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I Married a Dead Man (The Best Mysteries of All Time)

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Cornell Woolrich was the father of film noir and this book certainly reads like it. Think Barbara Stanwyck, who starred in the movie version. One of Woolrich's other stories eventually became REAR WINDOW.
The pacing in the novel is remarkable. At first it almost stops as the girl stands in front of a door and later listens to the dial tone as she tries to reach her lover who has left her pregnant and alone. But then it picks up as the girl heads west on a train, meets a newlywed and her new husband who show her compassion. The train crashes and somehow the two switch places and the girl is summoned back east where she becomes Patrice, the rich girl.
I was also impressed by Woolrich's pronoun usage. He refers to the girl as "she", although she does have a name, Helen. He begins several sentences in a row with the word "she", doesn't worry about varying his paragraph beginnings. Yet, this doesn't bother the reader a bit. Later on when she switches places with the rich girl, she becomes Patrice, so I imagine Woolrich is saying something about social class.
The setting, The Great Depression, adds a lot to the story. When she dials her lover, the girl asks the operator for her nickel back because it's the only money she has. Her former lover does leave her five dollars, along with railroad tickets, but when she boards the train, she's left with only seventeen cents, which she keeps throughout the novel.
I was bothered by the beginning which, in effect, told us how the novel would end. I imagine this was supposed to add suspense, but all it did for me was tell me Patrice and Bill would eventually hook up. Also, that despicable heal Georgesson giving Helen five dollars didn't quite ring true, and I was wondering why he would travel thousands of miles to identify Helen's body when he obviously couldn't care less what happened to her. I can only surmise that Woolrich needed Georgesson to give her the railroad tickets as a plot device (which should be hidden).
The ending will also rattle some cages as the reader must furnish her own. You'll read it over several times, I can guarantee you.

Cornell Woolrich, along with Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was a key innovator in the development of the noir genre of crime fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. I Married a Dead Man is considered a classic of this uniquely American genre.

I am fairly new to Cornell Woolrich as I have only previously read one of his novels, the suspenseful The Bride Wore Black. Woolrich wrote a large number of suspense novels, apparently of uneven quality. His best stories are very good and include The Phantom Lady, I Married A Dead Man, and his 'Black' series (so-named from their titles).

The plot for I Married a Dead Man twists and turns in an unpredictable manner. The layered, complex ending is quite good. I was completely unfamiliar with the plot and was continually surprised. If you are new to this book, avoid reading the summary on the dust jacket or elsewhere. Ignorance may not be bliss, but too much knowledge may spoil some of the surprise.

But it won't hurt to think about the seemingly incongruous title. In my limited experience Cornell Woolrich selects his titles carefully. In retrospect, a simple title may suddenly have multiple meanings.

I Married a Dead Man may be best compared to an Alfred Hitchcock movie. And, as matter of interest, Woolrich was the author of Rear Window.

Last week, I was in-between books, not knowing what to read, and went browsing through my bookshelf. I found a paperback I had bought some 20 years ago, never having read it. It was Woolrich's "The Black Curtain." I was awe-struck. Not only with the plot, but his prose just jumped out at me. After years of Grishoms, Pattersons, Kings, Balduccis,and others, I realized that THIS was what a true genius writes! He uses words that you swear should never belong in some sentences, yet work. Of course, I then went to the library and read "I Married A Dead Man", which was even better. It was like reading a VERY suspenseful film noir script...only better. There is a quote on the cover of this book by Ray Bradbury that reads, "...Woolrich deserves to be discovered and rediscovered by each generation." How true. If you've never read Woolrich's work, you owe it to yourself. And if you have, then you know what I write here is accurate.

After seeing the movie, Mrs. Winterbourne, and realizing it had first been a book I was curious to read the book. I prefer the lightness of the movie since life itself is at times dark and difficult. However, the book has held my iterest and you can't help but hope for a happy ending. But isn't that how we live our lives through the darkest times - hoping for a better ending?

