Customer Reviews

Fright (Hard Case Crime)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The year is 1915 -- not the most popular year in which to set a crime novel, to be sure -- but the year is really unimportant, except to make the events that occur in Fright even more shocking than they would have been in 1950, when it was first published under the pseudonym George Hopley.

Preston Marshall is a lucky man. He has a job on Wall Street and a lovely fiancee, but a single drunken night leads to an event that, one week later -- the week after the sinking of the Lusitania, in fact, though the two occurrences are not otherwise connected -- begins his downward spiral into a life where every minute is filled with ... wait for it! ... Fright.

Author Cornell Woolrich is probably best known for writing the novella that Alfred Hitchcock turned into his classic film, Rear Window. (His work has been the basis for numerous radio, TV, and film adaptations, one of the most recent being the Angelina Jolie-Antonio Banderas potboiler Original Sin, loosely based on Waltz into Darkness with all the noir trappings intact.)

All these works share some similarities, despite their different approaches, namely protagonists who respond to the events around them far more dramatically than those events really deserve -- at least at first. Marshall's reactions in Fright get him into a deeper quagmire than his original actions ever would have.

Woolrich uses this intense nature of Marshall's to keep the suspense level high. So high, in fact, that a couple of scenes -- if the tension were just one notch higher -- would work just as well played as comedy. But no one is laughing as the events in Fright get darker and darker still (shocking even this jaded reader; I can only imagine how they affected the 1950 audience), culminating in a tragic ending that twists all that came before (but you have to pay attention to details to pick up on its real significance).

This is a terrifically suspenseful dark crime novel from an author whose name is synonymous with noir among those who know the subgenre. Used copies of the "George Hopley" original (and, until now, only) edition of Fright can run upwards of fifty dollars, and it is great to see this Cornell Woolrich classic revived by Hard Case Crime for a much less upsetting price.

Noir fans everywhere should celebrate Hard Case Crime for its reprinting of several lost masterpieces. This book by Cornell Woolrich is, in my opinion, the best one yet. We should all buy as many Hard Case Crime books as possible so that they will keep getting these books back into print for us.

Okay. Now that I've got that little speech out of the way - onto the book. It's fantastic from the first page. Like most of Woolrich's books, you can feel the agony and despair jumping right off the page, building to an almost intolerable crescendo by the end. This is an amazing, tragic psychologocial portrait of a man gone wrong for reasons you can somehow understand. Woolrich for me is a masterful writer, even better than Jim Thompson, in the way he gets you deep into the psychology of a person who should be completely unsympathetic, and takes you right along while that character does some terrible things. Woolrich never loses his humanity when he does this.

In addition to a great, suspenseful plot that finally boils over, all of the characterizations here are fantastic. Woolrich was ahead of his time in writing complex, believable, interesting female characters and this book is no exception. He captures the particular suffering of men and women of a certain era so well in this book. There are never any truly happy characters in Woolrich's books (are there? I can't think of any) but you won't want it any other way. If you love noir, get this book!

"Fright," while not one of Cornell Woolrich's best-known novels, is definitely one worth reading. It provides an excellent demonstration of this noir writer's talent for creating an unbearable level of suspense. The hidden secrets and shameful agonies its characters endure make it almost painful to read at times. Woolrich was known as the "Hitchcock of the written word," and this book shows why.

While the novel was first published in 1950, it is set in 1915, a generation earlier, when Woolrich was only twelve years old. This setting during the Progressive Era is ideal. American society had entered a time of moral uplift, sandwiched between the excesses of the Gilded Era past and the Roaring Twenties yet to come. Victorian probity held sway. The whorehouses, no longer a genial rite of passage to be winked at, were being closed. Young men increasingly regarded their indulgences as a guilty secret--a shameful dalliance to be hidden from public knowledge.

Enter Press Marshall, a young man with ordinary desires who is engaged to be married to Marjorie Worth. Marjorie is a sweet young girl from a loving and wealthy Victorian family, naive and perhaps a bit spoiled, but devoted to Press. It is her devotion that will create the climate of agony throughout the novel, as the dark secrets from his past destroy her innocent hopes for wedded bliss.

