Books by Cornell Woolrich
Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories
Cornell Woolrich published his first novel in 1926, and throughout the next four decades his fiction riveted the reading public with unparalleled mystery, suspense, and horror. America's most popular pulp magazines published hundreds of his stories. Classic films like Hitchcock's Rear Window, Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, and Tournier's Black Alibi came chillingly to the screen from his work. And novels like Deadline at Dawn, Rendezvous in Black, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes gained him the epithet "father of noir." Now with this new centenary volume of previously uncollected suspense fiction edited by Francis M. Nevins--recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for criticism in the mystery field--a whole new generation of mystery readers, as well as his countless fans who have long loved his work, can thrill to the achievement of Cornell Woolrich, the writer deemed to be the Edgar Allan Poe of the twentieth century.
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Rear Window
Cornell Woolrich. His name conjures a maelstrom of nerve- shattering suspense spawned by the stark, cynical landscape of urban America in the 1930s and 1940s. This collection spotlights thirteen of his most unforgettable narratives, including REAR WINDOW, which watches Hal Jeffriesconfined with a broken leg to a tiny apartment that only allows him to survey the daily lives of his neighbors across thecourtyard?until he discovers one of them is a cold-bloodedmurderer and that he¹s the next victim. Other thrillers involve a woman trapped with a psychotic stranger obsessed with knifing his victims on the dance floor; a man who finds his bride buried alive; and a housewifeseizing her chance to escape a sadistic husband, only to find her dream go terrifyingly wrong. With REAR WINDOW, as in the other stories in this volume, Woolrich proves that, like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, he remains one of the all-time masters of the noir genre.
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Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich (Otto Penzler Book)
A collection of previously uncollected mystery and suspense fiction by the "father of noir" and author of Night Has Thousand Eyes presents twenty masterful tales, many of them originally written for the pulp magazines and never before published in book form.
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Rendezvous in Black (A Modern Library 20th Century Rediscovery)
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.
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The Black Angel
This hypnotic thriller by the father of noir exposes its heroine to a waking nightmare.
A panic-stricken young wife races against time to prove that her convicted husband did not murder his mistress. Writing in first person from her viewpoint, Woolrich makes us feel her love and anguish and desperation, as she becomes an avenging angel to rescue her husband from execution.
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Waltz into Darkness
From “the supreme master of suspense” comes the chilling chronicle of one man’s descent into madness. (New York Times)
When New Orleans coffee merchant Louis Durand first meets his bride-to-be after a months-long courtship by mail, he’s shocked that she doesn’t match the photographs sent with her correspondence. But Durand has told his own fibs, concealing from her the details of his wealth, and so he mostly feels fortunate to find her so much more beautiful than expected. Soon after they marry, however, he becomes increasingly convinced that the woman in his life is not the same woman with whom he exchanged letters, a fact that becomes unavoidable when she suddenly disappears with his fortune.
Alone, desperate, and inexplicably love-sick, Louis quickly descends into madness, obsessed with finding Julia and bringing her to justice ― and simply with seeing her again. He engages the services of a private detective to do so, embarking on a search that spans the southeast of the country. When he finally tracks her down, the nightmare truly begins…
A dark tale of the destructive power of love, Waltz into Darkness is a classic “femme fatale” narrative that shows “the father of the modern suspense story” (LA Times) at the top of his unsettling craft. It has been adapted for film twice, most notably serving as the basis for Francois Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid.
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The Bride Wore Black (An American Mystery Classic)
A police detective seeks the rationale between seemingly-unrelated murders, connected only by the appearance of a beautiful woman each time
When the wealthy ladies’ man fell from his balcony in the midst of his engagement party, the police dismissed the death as the result of a freak accident. There was nothing to connect it with the poisoning of a lonely man in his squalid apartment, or with the married business-man killed after him, sealed into a closet and left to suffocate. No connection, that is, aside from the appearance of a beautiful woman in each case, just before the victims met their untimely ends.
Nobody knows her identity, where she comes from or whither she goes. Nor do they know why anyone would be targeting this series of seemingly-unrelated persons. But one police detective is convinced that the answers to these questions can save the lives of men who might be next on the list, men who will continue to die at a rapid rate unless he can solve the puzzle and intervene.
Cornell Woolrich’s first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black is the stylish, tense thriller that launched the career of “the supreme master of suspense” (New York Times). It was filmed by Francois Truffaut under the same title, and went on to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.
