But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.
The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn’t guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, usually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it’s yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.
Even on the subject of love he tends to divide our reaction. Often of course he identifies unambiguously with whoever is lonely, whoever is in love, or needs love or has lost it. From the absence of love in his own life springs much of the poignancy with which he portrayed its power and joys and risks and pains and much of the piercing sadness with which he described its corrosion and loss. There’s a haunting moment in Phantom Lady when the morgue attendants are carrying out the body of Scott Henderson’s wife. “Hands riveted to him, holding him there. The outer door closed muffledly. A little sachet came drifting out of the empty bedroom, seeming to whisper: ‘Remember? Remember when I was your love? Remember?’ ” On the other hand, several Woolrich classics are precisely about protagonists — Julie in The Bride Wore Black, Alberta in The Black Angel, Johnny Marr in Rendezvous in Black — who destroy their own lives and the lives of others in a mad quest to save a loved one from death or avenge one who has already died.
Woolrich does invariably unite himself and us with his people at one moment. In the face of the specter of Anahuac nothing matters anymore: saint or beast, sane or mad, if any person is on the brink of death Woolrich becomes that person and makes us do likewise. In “Three O’clock” we sit bound and gagged and paralyzed with the morally warped Stapp while the bomb ticks closer and closer to the moment of destruction, and Woolrich punctuates the unbearable suspense with language and imagery clearly echoing the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, whose agony also ended at three o’clock. During the brief electrocution scene of “3 Kills for 1,” which is included in the present collection, the cold steel hood falls over the head of the murderer Gates and he whispers: “Helen, I love you.” No character named Helen ever appears in the story. At the point of death we are forgiven much, and if we love we are forgiven everything.
The intense, feverish, irrational nature of the Woolrich world is mirrored in his literary faults. His plots are full of outlandish contrivances, outrageous coincidences, “surprise” developments that require us to suspend not only our disbelief but our knowledge of elementary real-world facts, chains of so-called reasoning that a two-year-old could pull apart. But in his most powerful work these are not gaffes but functional elements that enable him to integrate contradiction and existential absurdity into his dark fabric. Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story. The same holds true for his style, which is often undisciplined, hysterical, sprawling with phrases and clauses crying out to be cut and sentences without subjects or predicates or rhyme or reason and words that simply don’t mean what Woolrich guesses they mean. But many (by no means all) of these features are functional in Woolrich’s doom-shrouded world, just like many (by no means all) of his plot Hubs. Without the sentences rushing out of control across the page like his hunted characters across the nightscape, without the manic emotionalism and indifference to grammatical niceties, the form and content of the Woolrich world would be at odds. Between his style and his substance Woolrich achieved the perfect union that he never came within a mile of in his private life.
“I was only trying to cheat death,” he wrote in a fragment found among his papers. “I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.” Trapped in a wretched psychological environment and gifted or cursed with an understanding that being trapped is par excellence the human condition, he took his decades of solitude and shaped them into a haunting body of work. He tried to escape the specter of Anahuac, and he couldn’t, and he couldn’t, and he couldn’t. The world he imagined, will.
Cigarette
Chapter I
The Errand Boy
Tommy the Twitch came out and said, “Okay, the Boss is ready for you, you can go ahead in now.” He pointed one uncontrollably-shaking hand over his shoulder at the room behind him.
The thin, inoffensive-looking young fellow they both called The Errand Boy dropped the newspaper he had been pretending to read and got up without having to be told twice. He looked a little scared. He always was when the Boss sent for him like this.
“He ain’t sore about anything—” he started to ask.
“He ain’t sore,” said Tommy tersely, “just wants to say hello to you.” Tommy the Twitch said that each time, said the Boss just wanted to say hello to him. Then the Boss always had some little thing or other that he wanted The Errand Boy to do for him, never anything much, but almost always it was something The Errand Boy couldn’t understand the meaning of.
He knew better than to ask, though. That would have gotten the Boss sore at him, and if the Boss ever got sore he could send him back to jail. He’d said so himself plenty often.
It was in jail that they’d first met, The Errand Boy and the Boss. He’d been in for theft, that time his mother and the kids didn’t have anything to eat in the house, and the Boss had been in for being unjustly accused of killing somebody. The Boss got out much sooner of course — as soon as his lawyer got around to proving that it was all a mistake. When The Errand Boy was let out he sort of naturally gravitated toward him. In fact the Boss let him know that it was due to him that The Errand Boy had been let out a little ahead of his full term, and he shouldn’t forget it.