"I Married a Dead Man" was recently made into the movie "Mrs. Winterbourne", starring Ricki Lake. How they made a light romantic comedy out of such a grim and despairing novel is beyond me. It's author, Cornell Woolrich, specialized in dark, brooding stories of urban alienation and paranoia. He wrote his best work in the 1940's, producing a whole series of novels containing the word "black" in their titles, and in the process penned some of the most depressing prose in the English language. Woolrich protaganists are typically driven by forces beyond their control towards hopeless fates. They are consumed with revenge, stranded in nightmare situations, denied normal human happiness by a cruel world. Many of his best stories have been made into classic movies: "Rear Window", "The Leopard Man", "The Bride Wore Black", "The Phantom Lady." Unfortunately, most of his novels are out of print. "I Married a Dead Man" is an exception. It isn't one of his best novels ("The Night has a Thousand Eyes" captures that honor), but remains a prime example of Woolrich's shadowy brand of suspense writing. The heroine is a destitute young woman, left abandoned and pregnant by her lover. After a train wreck, a series of unbelievable coincidences (which figure prominently in the illogical world Woolrich depicts) result in her being mistaken as the bride of a man who died, along with his real wife, in the accident. She is accepted into the loving household of the dead man's family, offering her a chance at happiness for the first time in her life. But happiness doesn't last long for the characters in a Woolrich story; soon she is recieving anonymous letters accusing her of being the fraud that she is. What before appeared to be paradise now threatens to crash down on her head, a feeling reinforced by the suspicions of the dead groom's brother. No author could build an atmosphere of dread and dark paranoia quite as skillfully as Woolrich could, and as the novel proceeds to its grim conclusion, the reader will find themselves ensared by a feeling of cold apprehension. This was Woolrich's talent as a writer, and if you like your books to be uplifting and inspirational, "I Married a Dead Man" is definitely not for you. However, if you're looking for something a little darker, I would enthusiastically recommend that you read this book. Sad to say, I wouldn't suggest that you see "Mrs. Winterbourne."

The first version of I Married a Dead Man appeared as a novella in the April 1946 issue of Today's Woman. By 1948, when the book was published under the pseudonym William Irish, Cornell Woolrich had expanded his novella and completely rewritten its ending, resulting in a fine American Noir novel that has been filmed at least three times. The best known movie version of I Married a Dead Man is the 1950 film starring Barbara Stanwyck for which the title was changed to No Man of Her Own. The movie is an excellent representation of the film noir of the period although it was somewhat weakened by the studio's decision to use the original ending of the novella rather than the stronger, more compelling, ending of the novel itself.

Helen, a very young woman, finds herself seven months pregnant and abandoned by the father of her child. All that the father of her child has left her is a five dollar bill and train tickets from New York to the West Coast where she hopes to start a new life for herself and her baby. By the time that she is seen struggling to find a place for herself and her one suitcase on an overcrowded train, Helen is down to her last seventeen cents and is near despair. But fate has a surprise in store for Helen and the young couple who befriend her on the train, a surprise that offers Helen the chance to provide her child with the kind of life she never dreamed possible.

Does she have the nerve required to snatch that chance when she recognizes it? Is her love for her new baby so strong that she will do anything to ensure the child's future? By the time that Helen has to answer those questions for herself, she finds that circumstances completely beyond her control have made it possible for her to live a life she never dreamed possible if only she keeps her mouth shut. But of course, fate is not that kind, nor is life that simple. That's the rest of the story, a story that would have made Alfred Hitchcock smile, and one that I'm not going to spoil for you.

Cornell Woolrich deserves to be better known than he is today. He was a contemporary of Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Raymond Chandler, all of whom have remained largely in print for the last 60 or 70 years. But despite the fact that during the period between 1940 and 1948 alone, Woolrich produced six novels under his own name, four as William Irish and one using the name George Hopley, his work is not easily found today. Woolrich has been called "the Hitchcock of the written word" and, in fact, between 1938 and 1950 Hollywood producers turned some 15 of his stories into movies, the most famous of which is Hitchcock's own Rear Window, a film based on the 1942 Woolrich novella It Had to Be Murder.

