Among his finest shorter crime fiction of the early 1940s are the annihilation stories “All at Once, No Alice” (Argosy, March 22, 1940) and “Finger of Doom” (Detective Fiction Weekly, June 22,1940), which share one of the most powerful premises in noir literature. A lonely young man has miraculously found the one right woman but just before they are to marry she vanishes into nothingness. Everyone who apparently had known or seen the woman denies she ever existed, and the police to whom the man frantically appeals for help can’t find the slightest proof she walked the earth. Convinced that she’s a figment of his lunatic imagination, they kick him out with contempt and abandon him to despair — all but one lone-wolf cop who’s willing to believe that the young man just might be telling the truth. The living nightmare stories “C-Jag” (Black Mask, October 1940) and “And So to Death” (Argosy, March 1, 1941), better known respectively under their reprint titles “Cocaine” and “Nightmare,” form another matched pair of noir classics. The protagonist comes to after a blackout episode of one sort or another and is haunted by the memory of having done something horrible while out of himself. Back in the waking world he tries to shrug off the memory as the residue of a bad dream, hangover, drug dose or whatever. Then he finds on his person an objective fragment from the nightmare, and then another, and before long he’s on the edge of madness. Desperately he appeals to his brother-in-law, who is a cop and, like most Woolrich cops, as ready to hang those in need of aid as to help them. The two men go back together into the shadows, hunting for the answer.
In the early forties the entrepreneurs of dramatic radio discovered that countless Woolrich stories were naturals for audio adaptation and began buying from him the rights to adapt his tales for broadcast on series like Suspense and Molle Mystery Theatre. The 30-minute version of The Black Curtain (Suspense, December 3, 1943, starring Cary Grant), which may have been scripted by Woolrich himself, ranks among the most powerful radio dramas ever written. “I tried to put it all behind me, to resume my life where it left off over three years ago... I don’t want to find out anything anymore. I want it all to die away and be still. And it will. All except Ruth. Because somewhere behind that black curtain I was loved, and loved someone! We must have known a love I’ll never know again.”
Woolrich continued to write more novels — too many for publication under a single byline — and soon needed to come up with a pseudonym. The name that he and Story magazine editor Whit Burnett hit upon was William Irish. Had Woolrich known that obscure First National title writer back in the twenties, and had he been carrying the man’s name in the back of his mind ever since? The first novel published under the Irish byline was Phantom Lady (1942). Scott Henderson quarrels with his wife, goes out and picks up a woman in a bar, spends the evening with her, and comes home to find his wife dead and himself accused of her murder. All the evidence is against him and his only hope is to find the woman who was with him when his wife was killed. But she seems to have vanished into thin air, and everyone in a position to know swears that no such woman ever existed. He is sentenced to die, and as the hours rush toward execution day, the woman who loves him and his best friend race the clock to find the phantom. The plot is so involuted that final explanations require two dozen closely printed and none too plausible pages, but the emotional torment and suspense are unforgettable.
Deadline at Dawn (1944) takes place on a single night in the bleak streets and concrete caves of New York as we follow a desperate young couple who have until sunrise to clear themselves of a murder charge and escape the web of the city. The storyline is loose and relaxed, with many characters and incidents in no way connected to the main plot. But the cliffhanger crosscutting between Quinn’s and Bricky’s searches through the night streets keeps tension high, and the two-pronged quest is punctuated by touches of the deepest noir. Woolrich evokes. New York after dark and the despair of those who walk its streets with a pathos unmatched in the genre.
Of all his novels the one most completely dominated by death and fate is Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945), which was published as by George Hopley (Woolrich’s middle names). A simple-minded recluse with apparently uncanny powers predicts that millionaire Harlan Reid will die in three weeks, precisely at midnight, at the jaws of a lion, and the tension rises to unbearable pitch as the doomed man’s daughter and a sympathetic cop struggle to avert a destiny which they suspect and soon come to hope was conceived by a human power. Woolrich makes us live the emotional torment of this waking nightmare until we are literally shivering in our seats.
Waltz into Darkness (1947), again as by Irish, is set in New Orleans around 1880 and begins as much of Woolrich begins, with a man being eaten alive by loneliness. “Any love, from anywhere, on any terms. Quick, before it was too late! Only not to be alone any longer.” Enter la femme fatale, the nameless woman who is Louis Durand’s destiny, whom he comes to love with such maniacal intensity that for her he will degrade himself to any extent, cheat, kill, endure torture and even death. Like several Woolrich men before him, Louis is an acolyte worshipping at the altar of love, and the woman is his goddess. Woolrich describes her in overwhelmingly religious and maternal language. She is God the Mother, unknowable and cruel as life. Louis is caught in her as in a whirlpool and we are trapped in his skin. In the cold light of reason the book is ludicrous, but no one can read Woolrich and be reasonable.
In I Married a Dead Man (1948) a woman with nothing to live for and in flight from her sadistic husband is injured in a train wreck. She wakes up in a hospital bed surrounded by luxuries because, as she eventually realizes, she’s been wrongly identified as another woman, one who had had everything to live for but had died in the train disaster. Helen grasps what seems to be a heaven-sent chance to start over and even falls in love again, but her new life proves to be a gift from the dark god who rules the Woolrich world. At the climax she and we are confronted with two and only two possibilities, neither of which makes the least sense, each of which will destroy innocent lives. “I don’t know what the game was... I only know we must have played it wrong, somewhere along the way... We’ve lost. That’s all I know. We’ve lost. And now the game is through.” Woolrich’s last major novel is one of the finest and bleakest of his works.
The success of his novels led to publication of several collections of his shorter work in hardcover and paperback volumes, which are extremely rare today. His stories were staple items in the endless anthologies of short mystery fiction published during the Forties. In addition to the dozens of radio plays adapted from his work, fifteen movies were made from Woolrich material between 1942 and 1950 alone. And his influence pervaded the culture of the forties so extensively that many film noir classics of that period give the sense of having been adapted from his work even though he had nothing to do with them.