Customer Reviews

Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich (Otto Penzler Book)

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

 

 

(First, a correction. There are fourteen stories in this collection, not twenty.)

Cornell Woolrich was America's best suspense author, spinning out for the pulps a string of dark noir tales that pulse with fear, dread, and paranoia. He can put the fear of death into you so that your hands shake as you read the page. But he can also move you to tears with his deep sense of human tragedy and emotional devastation. There never was anyone like him, and if you've never read him -- you have no idea what genius you are missing.

This volume contains a number of gems never before published in book form, so for Woolrich fans, this is a must buy. New readers may wish to begin with the collection "Rear Window," but will still get a great Woolrich experience with this collection.

Here are the contents:
1. Cigarette
2. Double Feature
3. The Heavy Sugar
4. Blue is for Bravery
5. You Bet Your Life
6. Death in the Yoshiwara
7. Endicott's Girl
8. Detective William Brown
9. The Case of the Killer-Diller
10. Through a Dead Man's Eye
11. The Fatal Footlights
12. Three Kills for One
13. The Death Rose
14. New York Blues

All the stories are great (the editor is a Woolrich expert and knows what works), but here are some of the stand-outs. "Endicott's Girl," which Woolrich once listed as his personal favorite story, is an emotional wringer about a cop who begins to suspect that his beloved teenage daughter is a murderer. Obsessed cops also populate "Three Kills for One" and "Detective William Brown." The first story is bizarre, disturbing, and edging on the psychotic -- I'm so glad this collection is making it easily available again. "Cigarette" will have you on the edge of your reading chair as a poison cigarette is passed from person to person -- who will finally take the fatal puff? "Double Feature" and "Death in the Yoshiwara" are action packed suspensers.

But the best tale is the last one, "New York Blues." It might have been Woolrich's last story, and it's a fitting end. It's almost abstract, plotless, but filled with pain and fear and a sense of impending doom that is impossible to shake. You will never forget this story.

Editor Francis M. Nevins offers an informative introduction which will bring new readers into Woolrich's life and world (both very depressing places). He also offers epilogues to each story to help place them in Woolrich's canon, and shed light on his work.

NIGHT AND FEAR -- buy it. Get yout friends to buy it. Let's get more Woolrich in print. And watch for his best novel, "Rendezvous in Black," coming back into print in March!

Aaahhh, Cornell Woolrich! How could anyone not love this guy? He ranks right up there with James M. Cain, Dashell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler as one of the godfathers of pitch black noir. Unfortunately, Woolrich's voluminous short stories and his many novels for the most part remain out of print. No excuse exists to merit such blatant disrespect. Happily, Woolrich biographer and all around noir fan Frances M. Nevins agrees, and that is why he assembled fourteen of the man's gems in "Night & Fear." You won't find any Woolrich novellas, like "Rendezvous in Black" or "I Married a Dead Man" here, but you will discover stories that crackle with despondency, murder, crooked cops, and suspense drawn out to knuckle cracking heights. The book also contains one of the most enthusiastic, insightful introductions I have ever seen in a fiction collection, an introduction from Nevins that puts Woolrich's life into crystal clear focus from his earliest, schmaltzy novels to his later forays into the depths of the bleakest noir and pulp fiction. If this foreword is any indication, Cornell Woolrich lived his life veering from one dank depression to another. He worshipped his mother, drank incessantly, and kept his true sexuality repressed. It was an overriding fear of his own mortality, however, that fueled his desolate visions. Sad to say, but Woolrich's miseries have given generations of fans of the genre something to sing about ever since.

The first story in the collection, the appropriately entitled "Cigarette," sets a tone that will continue to the final pages of the book. A dupe working for a crime boss must carry out a mission involving a poisoned cigarette. Predictably, the hapless hero of the story botches the job, requiring him to race around the city in a mad dash to find the tainted smoke before his malevolent boss discovers the mistake. I knew how the story would end a few pages in, but that's beside the point. What's important is seeing how Woolrich will get us there. Following closely on the heels of "Cigarette" is "The Heavy Sugar," a frightening account of an out of work transient who finds a surprise in the sugar pot at a coffee house, and who must then figure out how to contact the cops before the men responsible close in for the kill. "Death in the Yoshiwara," set in Japan, follows the exploits of a sailor turned detective as he attempts to help an American woman beat a murder rap. "The Case of the Killer-Diller," "Through a Dead Man's Eye," and "New York Blues" all deal to some extent with the most heinous of crimes and how "murder will out" every time. "Through a Dead Man's Eye" is the best story in the book as we follow the son of a cop pursuing a murderer. "New York Blues," according to the date of publication, may well be Woolrich's final story. It's a whirlwind of sight and sound as a man awaits the authorities in a secluded hotel room.

