Cornell Woolrich dresses everyone in black

Mystery Club #6

For this post, 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

I peeled through The Bride Wore Black in about a day, a rare occurrence in my reading life.  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 works, 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 its tide, disbelieving yet unable to resist.

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 very 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.

But that doesn't mean this is a page-turner with no literary flesh on its bones.  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 is given 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.”  Some noir is cold and hammers like newstype, but while his delivery of events may seem staccato, Woolrich gives us a glimpse below the action that echoes the shift towards victim awareness we see today in better true crime podcasts, like Maine's Murder She Told (https://www.murdershetold.com/).  

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.

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.

On Shorter Works:

I read some of Woolrich’s short stories (always a good idea for introducing yourself to a new author), including “The Night Reveals.” This tale is part of a short story collection, written under the pseudonym William Irish, titled After-Dinner Story (1944).  I was bowled over after reading it. 

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 homes.  He is all too aware that some people must make their abodes 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, like his own family's cozy apartment.

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 basic if I summed it up, but the variety of human conditions embedded in it are rich fodder for the reader's observation and comprehension -- for viewing with compassion, knowing eventually you will be forced to glance back at it for fast clear decision-making.  Woolrich makes nothing clearer than the fact that we are surrounded by gray areas, but that there will be critical moments when we must instead see everything in black and white.  We are all flammable.  There are flashpoints.

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!

Cape Fear stalks our end-of-summer reading list

Mystery Club #5 

Back in 1991, I went to see Cape Fear in the theater.  De Niro’s terrifying performance still lingers in my mind, all these years later.  But it wasn’t until last year that I finally read the book that the film and its 1962 predecessor were based on.     

All you need is a cocktail umbrella!

John D. MacDonald, best known and loved for his Travis McGee novels, wrote Cape Fear in 1957.  It was originally published as The Executioners. 

The basic premise is a familiar one.  A lawyer, Sam Bowden, is stalked by Max Cady, a man he helped to put away in prison years before.  At that time Sam had been young, but now he has a family – a wife, three kids, two of them growing up too fast, and a sweet family dog.

You could practically write it yourself, couldn’t you?

Here’s where MacDonald’s genius comes in.  In little glimpses, we get to know the family.  Likewise, the ongoing deeds and general behavior of the villain.  Yes, the family is appealing and wholesome but human.  Yes, the villain proves himself to be the worst of the worst, over and over again -- far beyond retribution.

But the story goes beyond that.  The nuances of justice, of right and wrong, of how far one can allow oneself to go in the name of defending one’s bit of peace and happiness without destroying everything you’ve built and are proud of – and how much fear and oppression a human soul can take before it breaks.  Not to mention how our survival instinct expands to protect those we care about.

This all sounds very pompous as I write it, but the way MacDonald handles it, and turns it over in these pages for us to examine, is anything but heavy-handed.  It is, instead, very human.

Throughout it all, Cady puts the reader on edge as much as he does Sam Bowden’s family.  And Cady amuses himself by tormenting others.  For the most part he sticks to attacking citizens who won’t go to the police.  

One woman, perhaps a little too “friendly,” winds up with “a face like a blue basketball” after Cady’s ministrations with a smashed chair.  And even to her Cady mentions his adopted nemesis, Sam Bowden – “The Lieutenant” – twice.  “And both times it gave me the cold creepers, right up and down my back," she tells Sam. “One time he said you were an old Army buddy and to show you how much he liked you he was going to kill you six times.”

Cady, like many twisted minds we encounter in daily life, doesn’t make sense by the normal standards of society.

It takes some finagling to arrange for Cady to be put away, even temporarily.  Perhaps a small sidestep outside the law.  But even that doesn’t last.  And this time when Cady gets out of custody, he’s not pulling any punches.  He’s not wasting any time.

The clock is ticking.  Summer is high.  And there’s nowhere for the Bowdens to run, after all, but home.

This is a fast, partly delightful and partly very intense summer read.  Perfect for tucking in your pocket to take with you to the beach, or a solo picnic!

My favorite vintage version!

 

Green Men and Occasional Pseudonyms

Mystery Club #4

I enjoy the spooky and melodramatic cover art that graces vintage paperback gothic mysteries, but I rarely pick them up to read myself -- probably because they tend to be heavy on the 💕romance💕 and helpless female protagonists. 

However, a couple of years ago I found a 1987 US printing of The Castle of the Demon by Patrick Ruell (one of UK mystery author Reginald Hill’s pseudonyms), and couldn’t resist.

I had fun with its mashup of tropes – a little bit of vintage gothic, a little bit of mystery, a generous dollop of local folklore, a dash of potential romances (plural!), all set against a seaside cliff breeze, and by the end … well you might read it yourself, so I don’t want to spoil anything.  Things get a little crazy towards the end!