So if you are a fan of Cain, Hammett and Chandler but have read all of their work, Cornell Woolrich is a name you need to remember. Finding his work will require some extra effort, but Woolrich is a worthy addition to anyone's American Noir collection.

I Married a Dead Man is a remarkable work of fiction. The plotting is less than air tight, but that's easy to forgive in view of the stellar success author Cornell Woolrich achieves in setting mood and creating suspense.

Helen is about 19 years old, so we are told. Pregnant and alone with exactly 17 cents to her name, her situation is dire to say the least. But Fate steps in and through a confluence of highly unlikely circumstances associated with a horrible train wreck, she is given the opportunity to assume the identity of another young woman. Now she and her newborn son can live a life filled with love, security, wealth and privilege.

But happiness obtained dishonestly comes at a terrible price. Inevitably, Helen, now known as Patrice, is forced to confront her past. As the reader stands by helplessly, Helen is pulled into a downward spiral of depravity from which there is no escape.

Except for the prologue and the epilogue, I Married a Dead Man is narrated in the third person. Yet it is told completely from Helen's perspective. The reader sees, hears and knows only what Helen sees, hears and knows. This has the effect of allowing the reader to experience the fear and terror Helen faces right along with her. Woolrich has written this novel in a style best described as haunting, almost surreal. Suspense permeates each chapter as we know that, ultimately, disaster is unavoidable. We just don't know how or when it will manifest itself.

Darkly moving, with a palpable aura of impending doom that is skillfully sustained from beginning to end, I Married a Dead Man is a great novel. Highly recommended.

The backhanded praise offered by the reader from Kentucky misses the mark. Questions of Woolrich's ability to hide "illogical" events by a "believable [writing] fashion" are not suitable points to be weighed by one considering reading this book. On the whole the work concerns itself with the mundane. The protagonist is described, at length, moving through hackneyed chores that wouldn't interest her own mother for more than a page or two. But that all falls to the background of the larger picture the work creates. The woman's life, maybe "illogical"-turned-"believable," is nonetheless a portrait of inner torment. There is a languid paranoia that seeps through everything she does. She is ensconsed in a perfect situation for herself and her child, but she lives in perfect terror of that world crashing to pieces because of past conflicts that lurk unresolved. Woolrich, as always, manages to communicate this slow and intense inner death with subtle ease. This is a good book. It's not my favorite hard-boiled novel, but it's not a book deserving of such uncertain adjecives as believable, either. If you are a fan of the school then it is worth a look.

This is the last novel of Woolrich's main period, before he hit a creative dry spell that lasted until his miserable lonely death of a stroke in 1968. It is also one of his least forgiving: depression, despairing, a look into the hopeless webs of fate that seem to ensnare us. Life, the protagonist tells us is a game -- one we and her are destined to lose. The third person story that falls in-between the first person prologue and epilogue is one of Woolrich's most imaginative and dark, albeit not always logical (Woolrich's work is suffused with logic holes that defy you to explain them, but you probably won't even notice them because the prose and suspense is no all-consuming). It's been adapted to film three times, but none have successfully recreated the true existential dread Woolrich's prose creates. (Riki Lake and existential dread . . . I don't think that works)

Very little of Woolrich is in print, and you really owe it to yourself to read one of the great works by the greatest suspense author of all time.

'I Married a Dead Man' is classic American noir fiction. Deceit, death and mystery are all packaged in a tight novel. Cornell Woolrich's expert use of descriptive language transports the reader back to the 1940s, in a setting where the unwashed mingle with the genteel rich. We have our heroine, a forelorn young mother, living a double life with a kind, wealthy couple who believe she is the wife of their deceased son (...yes, a fantastic set of circumstances justify this case of mistaken identity). As this false relationship turns more real (ie, a real bonding forms) our heroine becomes a victim of blackmail. The ending? Not what you will expect.


Bottom line: yes, the story is contrived but delicious reading nonetheless. Recommended.