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Rendezvous in Black

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At last! "Rendezvous in Black," the greatest suspense novel from the greatest suspense writer of all time, Cornell Woolrich, is back in print in a handsome trade paperback edition. Do not pass up this chance to encounter one of the most startling, emotionally rattling, and beautifully written pieces of noir in American literature. "Rendezvous in Black" is nothing short of a masterpiece: strange, horrifying, sometimes illogical, stark, achingly poetic, and ultimately devastating.

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) was the father of noir. Originally an author of `disaffected youth' novels in the jazz era, Woolrich turned to suspense and mystery stories for the pulp magazines in the mid-thirties. In 1940 he wrote the novel "The Bride Wore Black," kicking off a hugely creative period in which he wrote eleven novels (sometimes under the pseudonyms William Irish or George Hopely) between 1940 and 1948, concluding with "I Married a Dead Man" (available in the compilation "Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30s and 40s" and also one of his best works). Woolrich then entered a long phase of writer's block, turning out a few more novels and stories before he died an alcoholic recluse. His work is deeply concerned with doom and fate, people trapped in an uncaring world, the slow loss of love, and the inevitability of death. Through it all flows his incredible sense of pacing -- he can wring you dry with "races against the clock" that make your chest pound like race car piston -- and his stunning word magic that can break your heart with just a sentence.

"Rendezvous in Black" is the second-to-last novel of his major period, and it seems to return to the plot of "The Bride Wore Black"...at least on the surface. In "The Bride Wore Black," a woman named Julie Kileen loses her husband to a bizarre accident on their wedding day. Julie then goes on a quest to track down the five men she believes are responsible for the accident, and kill them one by one after inserting herself into their lives. "Rendezvous in Black" reverses the sexes, and adds an extra twist. Johnny Marr, an anonymous, average young man, loses his fiancee a few days before their marriage in a weird, bolt-from-the-blue accident (the perfect Woolrich example of the random cruelty of the universe). Marr eventually snaps, and discovers the identities of the men he feels are responsible for the accident. He then seeks to slowly, meticulously track down each one, discover who the most important woman in the man's life is (daughter, wife, protege), and kill her, so that man will forever know the pain that he feels.

It's a grim, frightening premise. Woolrich repeats the episodic structure of "Bride": after the opening chapter introducing the main character and his quest, each chapter after that switches to the P.O.V. of the next person on Marr's `hit list.' But "Rendezvous" isn't just a rehash of "Bride." As Woolrich's biographer, Francis M. Nevins, pointed out, it is "Bride" as it should have been, written with greater emotional involvement and deeper horror and suspense. It seems as if Woolrich was trying to correct the flaws of the earlier novel.

Correct them he does: "Rendezvous in Black" opens with a long, stunning chapter, "Parting," that captures perfectly the horror of losing a loved one, and then contains one of best portraits I've ever read of a descent into insanity. It's one of Woolrich's best sustained pieces of emotional writing. Each chapter after that, Woolrich tortures us with the suspense as we meet the next target of Marr's horrid quest. Woolrich's use of suspense here is brilliant: as in Hitchcock, we know WHAT will happen, but never WHEN, HOW, or even WHO (which woman in the man's life is Marr's target?). Since we don't know what Marr looks like or what fake name he is using, we aren't even sure which man in the chapter is actually the killer! Meanwhile, the police start to string things together, and with each chapter, Woolrich screws down the suspense tighter and tighter. The second to last chapter is a massive race against death that will probably have you locked in a room reading with sweaty, shaking hands. Even though there are logic flaws in the story the size meteor craters (this is Woolrich's way of showing how universe's basic illogic and unfairness), you won't notice them. Woolrich holds you in an unbreakable spell.

Read this book. It is an American classic. You will never forget its power. And you'll encourage the publication of more Woolrich classics. Look forward to re-prints of "Black Alibi" and "Night Has a Thousand Eyes." When you discover Cornell Woolrich, you will never be the same again.

How could anyone not love Cornell Woolrich? He ranks right up there with James M. Cain, Dashiell 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, several Woolrich works have begun to reemerge to the delight of noir fans. For example, Woolrich biographer and all around noir aficionado Frances M. Nevins edited a collection of fourteen delightfully bleak stories in the recent "Night & Fear." Now we have "Rendezvous in Black" thanks to the Modern Library publishing house. We can only hope that other novellas head to store shelves soon, specifically "The Bride Wore Black" and "Night Has A Thousand Eyes." But even more fascinating than his stories is the author's life. Cornell Woolrich lived from one black depression to another. He worshipped his mother, drank incessantly, and kept his true sexuality repressed. It was an overriding fear of his mortality and the cruel randomness of the world around him, however, which fueled his desolate visions. Sad to say, but Woolrich's miseries have given generations of fans something to sing about ever since.