The book contains several tales labeled "Noir Cop." According to Nevins, Woolrich's police stories embody several central themes, namely that the police hold godlike powers over the rest of us. They protect each other when a fellow officer commits heinous crimes, and they never shy away from torturing a suspect or committing murder. "Blue is for Bravery" deals with a cop cracking heads after a crime lord kidnaps his family. "Endicott's Girl" is the shattering experience of a police captain who thinks his daughter committed murder, and the lengths his compatriots will go to protect their boss. In "Detective William Brown," we follow the careers of two cops, one honest and one corrupt, as a series of suspicious solutions to high profile crimes leads to an explosive revelation-and a despicable cover-up. The beginning of "Three Kills for One" takes your breath away as we follow the final moments of a man about to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit. As the story progresses, and horrible truths emerge far too late to save the innocent, a cop pursues the real criminal with a single-minded vengeance.

With the exception of a few stories, all of Woolrich's efforts in the book attain a high level of suspense guaranteed to thrill. Who can read about the boy battling the killer in an abandoned house in "Through a Dead Man's Eye" and not get a rush? The tension filled tales in this book exploded onto my consciousness with the force of a howitzer. Simultaneously, the very suspense of the stories may constitute a central weakness in the author's writings. Too many times, Woolrich turns every element of the short story into a conduit for raising suspense. Character development consequently suffers as a result. Too, the author often comes up with a central idea so brilliant, so full of potential, that the conclusion invariably acts as a let down. "Endicott's Girl," for instance, ends on a decidedly disappointing note for such a promising thesis. I can't complain too much, though. "Night & Fear" is a collection of classic noir and pulp fiction that fires on nearly every level.

"I was only trying to cheat death," Woolrich once wrote, "I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone." Fortunate for us that the author chose pen and paper to keep his demons at bay, isn't it? If you haven't given Cornell Woolrich a whirl, you cannot possibly know what you are missing. Hopefully, "Night & Fear" will come out in paperback soon. With any luck, more Woolrich novels and anthologies will find their way back into print in the future.

When I was a boy I loved Cornell Woolrich and I'm old enough to remember Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine publishing "For the Rest of her Life" and "New York Blues." I was shocked when he died, straight off the twin triumphs of "The Dark Side of Love" and "Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich." Now as I read the stories Mr. Nevins has collected for "Night and Fear," I'm a little puzzled as to why I loved him so much as a youngster, but out of respect to my memories I give this book five stars. I think frankly the collections CW published while he was alive have a bit more authenticity, even if the biography explains how different editors and publishers chose the arrangement of those books even more than did Woolrich himself. And then again Nevins really wants to sell the "Noir" angle on Woolrich, and thus downplaying the gay pastoral fabulist of something like "Stranglers Serenade" or "The Black Path of Fear." Indeed no one but a gay man could have written the famous "Black Curtain," nor the fragment of a novel that Lawrence Block later completed, "Into the Night." However that's just my two cents and reflects probably my own dark vision as much as anything of Woolrich's.

"Night and Fear" collects a whole bunch of pulp fiction that truly has some serious ups and downs, but when Woolrich is hot (as in "Cigarette" or the aforementioned "New York Blues", he is smoking! Good work to all concerned. I hope there are further collections, for the barrel has been bottomed out yet.

When the "hard-boiled" mystery authors from the early 1900s are listed, usually the names that stand out are Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Although not as well known, Cornell Woolrich belongs in the same group as the other pair. His stories that were adapted into movies are often the best known: good adaptations like Rear Window and The Leopard Man (based on Black Alibi) and bad ones like Mrs. Winterbourne (based on I Married a Dead Man) and Original Sin (based on Waltz into Darkness).

One big reason that Woolrich is less well-known is his lack of immortal characters: there is no Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade or Nick and Nora Charles in his books; instead, each story stands apart with its own unique characters. As noted in the introduction to Night and Fear, the lack of series characters adds a level of uncertainty; you're never certain whether you'll get an upbeat or downbeat ending. And in this collection of short stories, you do get both.

