Woolrich published little new after 1948, apparently because his long absent father’s death and his mother’s prolonged illnesses paralyzed his ability to write. That he was remembered during the fifties is largely due to Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay), who reprinted in his magazine a host of Woolrich pulp tales, and to Alfred Hitchcock, whose Rear Window (1954) was based on a Woolrich story. His magazine work proved as adaptable to television as it had to radio a decade earlier, and series like Mirror Theater, Ford Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars frequently presented 30-minute filmed versions of his material. Even the prestigious Playhouse 90 made use of Woolrich, presenting a 90-minute adaptation of Rendezvous in Black (CBS, October 25, 1956) starring Franchot Tone, Laraine Day, and Boris Karloff. The finest adaptation of Woolrich in any form is Hitchcock’s 60-minute version of “Three O’clock,” starring E.G. Marshall and broadcast on the series Suspicion (NBC, September 30, 1957) as Four O’clock. It’s pure Hitchcock, pure Woolrich, and perhaps the most totally suspenseful film the master ever directed.
Woolrich’s personal situation remained wretched, and more than once he sank to passing off slightly updated old stories as new work, fooling book and magazine publishers as well as readers. Not long after his mother’s death in 1957 came Hotel Room (1958), a collection of tales set in a single room of a New York City hotel at various times from the building’s years of sumptuous fashionableness to the last days before its demolition. The St. Anselm was an amalgam of the desiccated residential hotels in which mother and son had lived and the stories set there mark the beginning of Woolrich’s end. Yet once in a while he could still conjure up the old power. “The Penny-a-Worder” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1958) is a wry downbeat tale of a pulp mystery writer of the 1930s desperately trying to crank out a complete novelet overnight. And “The Number’s Up” (in Beyond the Night, 1959) is a bitter little account of gangland executioners mistakenly taking an innocent couple out to be shot.
Diabetic, alcoholic, wracked by self-contempt, and alone, Woolrich dragged out his life. He would come to a party, bringing his own bottle of cheap wine in a paper bag, and stand in a corner the whole evening. If someone approached and tried to tell him how much he or she admired his work, he would growl “You don’t mean that” and find another corner. In 1965 he moved into a spartan suite of rooms on the second floor of the Sheraton Russell, at Park Avenue and 37th Street, and continued the slow process of dying by inches. He wrote a little, left unfinished much more than he completed, but publishers continued to issue collections of his stories. The last such book published in his lifetime was The Dark Side of Love (1965), which brought together eight of the author’s recent “tales of love and despair,” among them that dark gem “Too Nice a Day to Die.” A desperately lonely woman turns on the gas in her apartment one morning, ready to end her life. The phone rings. From force of habit she picks up the receiver. It’s a wrong number, someone wanting Schultz’s Delicatessen. The absurdity gives her the will to live one day longer. She goes out, walks about the city and, thanks to the long arm of chance or fate, meets in Rockefeller Plaza a man who seems to be as right for her as she seems to be for him. As they’re on their way to her place for dinner, she’s run down while crossing the street and dies. The world according to Woolrich has rarely been rendered in such fitting form.
During 1967 his slow march to the grave quickened into a fast walk. He developed a bad case of gangrene in one leg but put off seeing a doctor for so long that, in January 1968, it had to be amputated above the knee. He returned to the Sheraton Russell with an artificial leg on which he could never learn to walk and spent his final months in a wheelchair, alone and immobilized much like the protagonist of his 1926 novel Cover Charge. But the best of his late stories still hold the magic touch that chills the heart, and his last two suspense tales are among his finest. “For the Rest of Her Life” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1968) follows a young woman whose husband has turned out to be a sadistic abuser of women. She meets another man, confesses the truth, and together they try to escape. Every move they make throughout this excruciating story is precisely the wrong thing to do, and Woolrich keeps tightening the screws until we’re screaming at them to change their course before it’s too late. But each wrong move has also been foreordained in the womb of destiny, and Linda and Garry are the last of the doomed couples whose shattered remains fill the Woolrich world.
In the late sixties Woolrich had plenty of money and his critical reputation was secure not only in America but in Europe, where Francois Truffaut had recently filmed both The Bride Wore Black and Waltz into Darkness, but his physical and emotional condition remained hopeless. He died of a stroke on September 25, 1968, leaving unfinished two novels (Into the Night and The Loser), an autobiography (Blues of a Lifetime), a collection of short stories (I Was Waiting for You), and a long list of titles for stories he had never begun, one of which captures his bleak world in a single phrase: First You Dream, Then You Die. He left no survivors and only a handful of people attended his funeral. His estate was willed in trust to Columbia University for the establishment of a scholarship fund for students of creative writing. The fund is named for Woolrich’s mother.
In Woolrich’s crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure.
In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts.
Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, highstrung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. In his finest work every detail serves this purpose, even the chapter headings. Chapter 1 of Phantom Lady is entitled “The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution” so that even before Marcella Henderson is strangled the countdown to the day of her innocent husband’s electrocution for the murder has begun. In Deadline at Dawn Woolrich replaces the customary chapter titles or numbers with clock faces so that like Quinn and Bricky we feel in our bones the coming of the dreaded sunrise.