"Rendezvous in Black" excels as an archetype of white knuckled, totter on the edge of your seat noir, a story even better than the author's phenomenal and oft copied "I Married a Dead Man." This yarn concerns the activities of one Johnny Marr, an ecstatic young man set to marry the love of his life. When his girl, Dorothy, perishes in a freak accident involving a bottle dropped from a low flying plane, Marr's sanity melts away. The desolate young lover discovers the names of five men who bear the blame for the tragedy that destroyed his life, and he promptly embarks on a mission to wreak bloody revenge on these strangers. Marr will go after the people these men love the most in life, using any tricks he can muster in an effort to avenge his shattered life. Woolrich makes sure the reader understands exactly how far gone Marr is in the first chapter, as we see the young man continue to turn up at the couple's favorite meeting place night after night, waiting desperately for a woman who will never show up. Marr's activities assume a mindless repetition, an unremitting yet senseless hope that Dorothy will eventually appear, thus setting the tone for his single minded, relentless revenge plots later on.

A rendezvous for each of Marr's enemies, five in all, unfold with cold, methodical precision. The first rendezvous achieves the least suspense of the five, a short chapter serving as a post-mortem of Marr's first act of revenge. It is here we learn how Marr will attack his enemies (through important women in their lives), and meet the cop, Detective Cameron, who takes on the case. The second rendezvous will set your nerves on edge as an illicit affair leads to disastrous consequences, including a vengeance seeking wife and a walk to the electric chair, for the second man on Johnny's list. In the third rendezvous, a wedge driven between a man and his wife results in a murder and a suicide. As the fourth act unfolds, a conceited, secretive daughter discovers the hard way that she should have listened to Detective Cameron and her parents. The denouement, the fifth rendezvous, involves that last man on the list and his childhood love. It also tries to show that nothing, neither running to the ends of the earth nor the best laid plans, will deter fate. If you feel like you've been chewed up and spit out by the time you reach the end of the book, don't fret. This reaction is normal when reading Cornell Woolrich. It is, in fact, exactly what you want to feel.

The strength of "Rendezvous in Black" comes not from its staccato prose and descriptive metaphors, although these elements do play a large part in the success of the novel, but in Woolrich's bleak cosmology built on an unholy trinity of love turned bad, paranoia, and crushing fate. The accident that claims Dorothy, a bottle falling from the heavens, and the subsequent disasters visited upon those individuals Marr deems responsible, displays the writer's belief in a unsystematic, frequently cruel world where events unfold with ruthless certainty. Love is a good thing, or can be a good thing, but too often it morphs into something that can fuel neverending hostility and destruction. Richard Dooling, the author of the introduction to this edition of the novel, does an excellent job explicating the numerous themes in Woolrich's writings, a better job than I could possibly hope to do in a short review. But you don't need really need an introduction to see that the mindset behind the book is seriously depressing.

The number of continuity errors, implausible events, and other mistakes in "Rendezvous in Black" leap off the page. I find it impossible to believe someone could drop a bottle out of an airplane as late the 1940s, for example. Too, I kept wondering whether Johnny Marr ever aged, as a considerable period of time passes from Dorothy's demise to the end of the book. How could Johnny possibly have wooed the teenaged Madeleine if he was in his late twenties? And considering Woolrich describes Detective Cameron as a bumbler, the cop possesses a tenacity that eventually pays off in the end. None of these problems takes anything away from the sheer power of the novel. There were times I literally felt like I couldn't stand the tension anymore, and any book that can cause that sort of sensation deserves attention. If you love noir, you need to read this one immediately.

This is a suspense story in which one knows the killer and his victims and where there is nothing random about his choice of victims. The murders are acts of revenge against an unpremeditated, accidental death - a death that one can only characterize as 'fateful.' A bottle has been thrown from an airplane, killing a young woman standing by a store window in a busy street. She is waiting for her fiance. Out of the hundreds of people walking that street, it is she who has been dealt this fatal blow. It is an accident that could not have been foreseen, though it can be argued, that its negligence might have been anticipated.