What really grabbed me about the book initially besides its title (!!) and the diabolical cover (!!!!) was the writeup on the back:   

“For Emily Follet, alone in the remote village of Skinburness, fear could take many forms.  It could be the college, formerly the castle of a renowned sorcerer, where no one seems to know what goes on.  It could be the mysterious black rider on his black horse.  Or the two recent unexplained drownings.  Or the green men.  Above all, the green men.”  And off I went to follow the train of green things, as I always do.  

Please note that Skinburness is a real place, and its name is honest-to-gosh thought to mean "the headland of the Demon haunted castle."  I’m glad it inspired Hill to pen this tale!  

Our narrator, Emily Follet, is a woman finding her own way for the first time perhaps ever.  She is determined to be independent.  She makes new friends during her vacation break, playing dominoes with the old village dudes at the local tavern, spending time alone with her lanky lolloping dog Cal on the beach, and at night she reads from a book on local folklore that she’s found on the bookshelves in her cottage.  

But strange things start happening at an accelerating pace, and it becomes difficult to know who to trust and who to avoid, who to keep at arm’s length and who to have dinner with, if only for politeness’s sake.  New disappearances occur, the windswept dunes hide secret excavations… and maybe a corpse or two?  And in the depths of the night, alone in her cottage, she hears strange voices on the phone line, and sees something unbelievable peering through the window into her bedroom at 3:00 in the morning. 

Of course, she can’t tell the polite Constable Parfrey the whole story about the face at the window.  He would think she was barmy.  “He seemed doubtful enough about its existence, as it was.  He probably suspected some kind of hysterical nightmare.  He would have hardly been reassured if she had told him the face was green.”  Events continue to ramp up, with mysterious nurses, midnight assaults, strange “archaeologists”, and then it goes completely off the rails in a fun little darkride.  

So if you like a diversion on the spooky side, with a decently-written female narrator, a gothic seaside setting, just the barest dusting of romance, and a dog named Cal instead of Scooby-Doo, you’ve got yourself a book recommendation here!  I hope someone brings it back into print soon. 

 

TONIGHT! Event: JAWS documentary at SPACE Gallery!

 

WHAT: Film screening of The Farmer & the Shark

WHEN:  TONIGHT!!!

Weds Sept 10 @7:00pm (doors open 6:30)

90 min runtime, followed by Q&A

WHERE:  SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St, Portland ME

TICKETS:  

https://space538.org/event/the-farmer-and-the-shark/

It's the 50th anniversary of Jaws this year!!!  

 

Join us TONIGHT at SPACE for the Maine premiere of "The Farmer & the Shark" - a documentary about the making of Jaws through the lens of Craig Kingsbury, the Martha's Vineyard farmer and fisherman who inspired the film character of the one and only QUINT!!! 

 

Director John Campopiano joins us for a Q&A after the film, as we celebrate the tail end of summer in a very New England way. 

Poet vs. Jabberwock - FIGHT!

Mystery Club #3

Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock (1950) 

vs. Michael Connelly’s The Poet (1996)

Reading Michael Connelly’s The Poet resurrected my experience of reading Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, even though they are very different books.  So of course I had to dig out my old copy of it, and re-read it – even before I finished with The Poet.

I’ll start with The Poet because I really want to talk about Jabberwock – I like both books, but Jabberwock remains a favorite.  You’ll see.

Michael Connelly’s The Poet:

Last year, after years of hearing about him from others, I decided it was finally time for me to try a Michael Connelly novel.  I started reading The Poet, and was feeling pretty lukewarm about it – but as soon as the literary element made itself known in the storyline, I was hooked. 

The Poet is one of three novels Connelly has written featuring the main character Jack McEvoy, an investigative reporter.  In discussing McEvoy, Connelly has mentioned that his character is somewhat autobiographical, but “what is autobiographical is his view of the business” – when Connelly is writing the character, he writes what he himself would do in each given situation, drawing from his own experience as a crime beat reporter throughout the 1980s.  (see interview with Paul Davis here: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/michael-connelly-on-fair-warning-and-his-crime-rep/)

The Poet definitely feels personal, so I was pleased to find that verification in his own words.  I say personal, but really it feels like it’s unpretentious, more specifically.  McEvoy’s inner dialogue is raw and straightforward.  It gives you the impression that you are hearing his thoughts as fast as he is – there’s no filter, no buffer to slow them down and sift them out.  This also means there are moments in the story where McEvoy is just as in-the-dark as you, the reader (perhaps even more so).

McEvoy’s twin brother, a police officer, died shortly before the story starts -- a purported suicide.  But something about the case bothers McEvoy, and when he latches onto some strange clues while digging into other similar cases, ostensibly in the process of researching police suicides as a whole, he knows he’s laid hold of a case much bigger, and more dangerous, than anything he could have imagined.  At the end of Chapter Two, he lays treacherous groundwork for the story to come, telling us, “I thought I knew something about death then.  I thought I knew about evil.  But I didn’t know anything.”