For there is another woman. A woman of much less innocence and wealth, a coiled viper of a woman who encountered Press at a moment of weakness and has been blackmailing him ever since. When Press takes steps to end her blackmail for good, the horrifying results leave him trapped in a web of unendurable guilt and anxiety. His flailing attempts to escape only pull him in deeper and deeper and deeper still...creating a living hell for both Press and Marjorie. The end result is horrifying, as unsparing as any tragic ending in classic literature.

The book ends with an aftermath that unveils an even more shocking twist. The sophisticated reader may anticipate the suprise, but it still packs a punch. The best thing about this novel is Woolrich's unsentimental approach to the senselessness of it all. For such is the essence of noir.

Noir is a term most often associated with films, but it may also be appropriately applied to books. Among the classic mystery writers, there are few who are more noirish than Cornell Woolrich. With his tales of men and women caught up in the quirks of fate, where every turn to break free from doom leads just further down that path, Woolrich's writing epitomizes what noir is all about.

In Fright, the hapless character is Prescott Marshall, who, at least in the beginning of the novel, has everything going his way. He has a decent job with good prospects and is about to marry a beautiful woman who he not only loves but also belongs to a wealthy family. Left on his own for a night, he gets completely drunk and has a one-night stand with a woman who he promptly forgets as soon as he sobers up. Unfortunately, Lorna hasn't forgotten him, and she starts blackmailing him, with the threat of endangering his upcoming marriage.

Prescott thinks he has bought her off, but on his wedding day, she arrives to extort a bit more money. Prescott snaps, beats her to death and stashes her body in his closet as he goes off to his wedding. From the ceremony, he goes directly to his honeymoon and when an opportunity presents itself, he takes new wife Marjorie to another town, never returning to dispose of the body.

Guilt gnaws at him, hanging over everything that happens in his life, and it gets nothing but worse when a stranger appears at his office. Is this man a cop out to find proof that Prescott is a murderer? Certainly, to the increasingly paranoid protagonist, there can be no other explanation.

As in the best noir stories, even when the main character is a killer, it is still possible to find him sympathetic, and Prescott is definitely in that category. Fright is an example of what made Woolrich one of the all-time great mystery writers; even if it is not perfect, it is still pretty good. It may be a little pulpy, and the concluding twist, while nice is a little predictable (then again, it may have been less so back when it was first published in 1950). Little flaws aside, this is still a small gem that is worth reading.

Fright is a terrific book. Cornell Woorich managed to combine a thriller with sheer pyschological horror. It is one of the most twisted and downright disturbing things I've ever read and had got to be the most tragic thing Hard Case Crime has published yet.

Press Marshall is a lucky boy. He's handsome, smart, got a good job that is only going to get better and he's going to marry the beautiful, elegant and rich Marjorie. And then he messes up and everything goes horribly, irrevocably wrong. By the time the book is over Press has snuffed out lives, destroyed his mental health, turned Marjorie's adoration into disgust and fear and transforms himself into a monster.

Watching Press and Marjorie descend into hell is like a fast paced roller coater. I did not put this book down once I got into it and the ending is like a smack upside the head. I'm going in search of more Cornell Woolrich books.

Cornell Woolrich is perhaps best known for his novel REAR WINDOW, famously adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock. But he created an amazing and enviable body of work that ultimately earned him the title "The Father of Noir Fiction." Indeed, he is often ranked with Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

FRIGHT is not one of Woolrich's better known works; published under the pen name "George Hopley," it has been out of print for over five decades. Many of the incidents that occur in this book appear to be written less as chapters and more as vignettes that seem to cut away unexpectedly, revealing what is to occur only later, if at all. It's difficult to tell if Woolrich was utilizing a stylistic tool or simply engaging in whimsy. Yet, taken as a whole, this is as stunning and as suspenseful a work as you might ever read.

Written in 1950, FRIGHT is set in 1915. The social mores, inventions and language that had evolved and devolved between the beginning and the middle of the 20th century seem even more remote and out of place in our current era. Constants remain, however, as is demonstrated when we meet Preston Marshall, a young man who is working for a brokerage firm but who seeks higher status. When he meets and becomes engaged to a young woman named Marjorie Worth, the attainment of his quest seems assured. Marshall, we are informed by our omnipresent narrator, loves Worth, yet there is almost immediately an issue raised as to her motivation. Still, he courts her and proposes, and she accepts.