Like Woolrich's novels, his short stories have a definite noirish quality. With the novels, this means antiheroes who seem to move slowly and inevitably towards doom; although there is action, the emphasis seems to be on the characters and their self-destruction. For these short stories, the noir elements are the dark urban environments and the violence and corruption that comes with them. Night and Fear is an appropriate title; it seems like most of these tales take place long after dusk, in a realm inhabited not by ghosts but more tangible evils.

As a writer, Woolrich is a better novelist than a short story writer. There is little wrong with these stories, but they are merely pure suspense, and the characters are not all deep. There are a few, however, that stand out, such as the workhorse cop constantly outshined by his boyhood friend or the detective who devises an elaborate form of revenge for a cop-killer who successfully had another executed for his crime. But most stories are exercises in tension: a guy and his girlfriend are at the movies when he notices the man next to her is a wanted killer; a young child is intent on finding a killer to help his detective father keep his job; and others.

So, although I'm giving this book only four stars, it is still a very good book; it's just compared to Woolrich's five-star novels, this collection isn't as good. Nonetheless, for those who enjoy old-style, hard-boiled mysteries, this is a must-read.

Published in 2004 to commemorate the centenary of Cornell Woolrich's birth, `Night and Fear" contains 14 short stories that had not, until now, been included in any anthology of his work. In the Introduction editor Francis M. Nevins says of Woolrich, `He was the Poe of the twentieth century and the poet of its shadows.'

And that, in my opinion, pretty much nails it. Although, of course, there are differences. Poe's tales always seem to take place in drafty mansions dimly lit by guttering candles, his characters slowly going mad by morbid introspection. Woolrich's characters, on the other hand, are out in and a part of the larger world. Creeping madness is not what threatens them. Rather it's freakish, capricious Chance that will put a valuable string of diamonds in a sugar bowl at a table in a greasy spoon diner. At your table. It's the malevolent Chance that sends the death dealing thug, who had been frantically looking for that hot ice before you chanced upon it, out to your side in the shadows of that diner. To paraphrase Mr. Nevins again, the typical Woolrich hero cannot move forward, or backward, or even stand still.

According to a web site that usually gets such things right, Woolrich's stories have been made into movies sixty-six times, probably most successfully with Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 Rear Window. He has often been called, along with Raymond Chandler, the `father of noir.' There's a breathless, fast-paced quality to many, most, of the stories in this collection that make them seem natural for a cinematic treatment. As a rule the setting is urban, the characters are flawed and danger is imminent. In other words, a typical noir setting.

Most of the stories are taken from pulp magazines and, as far as I can tell, probably won't hold up to great critical scrutiny. You can only stretch credibility so far until it snaps, and Woolrich doesn't seem to know or much care about its breaking point. That flaw, if it is a flaw, didn't bother me much. I enjoyed these stories immensely.

It's easy to see why Woolrich is considered a pioneer--as in first, or nearly so--of the noir mystery genre. His prose is terse, clean, with few if any throwaway or mere transition sentences or paragraphs. Nor does he employ much dialogue, preferring mainly description to tell his stories; dialogue generally gives the reader respite from deduction.

In which sense this book of short stories is not for everyone, because it requires an attentive reader, one willing to enter the detailed flow of the writer's simple but elegant prose. On top of which, Woolrich is what I call a sensory writer (in the Jungian sense of psychological types). His descriptions present sounds, smells, light and dark and colors ... Not that he can't sum up a state of mind with a memorable turn of phrase. He certainly can. But this too requires attention: you never know when one of his descriptive gems will come.

This book was my introduction to Woolrich, and I look forward to seeing what he can do at novelistic length. I Think, Therefore Who Am I?

The legendary Cornell Woolrich was an exceedingly lonely individual whose life was dominated by intense feelings of guilt, anxiety and fear. These are the self same emotions he was able to successfully transfer to the written page as he skillfully composed stories calculated to manipulate readers at a very visceral level. His stories unfold with a relentless build up of suspense and dread even as the plotting often defies plausibility and common sense.

Woolrich biographer Francis Nevin did a great job in selecting the 14 short stories that are reprinted in this very appealing book. Each one unfolds smoothly and each one demonstrates the author's remarkable ability to tantalize readers with a writing style that can only be described as spellbinding.

Night and Fear is a wonderful collection of short stories guaranteed to hold your interest. For best effect, read it at night preferably when you are alone. And don't skip the introduction, it's a good one.