To Death!: Three Stories by Cornell Woolrich

by Cornell Woolrich

To Death! Three stories of suspense and murder, fall guys and frames, and good women and bad.

The Fatal Footlights (1950)
Match wits with Police-Dick Benson as he tries to trap the brazen murderer who killed golden Gilda before his eyes—on a burlesque runway.
Chapter One – Curtains for the Cutie
Chapter Two – Vanishing Bottle
Chapter Three – Brazen Killer
Chapter Four – An Eye for an Eye
Chapter Five – The Lady Says “Die!”

The Woman’s Touch (1938)
Never embroider on murder

And So To Death (1941)
Ever had a nightmare—and dreamed you killed a man? And then did you ever wake up and find him dead? The gripping story of a man whose worst dreams came true. A short novel.
Chapter I – The First Horror
Chapter II – The Key
Chapter III – Dead End
Chapter IV – The Eighth Image
Chapter V – Inquisition
Chapter VI – There Was A Murder
Chapter VII – Wrong Way Out
Chapter VIII – The Candle Flame
Chapter IX – Kill Me Again
Chapter X – The Spark Went Out
Chapter XI – Last Ordeal

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) is one of the most highly regarded writers of mystery and suspense of all of the writers from the pulp fiction era.

Under his pseudonym “William Irish”, Woolrich wrote the story It Had to Be Murder, published in Dime Detective Magazine (February 1942), which was the source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black in 1968, and followed that the next year by filming Waltz into Darkness as Mississippi Mermaid.

176 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 10, 2025

About the author

Cornell Woolrich is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s finest writer of pure suspense fiction. The author of numerous classic novels and short stories (many of which were turned into classic films) such as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Waltz Into Darkness, and I Married a Dead Man, Woolrich began his career in the 1920s writing mainstream novels that won him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The bulk of his best-known work, however, was written in the field of crime fiction, often appearing serialized in pulp magazines or as paperback novels. Because he was prolific, he found it necessary to publish under multiple pseudonyms, including "William Irish" and "George Hopley" [...] Woolrich lived a life as dark and emotionally tortured as any of his unfortunate characters and died, alone, in a seedy Manhattan hotel room following the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Upon his death, he left a bequest of one million dollars to Columbia University, to fund a scholarship for young writers.

Source: [http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bi...]