Two sentences form the lynchpin of this story, written inside the fogged windshield of the brother’s car: “Out of time.  Out of space.”  A cryptic legacy of which no one knows what to make.

And from those two short sentences spin the rest of this tale, feathering pinions of tiny case details, cop by cop, that stand out on reinspection, that have bothered the investigating officers, sometimes for years after their fellow officers’ deaths.

Needless to say, things accelerate quickly.  McEvoy finds himself first working against, then with, then against, then with a special FBI unit, and the creep of a killer piles horror upon horror as he hears the baying of the hounds getting closer.  The elegant sentences stolen from an age-old poet to grace each incident cannot conceal the sordid dealings which lie at the root of this spreading evil.  The only solution is a brutal cauterization of the elusive source.  I won’t spoil the story for you, in case you have yet to read it yourself.

Fredric Brown’s The Night of the Jabberwock:

Several years ago, while I was attending ReaderCon in Burlington, MA, my friend and fellow bookdealer Bob Eldridge gave me a copy of Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock.  I had never read Brown before, although I was familiar with him by reputation from his wild and absurd scifi work such as Martians, Go Home (1955).  Brown was also an early originator of flash fiction (the two opening sentences of “Knock” 1948, which form a complete story themselves, and “Answer” 1954).  But I hadn’t realized he also wrote mysteries.  That evening, sitting in my hotel room, I began reading Night of the Jabberwock, and didn’t get to sleep until very late that night.

Where The Poet embeds a few choice lines in each of its cases, waiting to be found by McEvoy’s stubborn tenacity, Night of the Jabberwock opens each chapter with an epigraph drawn from Lewis Carroll’s poem "Jabberwocky."  And like Connelly, Brown uses his experience as a newspaper proof-reader and reporter to build the backbone of this winding story.

The passage beginning with “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves,…” sets us out on our adventure, not quite knowing what we are up against, and feeling as ill-prepared as the forewarned son of Carroll’s rhymes.

Our guide and narrator is hardly better-off than we are.  Doc Stoeger, regularly haphazard newspaperman, publisher of the weekly Carmel City Clarion, and Lewis Carroll afficionado, wakes from a dream of the Jabberwock coming for him on the dark streets of his small town, only to find he’s fallen asleep at work waiting for the next-to-final proof of his latest issue, due to come out on Friday morning.  A few small tweaks to the type for the edition accomplished, he heads for Smiley’s across the street, looking forward to a drink to end the long day.

Smiley tells him, “Glad you got here early, Doc.  It's damn dull this evening.” 

Doc commiserates with him.  “It’s dull every evening in Carmel City, and most of the time I like it.  But Lord, if only something would happen just once on a Thursday evening, I’d love it.  Just once in my long career, I’d like to have one hot story to break to a panting public.”

Clearly, we readers know things are about to change.  Instead of the usual Thursday night drill, Doc is about to find himself in the middle of what seems like a dozen different nightmare collusions, none of which he could have anticipated in a million years.  This Thursday, he’s going to wish the evening’s brouhaha started and ended with having to figure out what to put in the paper now that the Tuesday rummage sale has been canceled at the last minute.

The evening starts off normally enough.  Rummage sale kerfuffles (you thought I was kidding?), some booze, a chess game, rampant Carroll-quoting challenges, etc.  A weaving walk home through the dark.  A dite[1] more booze.  Then Doc learns of the existence of the Roman Candle Department at the local fireworks factory (introducing him to a new lifegoal).  Still, all fairly normal Thursday night events.

Next one Yehudi Smith arrives on Doc’s doorstep, a peculiar chap hailing from a Lewis Carroll-loving club, with a strange invitation for Doc to attend a secret meeting.  More booze!  More Carroll quoting!  But these veer into some wonderful deepdives, introducing the lighter Carroll reader to such passages as:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And each damp thing that creeps and crawls

Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

-- from “The Palace of Humbug”

Smith also brandishes a clipping from a nearby newspaper at Doc, titled “Man Slain by Unknown Beast,” and broaches the topic of risks associated with joining ranks with the Carroll-loving club.  Attack by a real Jabberwock?!

And thus the night begins to turn its tail and reveal a sinister side.

Before dawn breaks, Doc will have lived a lifetime’s worth of insane and terrifying events, all by pure happenstance.  All echoing back and forth from Carroll’s rhymes.  All insensible, as most human things are.

It’s not in the book, but surely at some point Doc quoted Alice in Wonderland to himself: “Dear, dear!  How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”

In closing:

Both Brown and Connelly are aces at writing a tale that lures you in quietly, then gets its hooks in you with all sorts of intriguing details, and then thrashes you mercilessly (but with great interest in your entertainment as a reader).  Almost a half-century apart, but both highly skilled, and both well worth a read.

Early dustjacket art for Jabberwock!

 [1] A “dite” is a Maine measurement, somewhere between a smidge and a bit.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dite