By the time he was well enough to return to school he’d become a writing addict. Every evening from nine until midnight he’d sit in a second-floor room and scribble furiously — the door closed, the family out of hearing, a Burmese elephant-head lamp lit on a pedestal in the corner behind him. By late spring of 1924 the first draft of his first novel was done, and he borrowed a friend’s typewriter to turn it into readable form. When the novel found a publisher, Woolrich quit Columbia to pursue his dream of bright lights, gay music, and a meteoric literary career like that of his whole generation’s cultural idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Woolrich’s early mainstream fiction is saturated with the Fitzgerald influence, especially the first novel, Cover Charge (1926). It chronicles the lives and loves of the Jazz Age’s gilded youth — the child-people, flitting from thrill to thrill, conversing in a mannered slang which, sixty years later, reads like the gibberings of creatures from another galaxy. But if nothing else, the novel is eerily prophetic in the way its protagonist’s fate foreshadows its author’s. Ballroom dancer Alan Walker winds up alone, in a cheap hotel room, his legs all but useless after a drunken auto smash-up, abandoned by all the women he loved, contemplating suicide. “I hate the world,” he cries out. “Everything comes into it so clean and goes out so dirty.”
This debut novel was followed by Children of the Ritz (1927), a frothy concoction about a spoiled heiress’s marriage to her chauffeur, which won Woolrich a $10,000 prize and a contract from First National Pictures for the movie rights. He was invited to Hollywood to help with the adaptation and stayed on as a staff writer. Besides his movie chores (for which he never received screen credit) and an occasional story or article for magazines like College Humor and Smart Set, he completed three more novels during these years. Early in 1931, after a brief, inexplicable and disastrous marriage to a producer’s daughter, Woolrich fled back to Manhattan and his mother. His last mainstream novel, Manhattan Love Song (1932), anticipates the motifs of his later fiction with its love-struck young couple cursed by a malignant fate which leaves one dead and the other desolate.
Over the next two years he became one more victim of the Depression. He sold next to nothing and was soon deep in debt, reduced to sneaking into movie palaces by the fire doors for his entertainment. What he didn’t know was that he was on the brink of a new creative life, that he was about to become the foremost suspense writer of all time.
It was in 1934 that Woolrich decided to abandon his hopes of mainstream literary prestige and concentrate on the lowly genre of mystery fiction. He sold three stories to pulp magazines that year, ten more in 1935, and was soon an established professional whose name was a fixture on the covers of Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective and other pulps. The more than one hundred stories and novelettes which he sold to the pulps during the Thirties are richly varied in type, including quasi-police procedurals, rapid-action whizbangs, and encounters with the occult. But the best and the best known of them are the tales of pure edge-of-the-seat suspense. Even their titles signal their predominant mood of bleakness and despair: “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes,” “Speak to Me of Death,” “All at Once, No Alice,” “Dusk to Dawn,” “Men Must Die,” “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” “The Living Lie Down with the Dead,” “Charlie Won’t Be Home Tonight,” “You’ll Never See Me Again.” These and dozens of other Woolrich suspense stories evoke with fierce power the desperation of those who walk the city’s darkened streets and the terror that lurks at noonday in commonplace settings. In his hands even such clichéd storylines as the race to save the innocent man from the electric chair and the amnesiac’s search for his lost self pulsate with human anguish. Woolrich’s world is a feverish place where the prevailing emotions are loneliness and fear, and the prevailing action a race against time and death. His most characteristic detective stories end with the discovery that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with the terror not dissipated but omnipresent.
The typical Woolrich settings are the seedy hotel, the cheap dance hall, the run-down movie house and the precinct station backroom. The overwhelming reality in his world, at least during the Thirties, is the Depression. Woolrich has no peer at putting us inside the skin of 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 the protagonist not only can’t find her but can’t convince anyone she ever existed. Or, in another classic Woolrich situation, the protagonist awakens after a blackout — the result of amnesia, drugs, hypnosis or whatever — and little by little becomes certain that he committed a murder or other crime while out of himself. The police are rarely sympathetic; in fact, they are the earthly counterpart of the malignant powers above, and their main function is to torment the helpless.
Woolrich suggests that the only thing we can do about this nightmare in which we live is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at portraying the corrosion of a once beautiful relationship. Yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; if one loves or needs love, Woolrich makes us identify with that person, all of his or her dark side notwithstanding.
Purely as technical exercises, many of Woolrich’s novels and stories are awful. They don’t make the slightest bit of sense. And that’s the point: neither does life. Nevertheless some of his tales, usually thanks to outlandish coincidence, manage to end quite happily. But since he never used a series character, the reader can never know in advance whether a particular Woolrich story will be light or dark, will end in triumph or despair — which is one of many reasons why his work is so hauntingly suspenseful.
In 1940 Woolrich joined the migration of pulp mystery writers from lurid-covered magazines to hardcover books, but his suspense novels carry over the motifs, beliefs and devices that energized his shorter fiction. The eleven novels he published during the Forties — six under his own by-line, four as William Irish and one as George Hopley — are unsurpassed classics in the poetry of terror. The Bride Wore Black. The Black Curtain. Black Alibi. Phantom Lady. The Black Angel. Deadline at Dawn. The Black Path of Fear. Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Waltz into Darkness. Rendezvous in Black. I Married a Dead Man. These titles, all published between 1940 and 1948, make up the finest group of suspense novels ever written.
Those were his peak years, in which he became a wealthy man and a superstar of his genre. Publishers began issuing hardcover and paperback collections of his shorter fiction, which then came to the attention of the story editors of the great dramatic radio series of the Forties, leading to dozens of Woolrich-based dramas on Suspense and Mollé Mystery Theatre and similar programs. Meanwhile Hollywood rediscovered the “boy wonder” of the Twenties and paid him handsomely for the right to make movies out of large numbers of his novels and stories. These pictures helped shape the uniquely Forties brand of suspense movie known today as film noir. But all the money and adulation didn’t make Woolrich happy. In a letter of February 2, 1947, to Columbia’s poet and professor Mark Van Doren, he seemed to blame his unhappiness on the fact that he was revered only as a mystery writer, not as a literary figure. “I don’t like to look back on the Columbia days for that reason; the gap between expectation and accomplishment is too wide.” On the other hand, impenetrable as the shield of self-contempt was with which Woolrich had surrounded himself, it’s unlikely he would have been any happier if he had been acclaimed as another Scott Fitzgerald.