Blind Date With Death

by Cornell Woolrich

Contains:
-Blind Date with Death (1937)
-The Living Lie Down with the Dead (1936)
-Flowers from the Dead (1940)
-The Riddle of the Redeemed Dips (1940)
-The Case of the Maladroit Manicurist (1941)
-Crazy House (1941)
-If the Shoe Fits (1943)
-Leg Man (1943)

All stories originally published in Dime Detective Magazine.

220 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1985

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

[Jeremy Hurd-McKenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't always like short stories--they often seem like first chapters of failed novels with endings tacked on them. These were solid, but not great. This set followed a typical short story set up--four or five mediocre-to-fair ones in the middle, bookended on either side by one or two good ones. They all at least had identifiable beginnings, middles, and conclusions, which put them ahead of the curve for me on the narrative scale.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding collection of Woolrich short stories from the pulp magazine days. Each one is superb in its own right, great dialog, clever plots, and filled with those brief sharp-focused closeups on a random detail that Woolrich takes a moment to describe so well.

[Karl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice collection of crime stories, with a lot of atmospheric details and colorful characters. My favorite in the collection was "The Living Lie Down with the Dead," which was part hard-boiled crime story, part weird tale. It was easy to imagine these stories as forming part of a film noir movie, though the stories themselves are relatively short. In contrast, the paths from start to solution are typically wildly convoluted, with various twists and schemes based on minute plotting. A couple times, the sum-up at the end left me feeling, "OK. I guess so. That's possible" Woolrich tends in the stories here to put his protagonists on the verge of a nasty death only to have them be saved by the cops arriving deus ex machina at the very last instant. In isolation that's fine, but in a story collection, it started to feel over-done.. Maybe not Woolrich's best work, but certainly a fun read.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blind Date With Death (1985---stories originally published in Dime Detective between 1937 and 1943)

This is a collection of Cornell Woolrich stories. A couple of them are nice and dark, with one from the “buried alive” sub-genre. Others are from that weird genre so peculiar to Woolrich himself, with people running around the city trying to find out who they are or who they killed or both.

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

*Blind date with death --
*The living lie down with the dead (aka One night to be dead sure of)--
Flowers from the dead --
The riddle of the redeemed dips --
The case of the maladroit manicurist --
*Crazy house --
*If the shoe fits --
Leg man--3

[Trent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Woolrich, and while I found this collection weaker than his norm, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Rob Roehm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of noir detective stories, not as good as most by Woolrich, but entertaining.