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Deadline at Dawn (An American Mystery Classic)
In this thrilling mystery from “the Hitchcock of the written word,” two lovers rush to solve a murder before the end of a New York night (Believer)
When Quinn first meets Bricky, she’s working as a partner-for-hire at a dancehall and he’s struggling to shake the anxiety of his guilty conscience. Earlier that day, the young man took advantage of a found key and used it to rob a stranger’s home. Now, with the purloined money in his pocket, Quinn is unable to escape the memory of his wrongdoing―and not even a night spent dancing is enough to silence his nagging thoughts.
When the dancehall closes, he and Bricky―linked, after many intimate hours, by a budding romance―return to the scene of the crime intending to restore the stolen fortune and begin a new life together, only to discover, upon arrival, that the owner of the property has been murdered. There’s evidence present that easily links Quinn to the crime, and he expects that, as soon as day breaks and the authorities learn of the gruesome scene, he will be arrested straight away. Which means that he and Bricky have only a few short hours to find the true killer and clear Quinn’s name for good.
What begins as a romance soon turns into a nightmare, as this young couple trek through the dark underbelly of old New York in a desperate race for salvation. Twisty, turny, and breathlessly told, Deadline at Dawn is an exemplary tale from the “supreme master of suspense” (New York Times).
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Four Novellas of Fear Eyes That Watch You, the Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum
Cornell Woolrich, best known as the author of "Rear Window," is unsurpassed in his ability to create and sustain sheer suspense. In his tales of terror, ordinary people find themselves in the most extraordinary circumstances-and, as readers, we share their spine-tingling tension every step of the way. Collected here are four of his most nail-biting novellas: EYES THAT WATCH YOU: Greedy Vera Miller plots her husband's murder right under the nose of her mute, paralyzed mother-in-law. After all, the old lady won't be able to tell anyone about the crime. Or will she?THE NIGHT I DIED: Nice guy Ben Cook, goaded by his scheming common-law wife, fakes his own suicide and moves to another town-all to trick his life insurance company into making a large payout. No one en route or at the new address will recognize him, will they?YOU'LL NEVER SEE ME AGAI" Ed Bliss's new bride, miffed by her husband's insults about her biscuits, promises that Ed will never have to see her again-and storms out! When she doesn't return within a few days, Ed begins to suspect foul play-but when he reports the crime to the police, he's the first one they suspect!MURDER ALWAYS GATHERS MOMENTUM: For his wife's sake, Dick Paine approaches a former employer for back wages he is owed-but things go terribly wrong and the old boss ends up dead. Now the guilt-ridden Paine, who'd never before committed a crime, is convinced that people will figure out what happened. As his paranoia gathers momentum, anyone he meets is at risk of becoming his next victim.
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Darkness at Dawn Early Suspense Classics
From 1934until his death in 1968, Cornell Woolrich wrote dozens of “tales of love and despair” that chill the heart and display his mastery of the genre he all but created. In a title for a story he never wrote, he captured the essence of his tortured world: “First you dream, then you die.”
Introducing these 13 tales, Nevins describes the dark world Woolrich so vividly creates. “The dominant reality in his world is the Depression, and Woolrich has no peers when it comes to describing a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job, a hungry wife and children, and anxiety eating him like a cancer. If a Woolrich protagonist is in love, the beloved is likely to vanish in such a way that he not only can’t find her but can’t convince anyone she ever existed.”
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The Bride Wore Black
AMERICA'S MASTER OF SUSPENSE...FIRST IN THE DEFINITIVE SERIES OF THIS AMERICAN GENIUS No one knew who she was, where she came from, or why she had entered their lives. All they really knew about her was that she possessed a terrifying beauty-and that each time she appeared, a man died horribly. . . .
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Into the Night
by Lawrence Block, Cornell Woolrich
"REAL NOIR... A GROTESQUELY MEMORABLE RIDE." - WALL STREET JOURNAL
TWO OF THE GREATEST AUTHORS OF NOIR FICTION IN AN UNFORGETTABLE COLLABORATION
An innocent woman lies dead in the street, felled by a stray bullet. Now it’s up to the woman who killed her to investigate the dead woman’s life and pick up its cut-short threads, carrying out a mission of vengeance on her behalf against the man she loved and lost – and the nightclub-singing femme fatale responsible for splitting them apart.
Begun in the last years of his life by noir master Cornell Woolrich, the haunted genius responsible for such classics as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and Phantom Lady, and completed decades later by acclaimed novelist and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block (A Walk Among the Tombstones, Eight Million Ways to Die), INTO THE NIGHT – available here for the first time in more than 35 years – is a collaboration that extends beyond the grave, echoing the book’s own story of the living taking on and completing the unfinished work of the dead.
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