Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968)

After-Dinner Story is a terrific collection of short stories by the master of suspense, Cornell Woolrich. Everything from revenge for an unsolved murder, to a man convalescing who believes a man has murdered his wife but can’t get anyone to believe him, to pyromania, and a writer whose story eerily resembles an actual murder, make up a terrific collection. For those who love great stories, told as only Woolrich was capable, this is fantastic.

The highlights for me were After-Dinner Story, show more The Night Reveals, Rear Window (its original title was It Had to Be Murder), and Murder-Story. The beginning of After-Dinner Story, as a group of people are trapped in an elevator which has crashed is exciting, but it is the dinner party thrown by someone who has invited all the survivors which becomes enthralling. It has a fabulous ending.

The plot of Rear Window is well-known because of the Hitchcock film, which basically follows Woolrich’s original story with a few cast alterations. The Night Reveals might be the most involving, and was adapted for radio’s Suspense, as was After-Dinner Story. Like Murder-Story, it is great stuff. People can nit-pick a bit of implausibility here and there all they like, but Woolrich makes his tales so involving, few really care.

Great writing from a great writer. Let everyone else waste their time with the latest pretentious offering masquerading as something special you just “have” to read — i.e. Girl On a Train or Fifty Shades, etc. — and enjoy a real writer at the height of his craft. Most of these stories are fairly famous — at least to those who appreciate the craft of writing. Rear Window, as mentioned, was adapted for film, as were several of Woolrich’s stories and novels, but a lot were also adapted for radio. Robert Young and Margo portrayed the main characters in Suspense’s adaptation of The Night Reveals, and Suspense’s adaptation of After-Dinner Story starred Otto Kruger.

Read the stories first, however, because as good as the adaptations for radio were, there is nothing else quite like reading a Woolrich story. show less

“She wouldn’t beg the masked faces in the crowd for a friendly look any more. She wouldn’t hope for the slot in the letterbox to show white any more. She wouldn’t wish for the telephone to ring any more. Let the world have its wakefulness—she’d have her sleep.”

“Loneliness is all the same, the world over.”


One of the last tales ever penned by Cornell Woolwich is one of his finest short stories. Imbued with loneliness and hopelessness, there are passages of great beauty within show more the narrative. And when his protagonist, Laurel, gets a second chance at life, and then love, Woolrich uses his gift for words to make us feel the rush of hope filling her heart. As in any Woolwich tale, a cloud looms on the horizon, and we have yet to discover whether it is a benign white one, or a dark raincloud. This is without any doubt, a Woolrich masterpiece of short fiction.

It begins with Laurel turning on the gas, and lying down to await the end in her lonely apartment. Through her final thoughts we get a sense of her despair, and her resolve to be done with it all. But a wrong number dialed in the middle of the night, someone trying to reach Schultz’s Delicatessen, gives her a reprieve. The air coming through the widow she opens — the reason she opens it is logically explained — and the euphoria of having a reprieve, is wonderfully written by Woolrich.

When Laurel gives herself one more day to decide, an attempt to snatch her purse while she’s playing hooky from work brings her into contact with Duane, a man who helps her. Woolrich is at his best here, dispelling the apocryphal notion often espoused by the inexperienced, unromantic, and hard-hearted, that love never blossoms quickly, or that two souls meant to be together can’t meet by chance and feel love in their hearts. As Woolrich describes their sudden falling in love, hope replacing despair, he writes one of the loveliest paragraphs about love, and the way it happens or doesn’t happen, you’ll ever read. Yes, I said Ever. It is staggeringly spot-on. In any Woolrich story, however, one must never forget fate.

Will the cloud be white and puffy and harmless, or will it be dark gray and threatening, bringing with it rain? Woolrich’s oeuvre includes more happy endings than one might think from how much people — rightly — speak about his propensity to show fate as some inescapable force laughing at us all, dooming us. In just over twenty pages, Woolrich reminds us how good he was at the short form.

Too Nice a Day to Die is a must read for anyone wishing to know why so many return to Woolrich’s work time and again. Woolrich and Bradbury were two writers so unique, that no one can ever say that they wrote like anybody else — not even remotely. This one will leave your heart aching. Whether your heart aches with joy or despair, I cannot say… show less

“It was like a ghost committing a murder, and passing the buck to the living.”


Those who only know of Cornell Woolrich’s “Black” period, that string of suspense novels like no other in American fiction, are missing out on a wealth of fine short pulp stories. Originally released as A Crime on St. Catherine Street in Argosy Magazine of January 1936, All It Takes is Brains is delightful fun. Yes, there is the standard trope of a crime, and a man on the run trying to find a way to clear show more himself, but the suspense is fun, rather than dark and foreboding. Woolrich is having a blast with this one, as he did with a number of stories during this period. Despite what you often hear, not all of his work, especially the early stuff, was gloom and doom, and not all of his stories were about the futile struggle against fate. All It takes is Brains is, in fact, a perfect example of a suspense story filled with near whimsy, the author most famous for dark tales of nearly unbearable suspense, making this one light and breezy and quite enjoyable.