That is the beginning of the story. Woolrich wastes no time in setting the psychological tone. Her fiance arrives at their place of rendezvous, the scene of the accident, looks at the stricken woman, denies that it is his "Dorothy", then leaves the scene. Despite this initial denial, he knows, of course, that it is she, and from that moment a cataclysmic change occurs in his personality and his present world falls apart - a world of romance, marriage and well being. He sheds all innocence and becomes a man singularly possessed - a man seeking revenge against the carelessness of other men - determined to have them pay for this carelessness in the same way he has been forced to pay - destruction of what they prize most.

It is a story, wonderfully told - direct, gripping and so thoroughly credible that you read through it quickly, hoping against hope that it will have a happy ending. But it doesn't.

Plot summary: Ordinary young man loses the love of his life and vows revenge on people who took her from him: once a year, on the anniversary of her death, he will take the love of their life from one of them. A lone policeman becomes suspicious, but cannot convince anyone else that there is a pattern behind the deaths.

This is last book in Woolrich's "Black" series of books, and is reminiscent of "The Bride Wore Black", the first book in the series. It is a fascinating portrayal of a young man turning from a cipher into a force of nature to avenge his loss. Although episodic in nature (giving the prelude, revenge incident, and aftermath for each of the five men he holds responsible for his love's death), each episode is tied together and the intensity of feeling and suspense builds nicely. Although there are some major lapses in continuity and logic (eg. - one episode crucially happens after the end of World War II, while the following episode crucially happens *during* World War II), Woolrich is able to sweep you along so that you either don't notice these flaws, or you don't care about them.

The introduction to this novel says that Woolrich has been described as the "Hitchcock of the Written Word," but adds that maybe he wouldn't have liked this description. It might be even more accurate to say that Hitchcock is the Cornell Woolrich of the cinema - since many of Woolrich's works came before Hitchcock's, and Hitch even adapted one of Woolrich's stories into one of his most famous movies, Rear Window.

The point, though, is that this guy writes suspense like you've never seen. I say "seen" because reading his novels is really a visceral experience. I don't know how he does it but Woolrich can write a beautiful, elegant story that you can sort of just almost SEE unfolding like a movie --- a movie that will move you emotionally and also scare the bejesus out of you.

Rendezvous in Black contains six interlinked stories about six doomed love affairs threatened by violence. Five of these are labelled "The First Rendezvous" through "The Fifth Rendezvous." The sixth is the story that ties them all together (but it comes first in sequence). I don't want to spoil the experience of reading this book for anyone, but overall it is just amazing and I cannot recommend it more highly. Woolrich, as has been noted here already, was a protege of F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Like Dashiell Hammett, he's an author who makes mysteries somehow as beautiful as what passes for "literature" - yet so emotionally gripping that you hardly notice till you are done how beautiful the craft of what you just read really was. The characters are spectacular and each one is described with wonderful psychological details. One of my favorites is this description of the police detective:

"He was too thin, and his face wore a chronically haggard look...His manner was a mixture of uncertainty, followed by flurries of hasty action, followed by more uncertainty, as if he already regretted the just preceding action. He always acted new at any given proceedings, as if he were undertaking them for the first time. Even when they were old, and he should have been used to them."

Little gems like this are on almost every page of this book and they make for a wonderful reading experience you won't forget.

I envy anyone about to read Cornell Woolrich for the first time. This book is a great place to start.

This book is raw every which way. The sentences are ungrammatical, compound words invented by Woolrich pop out at you. Rendezvous in Black is a masterful anarchy of both structure and language. And it all works together as a suspenseful, surreal narrative.

The main guy, Johnny Marr is the everyman become unhinged. At the outset we are introduced to him as one of those faces in the crowd, an unremarkable man, what they used to call in 1940s parlance an "Ordinary Joe." He thinks he's got it pretty much figured out, he's staked out his claim-- he's got his girl, and has a little money in his pocket. But security is an illusion.

A nightmarish accident kills his longtime sweetheart. Her battered body is displayed in death as a gory sideshow attraction on a nighttime street crowded with the sensation seeking public.

