First you dream, then you die.

  Woolrich wrote all sorts of stories, including quasi-police procedu-rals, rapid-action whizbangs, and tales of the occult, and all three varieties are represented in this collection. But he’s best known as the master of pure suspense, the writer who could evoke with almost-more-than-human power the desperation of those who walk the city’s darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in the most commonplace settings. In his hands even such clich6d storylines as the race to save the innocent person from the electric chair and the amnesiac hunting his lost self resonate with anguish. Woolrich’s world is a feverish place where the prevailing emotions are loneliness and fear and the prevailing action—as in his classics “Three O’Clock” (1938) and “Guillotine” (1939)—the race against time and death. His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like Grod.

  The typical Woolrich settings are the seedy hotel, the cheap dance hall, the rundown movie house and the precinct station backroom. The dominant reality in his world is the Depression, and Woolrich has no peers when it comes to describing a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protagonist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that he not only can’t find her but can’t convince anyone she ever existed. Or, in another classic Woolrich situation, the protagonist comes to after a blackout—caused by amnesia, drugs, hypnosis, or whatever—and little by little becomes certain that he committed a murder or other crime while out of himself The police are rarely sympathetic; in fact they are the earthly counterparts of the malignant powers above and their main function is to torment the helpless.

  All we can do about this nightmare we live in is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at making us watch while relationships corrode. He knew the horrors that both love and lovelessness can breed, yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; for with whoever loves or needs love, Woolrich identifies, all of that person’s dark side notwithstanding.

  Purely as technical exercises, many of Woolrich’s novels and stories are awfiil. They don’t make the slightest bit of sense. And that of course is the point: neither does life. Nevertheless some of his tales, usually thanks to outlandish coincidence, manage to end quite happily. But since he never used a series character, the reader can never know in advance whether a particular Woolrich story will be light or dark, all^gre or noir —which is one of many reasons why his stories are so hauntingly suspenseful. Including the thirteen collected here.

  Woolrich’s dream of being the next Scott Fitzgerald was killed by the Depression, and during 1933 he wasn’t able to sell a single word. Then in the spring of 1934 a second chance opened up for him, and he began writing a new kind of story for a market he hadn’t considered before, the pulp mystery magazines. His success in this genre was as rapid as his early success in the mainstream. His first three crime stories appeared later that year in Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective, and ten more were published in 1935 in those magazines plus Dime Mystery and Argosy. In these thirteen tales, collected here, he introduced a huge number of the themes and elements and devices that we think of as peculiarly his own.

   In 1923, while shooting the Civil War film The Warrens of Virginia, actress Martha Mansfield was burned to death when someone threw a lit match on the ground and her flammable hoopskirt was ignited, turning her into a living torch. One of the scenes in Woolrich’s precrime novel Times Square (1929) is also based on this incident.

  His earliest published suspense story, “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair” Detective Fiction Weekly, August 4, 1934), features not only some revealing glimpses of New York City in the pit of the Depression but also a typically bizarre murder method and a taste of countless races-against-the-clock in future stories when the protagonist frantically tries to get the poison removed from his body before it kills him. “Walls That Hear You” Detective Fiction Weekly, August 18, 1934) opens with the demonic invading the narrator’s life as he finds his younger brother with all ten fingers cut off and his tongue severed at the roots. “Preview of Death” Dime Detective, November 15,1934) harks back to Woolrich’s brief screenwriting stint in Hollywood, utilizes a grisly means of death which actually killed an actress years before,* and introduces the first of Woolrich’s dozens of cop protagonists. “Murder in Wax” Dime Detective, March 1, 1935), which he later cannibalized for part of his classic 1943 novel The Black Angel, is the first Woolrich story to be narrated in first person by a woman. “The Body Upstairs” Dime Detective, April 1,1935) is a more-or-less straightforward detective tale, except for its subtext of innocent parties being casually tortured by the police: the cops stick lighted cigarettes into the husband’s armpits till he’s about to confess, at which point the homicide dick in charge chews the husband out as a weak sister! “Kiss of the Cobra” Dime Detective, May 1, 1935) is another story of the invasion of everyday by demonic forces, and even though the situation is wilder than one usually encounters in Wool-rich—thfc narrator’s widower father brings home as his new bride a Hindu snake priestess complete with snake—the duel of poisoned cigarettes at the climax could have been written by no one else. “Red Liberty” Dime Detective, July 1, 1935) combines the detective tale with woiking-class cop protagonist and a meticulously portrayed setting inside the Statue of Liberty, the first of many New York landmeirks Woolrich used in his crime fiction. “Dark Melody of Madness” Dime Mystery, July 1935), better known under its reprint title “Papa Benjamin,” presents the first of Woolrich’s fate-doomed existential fugitives, a jazz composer-bandleader who’s cursed by a New Orleans voodoo cult. “The Corpse and the Kid” Dime Detective^ September 1935), also known as “Boy with Body,” is the earliest Woolrich story of pure nail-biting suspense: a young man finds that his father has killed his slut stepmother and desperately tries to cover up by wrapping the woman’s body in a rug and carrying it across part of New Jersey to the rendezvous where her lover is waiting. In “Dead on Her Feet” Dime Detective, December 1935) Woolrich borrows the dance-marathon motif that his pulp confrere Horace McCoy had used earlier that year in his classic noir novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, but Woolrich’s version features one of the most sadistic and psychotic of all his cop characters and one of the most chilling climaxes in any crime story. In “The Death of Me” DetectiveFiction Weekly, December 7,1935) he borrows from another noir masterpiece, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), for the climax of a powerful story about a man who tries to bury his past self and start life over again. “The Showboat Murders”

  DetectiveFiction Weekly, December 14,1935) is the first of Woolrich’s nonstop fast-action whizbangs, with another woiking-stiff cop hero, a setting clearly suggested by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern’s blockbuster musical comedy of 1927, and, as usual in Woolrich tales of this sort, a concern with precise details of physical movement even during frenzied pursuit. And “Hot Water” Argosy, December 28, 1935) is another whizbang, this one based on Woolrich’s memories of Hollywood and its stars’ below-the-border playgrounds in the transition time between the silent and talking eras.

  By the end of that year he was a professional mystery writer and from then till the end of his life he wrote little else. His 1935 earnings totaled $2487.00, a sum on which in those days a man and his mother could live. More important, by the end of the year Woolrich had set in place an untold number of the building blocks of his n
oir universe. Darkness at Dawn shows us what a superb writer and craftsman of suspense he was even at the start of his new career.

  After his death in 1968, a fragment was found among his papers in which he tried to explain his life’s work. “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.” In the end, of course, like Cio-Cio-San and all of us, he had to die. But as long as there are readers to be haunted by the fruit of his life, by the way he took his wretched psychological environment and his sense of entrapment and loneliness and turned them into poetry of the shadows, the world Woolrich imagined lives.

  Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair

  There was another patient ahead of me in the waiting room. He was sitting there quietly, humbly, with all the terrible resignation of the very poor. He wasn’t all jittery and alert like I was, but just sat there ready to take anything that came, head bowed a little as though he had found life just a succession of hard knocks. His gaze met mine and I suppose he could tell how uncomfortable I was by the look on my face, but instead of grinning about it or cracking wise he put himself out to encourage me, cheer me up. When I thought of this afterward it did something to me.

  “He not hurt you,” he murmured across to me confidentially. “Odder dantist say he very good, you no feel notting at all when he drill.”

  I showed my gratitude by offering him a cigarette. Misery loves company.