Making a bet with two buddies and a panhandler on a lark, young, brash, well-to-do Ted Hewitt has to survive without money, as an unknown in a strange city. He must manage to survive, as well as stay out of jail. The bet ends up being two grand, so with only seventy-five cents in his pocket, he heads for Montreal, where he isn’t known, and tries to win the bet. It seems like it’ll be a breeze at first, as wearing a good suit and knowing how the wealthy act and conduct themselves, he easily cons his way into the Mount Royal Hotel, and runs a tab for taxis and the like. But when a pretty girl named Margot Baptiste buys into his con, things change.

Ted is no greenhorn, and knows she is setting him up to be taken. When he tells her at the last second that he has no money at all, however, she must then convince “Louie” that she’s made a mistake. That turns out to be her last mistake. The trouble is, no one has seen Louie, but they saw Ted with Margot, and due to some incredible but fun coincidence, they also believe Ted was armed. Next thing you know, Ted is the subject of a manhunt, and winning the bet seems less important than staying out of the electric chair:

“Even if it had meant just giving himself up, explaining his connection with the affair, then walking out again, he would have chanced it; but he had about as much chance of clearing himself as he had of taking a trip to the moon. He was chained to the murder link by link, and every step he had taken since eight thirty had added another link.”

With a radio station offering a big reward for his capture, and a city-wide manhunt forcing him to find Louie or perish, Ted has his hands full. With only a salt shaker he’s been pretending is a gun, the dead woman’s purse, and his brains, he must find a way to clear himself. Moving swiftly and with real movement within the narrative, this is a blast to read. Yeah, it’s Woolrich, so coincidence abounds, but what fun! At thirty pages, you get an opening that immediately draws you into the story, a middle which sweeps the reader along with the protagonist’s plight, and a fun little ending that makes it all worthwhile — and will probably leave a smile on your face.

A somewhat more elegant version of the whiz-bang pulp story, this is an old-fashioned pulp delight, and must not be missed by the true Woolrich fan. Great stuff! show less

Deadline at Dawn was written in the 1940s, during that incredible period when Cornell Woolrich released one memorable novel of suspense after another. Some he wrote under the Woolrich name, others William Irish, still others George Hopely. He was so prolific he feared glutting the market. Woolrich was in essence a romantic, which is why he had originally — and with some success — set out to become the next Fitzgerald.

Woolrich's sense of romanticism, and wishing it could be a certain way, show more but knowing it often wasn’t, led to a theme running through the most talked about novels in his oeuvre. In many of Woolrich’s finest efforts, fate and destiny were forces which couldn't be overcome, no matter how desperately the protagonist tried. There was a rainbow at the end, but often the protagonist couldn't reach it, and get out of the jam. Why? Because fate was laughing at him, dooming him.

If Night Has a Thousand Eyes exemplified Woolrich's overwhelming sense of fatalism in this part of his oeuvre, then Deadline at Dawn exemplified the romanticism; the hope that somehow, once in a blue moon, a guy and a girl could fight fate and win. Maybe.

Darkly romantic and deeply involving, New York City becomes a living thing in Deadline at Dawn. The city is a Woolrich extension of fate working against two little people in a jam. To say that Deadline at Dawn is about a young man who has made a mistake, and a cynical yet secretly soft-hearted dance hall girl who decides to help him try to fix it, is like saying Lonesome Dove is about a couple of old Texas Rangers making a cattle drive. Neither description can convey the tenderness, beauty, and heartfelt moments that stay with us long after the final page is turned.

After finishing this novel, I had the same feeling as when finishing Remarque’s Three Comrades, and The Night in Lisbon; I knew I had just read something wonderful. As in many Woolrich novels, there is much detail and description, a gradual building of suspense. Everything takes place as a race against the clock, an effort to stave off doom for the protagonists. Also, as in many Woolrich tales, the reader is drawn into their plight, and into their souls. We are aching for them to succeed, and give fate a kick in the pants.

First it’s trying to fix a moment of weakness, then get out from under a murder charge before anyone finds the body. But ultimately, Deadline at Dawn is a lovely novel which happens to be suspenseful. It is an exciting and moving story of two “little” people fighting a city that doesn’t care about them, has changed them in ways they don’t like, is laughing at them as they try to fix things and catch a bus back home before it’s too late.

Woolrich once wrote that he didn’t think he was a very good writer, he just wrote the truth. His reputation, and the respect among great writers like Bradbury and Chandler for his work, would suggest that he was undervaluing his place in literary history. While some of his other novels are more famous, and more heralded, I believe that it was in Deadline at Dawn that a writer who was more than just good, but truly great, actually told the truth.

A wonderful, involving read. It's dense, rather than bloated, so it will take some getting used to for the "modern" reader. Both a mystery and suspense story, it is about so much more. A masterpiece that's now available on Kindle, from a guy who wrote a slew of them. A must read, and probably my favorite among his big novels. show less