Today for Black Friday, I’m going to do something a little different. Noir is French for black, and I’m a big fan of noir in both written and cinematic form. So this is my Noir Friday post.

This post would be better suited over at Gumshoes, Gats, and Gams, but I’ve not been active enough on that site this year for it to get much traffic. So I’m posting here.

One of the great writers of noir was Cornell Woolrich. He had an entire series of novels with “Black” in the title. They were all stand-alones; they are considered a series due to the word “Black”. Let’s look at them. Note, I’ve read some of these, but not all of them (yet).

The Bride Wore Black (1940) – A woman whose intended is murdered before their wedding sets out to kill the men she believes responsible.

The Black Curtain (1941) – A man wakes up with amnesia to find himself accused of murder.

Black Alibi (1942) – A jaguar gets loose in a large South American city. Not long after the cat escapes, bodies begin to be found. But is a killer using the jaguar as a cover?

The Black Angel (1943) – A fix-up novel based on two shorter works. A woman tries to prove her husband is innocent of the murder of his mistress.

The Black Path of Fear (1944) – A man flees to Havana with a gangster’s wife, only to have the gangster follow them, kill the wife, and frame him for the murder.

Rendezvous in Black (1948) – This one is basically the plot of The Bride Wore Black with a gender swap. Instead of the bride hunting down the killers of her fiance, it’s a man seeking revenge on those be blames for his wife’s death.

Ballantine books reprinted the Black novels as well as several others by Woolrich in the early 1980s. Those covers are to my mind the best he ever had.

That’s not to say the covers of the current editions are bad. They aren’t. The Black novels are available in two omnibus editions, here and here. You can see the cover of the first volume on the left.

Centipede Press has published two sets of Woolrich’s novels, each with a short story collection. They are very nice editions, but they aren’t for the casual reader.

Woolrich is worth tracking down. Fortunately much of his work is available in inexpensive electronic editions.