Cornell Woolrich is the father of Noir fiction, and Francis Nevin's has been keeping his legacy alive for many years as editor of Woolrich's collected stories (Tonight, Somewhere in New York) as well as the definitive biography First You Dream, Then You Die. Cornell Woolwich, defined the noir genre with titles like Black Path of Fear, Waltz Into Darkness, and Black Angel. He is the Alfred Hitchcock of the written word.
He also wrote lighter suspense novels such as the excellent I Married A Dead Man under his pseudonym William Irish, the basis of the terrific Barbara Stanwyk film No Man Of Her Own, in which an unmarried pregnant woman is mistaken for a newlywed pregnant woman after a deadly train wreck, and she guiltily continues the charade.
Love and Night - Unknown Stories falls a little further into the light, being the lesser-known collected stories that have been unavailable and unread for over 70 years. These fifteen stories, written between 1926 and 1939, still contain the Woolrich touch but are far from suspenseful or mysterious. These are light romantic stories of love and divorce in the carefree 1920's through depression of the 30's.
So light, many of them were originally published in magazines with titles like Breezy and College Humor.
They do have charm, and if you are a completist you will love anything Woolwich has written. In fact, so excited was I to find more Woolrich that I thought it was an instant keeper, sight unseen as it were.
It's a wonderful thing that these have been preserved and promoted to a new audience, but I found them just OK. His writing is always great, but I give a lower rating for subject matter, and slight disappointment. Just a note to anyone looking for Woolwich, this is not the area to begin with.
Go read Rendezvous in Black or Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
2007 / Hardcover / 236 pages
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