During one unfortunate evening, however, Marshall goes out for a night of drinking and some weeks later is confronted by a young woman who begins to blackmail him. What starts as one payment becomes several, culminating in a demand made on the day of Marshall and Worth's wedding. Marshall strangles his tormentor, but his problems are just beginning. Unable to tell his new wife what he has done, he fears discovery of his act and accepts employment far from New York.

Yet Marshall feels that every glance is accusatory, every inquiry into his business an investigation. Certain that he is being pursued by the authorities, Marshall reacts badly to each and every occurrence, with the result that his sins are heinously multiplied, and his life --- with a woman who loves him far more than he deserves --- collapses under the weight of them.

Woolrich does an amazing job of transforming Marshall's anxiety and guilt into print, to the extent that Marshall's tension almost unbearably becomes the reader's own. The tragedies that slowly unfold as the result of one bad act portend what is almost certain to be an ominous ending. FRIGHT may well be Hard Case Crime's darkest release to date. It is almost inconceivable that this twisted morality tale has remained out of print for so long.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

The postscript of the story sort of blew my mind. I won't say what it is. . . Woolrich's language is not full of cliche's. If anything he invented the situations that later on become cliches for the genre. He truly engages the reader. In a lesser writer it would just be a throwaway pot boiler with every cliche in the book and page upon page of moralizing. But here you get the fullness of master at work. You get sucked into the world of fear and paranoia experienced by Prescott Marshall and his willingness to do anything to protect himself. Woolrich bends your mind so much that you end up rooting for him to somehow overcome his situation. How is it that writer can do this, you ask? I wish I knew. (I experienced the same thing reading Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series.) This twisted and perverted world Woolrich creates engenders pity and fear like some ancient Greek tragedy. And even if some of the the characters are not fully three dimensional, it doesn't in any way prevent the enjoyment you'll experience reading this book.

I just finished reading this book and I am left in shock and in awe. This book is not about someone murdering someone else and finding out how it gets solved. No, this book is about the decent into the abyss of darkness that happens to Prescott Marshall, the primary character in this book. Cornell Woolrich really digs into his characters emotions. You experience the unravelling of a person first hand through his acts and emotions.
The only words I can find to tell you how I feel about this book is MIND BLOWING! If you like your suspense, you will love this book. If you like to experience the thrill of not knowing what to expect when you turn the next page or read the next chapter, READ THIS BOOK!

A drunken one-night stand degenerates into blackmail, murder, and life on the lam.

This is very much a psychological thriller, and has some neat paranoia in it. I like paranoia, so that's a plus. However, this balances out a painfully predictable plot (I called every "twist" as it happened) that by "intelligent" standards has A FEW too many holes and gaps in plausibility in it for my tastes. Then again, it's possible (indeed probable) the author anticipated this and chose his time-setting deliberately as an attempt to dodge the problems.

Although this was written in the '50s, by necessity it takes place in 1915. I say "by necessity" because the story simply wouldn't work a few years later with the advent of fingerprinting (or any semi-advanced forensics) let alone trackable things like SSNs. Still, there's some "quaint" period-piece descriptions thrown in, like silent movies and horse-drawn taxis.

Fans of noir fiction will probably like this book more than I did (my 4-star rating is actually quite generous, I think) but I can't see this having a wide appeal. Then again, it's not trying to.

Cornell Woolrich was a master of suspense. There are no truer words in the English language than those that make up that very simple sentence. Yet, somehow, they do not fully convey Woolrich's unparalleled ability to use suspense and her unwelcome companion, dread, to impact readers at a very visceral level.

Imagine a cowboy in a Wild West show doing rope tricks. That's how Cornell Woolrich handles suspense. He doesn't just present it to his audience, he makes it stand up and perform like a living thing. And just when you think the suspense cannot possibly rise beyond the fever pitch its already at it invariably does.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Fright, a novel set in 1915. A year from Woolrich's childhood but one he recreates with an astonishing attention to detail. (Slang, music, fashion, the distant echoes of the war being waged in Europe, etc.) Fright is very much a period piece albeit one that is timeless in its treatment of guilt and paranoia. Two emotional states the author had more than a passing familiarity with.

Recommended to those who like their fiction saturated with suspense. But be forewarned: Woolrich's talent in this arena is so acute he can and does manipulate the reader as easily as he manipulates his fictional characters. Some may find the emotional intensity hard to bear.