Customer Reviews

The Black Curtain

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Gosh, what more do people want? This is only one of the most brilliant suspense novels ever created, and in some ways a more coherent piece of work than its celebrated predecessor THE BRIDE WORE BLACK. And yet the other reviews here would have you think it was merely so-so.

THE BLACK CURTAIN is nicely excerpted in Jonathan Lethem's anthology THE VINTAGE BOOK OF AMNESIA, and it's one of the very best amnesia stories going. Frank Townsend wakes up after years of being somebody else: three years that seem to have elapsed in minutes, but when he goes home his wife screams with relief and bewilderment. Who has he been all these years, and even more importantly, who is the intense man who is dogging his every footstep right now? Could it be, that in his other lost life, he did something bad, something his middle-class upbringing wouldn't countenance?

Could he really have committed a murder? Frank Townsend would never have done such a thing, but what does he really know about "Dan Nearing," the man who's been accused of a murder honest witnesses saw him commit! Woolrich writes beautifully abour spiritual defeat and about existential hope. "He sat there on the edge of the bed, a dejected, shadowy figure. And once, at some break in inner fortitude--like a split in a film running through a projection machine, quickly spliced together again and resuming its evenness in a moment--his head suddenly dropped into the coil of his arms.
"Then he raised it again, and that didn't happen any more." What that man can do with a word as small as "that"!

Frank's wife, Virginia, bears with him through some tough times, but it's Dan's girlfriend who wins our affections, Ruth, a putupon maid for a rich family; we see her totally, as in a Dreiser novel, a poor timid creature with a ferocious inner life and total dedication to her man.

Woolrich is a poet, and his novels organized along the lines of poetry rather than cinema (contra the metaphor of film splicing in the quote above), each one a lesson in phenomenonology, and THE BLACK CURTAIN adds to all of this a human story of the pathetic, as well as a corking good page turner of the best kind.

Cornell Woolrich certainly has some comparative "duds" in his long collection of mystery novels and stories. The Black Curtain can be considered a dud because of its contrived story, but as with all Woolrich stories it is still very readable ... in a B movie sort of way.

The Black Curtain is about a man with amnesia who, inexplicably, has forgotten about the previous three years of his life. He gradually pieces back what has transpired, which includes the shock that he is wanted for murder. In the end he strives to exonerate himself. ...no the story isn't believable, leaving many unanswered questions, but it is engaging.

Bottom line: a book probably best left to Woolrich completists only.

The story is not that great, but this a very moody, atmospheric Woolrich. Nice read.

lazza is right - this one is probably best left for Woolrich completists. I've read in other places that Woolrich was best at atmosphere, and not with logic as to plotting. This is surely true of Black Curtain. There are some really big holes left unanswered when you finish it, but nonetheless, it's a satisfying conclusion. It's a b-movie read - read it on a flight sometime, it's very short.