Violence

by Cornell Woolrich

Contents

CLOCK RACES
1. "Don't Wait Up For Me Tonight"
2. "Guillotine"

LOVE AND MURDER
3. "That New York Woman"
4. "Murder, Obliquely"

PRIMITVE
5. "The Moon Of Montezuma"

VIOLENCE WITH A WINK
6. "The Corpse In The Statue Of Liberty"

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

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...]

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to inter-library loan, I'm now only one story away from reading everything on my "Cornell Woolrich short story list", in this case they found a book so obscure that I had to create the Goodreads record for it!

Of the 6 stories here, two have already been read by me, so let's repurpose those reviews first:

"The Moon of Montezuma" takes a traditional story idea ("cold murder is revenged on the perpetrator long after the fact by 'natural' coincidence") and sets it in poverty-stricken, rural Mexico - telling it in achingly beautiful (but sinister) poetic language. Not amazing or anything, but a nice change of pace than the usual Woolrich.

"Guillotine" (aka "Steps Going Up") is a masterpiece and should be more well known. It's perhaps the ultimate "race-against-the-clock" suspense scenario ever devised by Woolrich, and also an interesting example of how true suspense writing can be almost deliberately amoral in its deployment (more on that in a second). We start with a condemned man in a prison cell, detailing his mundane last moments (the honorary glass of rum, last rites, the shaving of the neck, last cigarette) before he begins that long walk up the 21 steps to madame guillotine (this is present day France, 'natch, there is some talk of the "savage" Americans who fry their criminals with amperage). Cut into this forward progression are slices of flashback that ratchet up the tension as we learn the whole scenario that led the condemned man there and why he seems unperturbed by certain death - the robbery, the murder, the betrayal, the capture, and then the plot with his female accomplice to save him from the blade - all it takes is for the state executioner to die on the day the criminal is scheduled to be put to death. And so, out of love, she moves to put this into effect. The two story threads eventually join at the scaffold, merging together seamlessly - and here is where that interesting amorality comes in. Much like those moments in heist movies where you realize that you want nothing more than the criminal's scheme to succeed (because you've seen all the hard work they've put into it), this story plays on those same discordant notes - you feel for the condemned man, because no one wants to die; you feel for his lover, because she works so hard to attempt to poison the executioner (some wonderful scenes of tension here); you feel for the executioner, first because he is a lonely man easily duped by a young beauty and then, later, an honorable man struggling against a dying body to do his final job, whatever the effort and cost! It's simply amazing and, on top of a killer plot, the writing just flows like water, with a marvelously sketched bar scene in a den of iniquity at the opening and some subtle twinning of actions (rolling the drunk in the opening versus poisoning the executioner, the executioner and criminal's struggles up the same scaffold steps). Those who read only for edification miss the chance to experience wonderful tales like this - a perfect exemplar (the work of P.G. Wodehouse is another) that the term "style over substance" is not always an insult and instead can hide the pure joy of effect-driven writing (which, to do well, is just as hard as edifying writing). I myself had to unlearn such dismissiveness and I'm a much happier reader for it. One of the most enjoyable stories I've ever read (with a killer last line too boot)!

“Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight” ("Goodbye, New York") - this is the story I hunted down the collection for and it didn't disappoint. It's, in some ways, the usual suspenseful "race against the clock" narrative as a poverty-stricken couple (I love Woolrich's honesty about the meanness and desperation of the poor - lessons learned by the Great Depression, coming again soon to all of us who aren't of the landed classes!) deals with the husband's rash actions. The opening, as the wife returns home to find her husband in mid-suicide attempt, is a grabber and it only gets better from there as, denied release, he disappears into the night with only a "don't wait up for me, tonight". When he returns in the early morning he's $500 richer and his abusive ex-boss has been murdered. Now his deeply loving wife must organize their flight from the city as the police close in....

Woolrich's mastery of suspense writing is not to be forgotten - he has *such* control over timing, pacing, incident and word choice as to take one's breathe away. Adding the meat to these bones, as the couple flees from street to subway to train station, is his masterful writing of human emotion - you feel for this woman who loves her husband so much, a man who has given up on everything and himself. Here again is the anguish that the author excels at. This really is a masterful story... for reasons which must be talked of behind the spoiler zone (but I urge you to seek it out for yourself, or some publisher to reprint it):

I've talked before about how Woolrich's "cold, random universe doesn't care about you" philosophical underpinning actually makes his suspense stories more suspenseful, simply because you're never totally sure if events in the fiction are going to turn out well or badly, as they would from an optimist or pessimist writer. Now, in a race against the clock story, you would seem to be left with two options - they get away or they get caught. Granted, with Woolrich, it could always be "they get away... but the train crashes" or "they get caught but it turns out the husband didn't commit murder and it's all a misunderstanding" (pardon my clunky attempts at spinning possibilities) but here, in a beautiful turn of events, it's neither of these - the couple do get away and the husband DID commit murder, and one might ask how that can be a satisfying story, even with the unconscious, in-the-moment "identification with bad guys trying to flee their actions" thrill familiar from all heist movies. And the answer is simplicity itself - because what's been driving this narrative are not the events but the wife's deep love for her husband and the life they have, the only thing they have against a world eating them alive dollar by dollar, and so at the height of success, Woolrich ends the story, powerfully and unexpectedly, on a single thought - the wife's realization that their love is now ruined by the events, that she can never truly love her murderer husband the way she did 24 hours before, and that eventually, even if they succeed in fleeing and resuming a "normal" life, their marriage will fall to pieces from that distrust. And THAT, my friends, is really excellent writing!