The freakish and the unforeseen have just sent Johnny an express message straight from Woolrich's parallel universe. Fate has stepped up with a lesson: a cosmic smack in the face that knocks him back and sends him reeling. Now Johnny is compelled to take a detour from familiar and commonplace reality and ditch Main Street for a road of biblical wrath and revenge. This average guy is now on a fantastically contrived mission to make the "killers" pay for the death of his lost love and the end of all his hope for the future--by making them suffer the excruciating pain he suffers.

Both Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson are masters of grit, the keynote of the noir genre. Woolrich could have been a celebrity name like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. He wasn't however a self-promoter. He was reclusive, tortured by personal demons and called seedy New York City hotel rooms his home.

This book is an unremitting dark ride; the best of it's kind.

Rendezvous in black is about this guy Johnny who finds his fiancee killed by something dropped off a plane - an accident, pure and simple. This triggers a fundamental reaction in Johnny -- a gruesome fate awaits the passengers of that plane...

It's an excellent book, but then I've never read anything by Cornell Woolrich that hasn't been excellent. The language is somewhat complex, and Cornell's quick shifts from plain language to metaphors are sometimes a bit confusing, but also quite poetic.

Warning: the downmost review contains spoilers for the ultimate fate of the main characters of the book!

Cornell Woolrich is a little known master who deserves to be discovered. I encourage you readers to walk down his inky black streets, to hide among the shadows, and know what it is to live in fear.

RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, one of the final novels in Cornell Woolrich's famous "black" series that have formed the basis for so many films noirs, is one of his most highly praised works. It is enormously suspenseful: an anonymous young man whose fiancée has been killed in a freak accident instigated by a group of wealthy hunters in a low-flying plane takes his revenge by systematically murdering the woman most beloved to each of the five men so they can share in his grief. Each of the five murders occurs in a different chapter and told in a different style: we know that a woman is going to get it and when, but we don't know how and sometimes we don't even know who. Simultaneously, a police detetctive begins assembling clues to catch the killer. Certainly Woolrich can draw out the suspense in each chapter, and the schematic narrative (which often refers to the characters as "the man" or "the woman") invests the narrative with an almost allegorical quality that makes the whole work seem over-the-top. But there's very little character development in the text, and the shoddy ironic twists in several of the stories seem telegraphed a mile away. Also, the misogynistic undercurrent to most romans noirs seems queasily overemphasized here: except for the first victim (who dies the most gruesome of the deaths), each of the killer's targets intentionally defies the dictates of male authorities in her life, as if to suggest she deserves what's coming to her. Although on one hand this seems almost a pure distillation of the operatic fatalism of the roman noir, it's simply not as good a work as Woolrich's more fleshed-out books like WALTZ INTO DARKNESS or I MARRIED A DEAD MAN--not to mention such superior suspense novels of the period as (for example) Kenneth Fearing's THE BIG CLOCK or Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's THE BLANK WALL.

On a mild midwestern night in the early 1940s, Johnny Marr leans against a drugstore wall. He's waiting for Dorothy, his fiancée, and tonight is the last night they'll be meeting here, for it's May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she's late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident - an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year - always on May 31st - wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe ... Cornell Woolrich's most justly famous novel is one of the true masterpieces of suspense. Johnny exacts his revenge in five meticulously planned and utterly unpredictable murders that Woolrich unfolds with an almost demonic fatalism while the marvellously unheroic police officer MacLain Cameron is in accelerating pursuit. Woolrich's prose is unique. His style is strongly visual - we'd now call it cinematic even though it prefigured much of the film-noir effects that render it, today, almost cliché. His syntax is occasionally tortured, his word choices odd. Yet as his biographer Francis Nevins has noted, Woolrich's imperfections are a happy marriage of form and function. Without the sentences rushing out of control across the page like his hunted characters across the nightscape, without the maniacal emotionalism and indifference to grammatical niceties, the form and content of the Woolrich world would be at odds. Between his style and substance, Woolrich achieved the perfect union. There are moments when the melodrama builds to such an intensity that it tumbles over into a kind of empathy, e.g. Cameron's late visit to Dorothy's childhood home. You know it's ridiculous, but you feel something all the same. As monstrous as Johnny Marr's revenge is, few readers will be able to damn him completely. This kind of amoral centre is the dark sun around which much of the noir world turns, and Woolrich gives us one of the genre's finest examples. The Modern Library's 20th Century Rediscoveries edition is particularly valuable for its Reading Group Guide, and for Richard Dooling's fine introduction which points to further reading and finds the origins of the novel in Woolrich's own startlingly sad biography. Strongly recommended.