Today, December 4, is the birthday of Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968). I featured some of his novels in this year’s Black Friday post. If you want to write intense, suspenseful stories, you could do a lot worse that study Woolrich. I’m not going to review anything; it’s been one of those days. But check him out. His novels and short stories are well worth the time.
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). Continue reading
Cornell Woolrich
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was born on this date (December 3) in 1903. He passed away in 1968. He wrote most of his novels and stories under the name Cornell Woolrich, but a few, such as my favorite, Phantom Lady, were published under the by-line of William Irish. A number of his works were adapted for film and television, often under other titles. The most famous of these was the Alfred Hitchcock film, Rear Window.
So why am I doing this birthday post here rather than at Gumshoes, Gats, and Gams? Well aside from the fact that that blog is currently dormant, Woolrich did write a few stories involving the fantastic.
But I want to do something a little different. Harlan Ellison has a story entitled “Tired Old Man“, which he says is based on something that happened to him. Ellison had gone to a party and got to talking to an older gentlemen there. Ellison didn’t get his name. Later when he described the man to his host and some other friends, they all insisted that the person Ellison had been talking to was Cornell Woolrich. Only none of them saw him there.
Ellison explains all this in his introduction to the collection No Doors, No Windows, which is where the story was first published. “Tired Old Man” is worth a read. Ellison adds some fantastic elements and a surprising amount of emotional depth to what is a brief story. I first read it years ago, and it’s stuck with me ever since.
I checked this morning to see what is available by Woolrich in ebook form. I’d bought the Centipede Press editions when they came out a few years ago, but I wanted something a little more portable.
There’s a lot that’s been published in recent years. I bought five short story collections. Here’s one of them, An Obsession with Death and Dying. And if you want a novel, start with Phantom Lady or Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
Today has been…a day. I’ll go into detail later when I have actual information. Because of some personal things, I almost missed two birthdays today.
Karl Edward Wagner was born on December 4, 1945. He’s no stranger around these here parts. Creator of the legendary Kane, a first tier horror author, and an editor who strove to make Robert E. Howard’s Conan available in affordable editions rather than the bowdlerized stories that were available in the late 70s, editor of the Year’s Best Horror anthologies for DAW, and cofounder of Carcosa Press, Karl Edward Wagner casts a long shadow over the field.
I need to read more Wagner. There’s still quite a bit out there that I haven’t read, including some Kane.
The other author, Cornell Woolrich, didn’t write much in the way of the fantastic, but he’s still a writer you’re going to want to read. Born in 1903, Woolrich wrote mysteries and suspense, a number with macabre overtones. The first Woolrich novel I ever read, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, is about a millionaire who is told by a gypsy fortune teller that he will die at the mouth of a lion. And then a lion escapes from a circus…
Both of these men should be in your libraries. Check them out.